Wikipedia Leaves Biased Middle East Edits Unchecked, New ADL Report Shows
A new ADL report reveals that biased edits on Israel, Zionism, and Hamas remain uncorrected on Wikipedia despite previous editor bans, impacting millions of readers and AI tools.
More than a year after the Anti-Defamation League exposed a coordinated campaign designed to skew narratives surrounding Israel, Zionism, and Hamas on Wikipedia, a new report paints a troubling picture: the vast majority of the distorted and biased edits remain intact on the platform's most-viewed pages.
The report, published by the ADL Center for Technology and Society (CTS) under the title "Damage Done: Wikipedia Leaves Biased Edits Unchecked Despite Editor Bans," reveals that although six key editors were barred from the topic area and three others were completely banned from the site, their work was never systematically reviewed. As a result, it continues to form the official version presented to millions of readers daily.
Methods Changed, Bias Remained
Research shows that following public criticism and pressure from US federal lawmakers, overt coordinated activity decreased by approximately 95%. However, a new group of 11 active accounts — alongside eight veteran editors who faced no sanctions — continues to hold the reins. These editors have adopted more subtle and quiet working methods, ranging from reverting changes by other editors to preserve specific framing, downplaying factual claims, and rebuilding articles at a slow pace that avoids direct community attention.
According to the data, among 229 examined articles edited by at least two of these accounts, about 60% of the recent edits that determine the current active phrasing belong to these new editors. This means that the texts read by users — and fed into Large Language Models (LLMs) and search engines used by the general public — continue to bear the hallmarks of a systematic disinformation campaign.
"Banning individual editors was never enough," said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL. "The pages read by millions of people and learned from by artificial intelligence tools still contain signs of a systematic disinformation campaign that Wikipedia itself recognized but never fixed. The most popular online encyclopedia must be ready to correct its record."
How the Articles Were Rewritten
The report highlights a series of individual cases indicating deep distortion in flagship encyclopedia articles. On the entry for Hamas, three days after the October 7 attacks, a significant portion of material detailing the terrorist organization's antisemitism, use of human shields, and human rights violations was moved to a secondary, less-viewed page titled "Criticism of Hamas." Today, the lead section of the main article — which received one million views a day during that period — fails to mention Hamas's status as a designated terrorist organization until the very end of the paragraph.
On the Gaza war article, approximately 17,000 characters of text and documentary sources were removed in November 2023, including forensic evidence of bound and burned victims, evidence of sexual violence, and video documentation of attempted beheadings. Today, only a single line remains stating that terrorists were "reportedly" involved in such acts.
Demands for Structural Change
Daniel Kelly, a senior director at the CTS, emphasized that the problem is not isolated but points to a deep failure within the Wikimedia Foundation. The ADL reiterates its call for Wikimedia to adopt four structural recommendations: private identity verification for editors in disputed areas, halting anonymous IP edits on sensitive pages, resolving content disputes based on expertise rather than majority votes, and establishing a dedicated team to combat antisemitic bias.
