On March 16th, 2026, during an active communications blackout inside Iran, a Wikipedia editor uploaded a video to Wikimedia Commons.

It was produced by the Revayat-e Fath Institute, a cultural center funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps titled “Iran propaganda LEGO AI video on 2026 Iran war.” Four weeks later and an hour apart, two further Lego style videos were uploaded to the site produced by Explosive Media, a company whose clients include the Islamic Republic of Iran.

By the opening weeks of the war, the videos were appearing widely across X, TikTok and have since been viewed hundreds of millions of times. They mock American leaders, glorify the IRGC, and are set to rap music. The BBC, New Yorker, Guardian, Al Jazeera and France 24 have all covered them—in doing so, amplifying their reach further.

But with the uploads to WikiCommons, the Iranian videos would become etched into our knowledge infrastructure—foreign propaganda hosted by a US-based 501(c)3 non-profit organization. A platform that touts itself for providing neutral information to the world, now leveraged as part of a mass-scale psychological operation staged by a country the US is at war with.

In addition to national security concerns, the content very likely constitutes an infringement on the IP of LEGO. NPOV reached out to LEGO for comment, no response was received by the time of publication.

State propaganda appearing online is not new. Governments do it constantly. What felt different here was where it landed—inside an infrastructure most people still experience as neutral, archival and vaguely untouchable. As the edit histories expanded, the same accounts continued appearing across seemingly separate parts of the ecosystem.

Share

Search “Iran war” on Wikimedia Commons, filter by video, sort by relevance and the Lego video ranks first. Search “2026 Iran war” and it appears near the top again. Within days, Iranian state channels were circulating it as wartime messaging—distributed through infrastructure that Wikipedia’s global readership generally experiences as neutral archival media.

The account that uploaded the first Lego video is User: VitoxxMass. They are not a fringe contributor. VitoxxMass is one of the three most active editors on the English Wikipedia article for the 2026 Iran War—the version read by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The logs tell us that their first edit was February 2025- by March 2026, they were uploading IRGC-produced wartime media during an active internet blackout inside Iran.

VitoxxMass also worked directly with IvanScrooge98, an editor NPOV previously documented removing Holy Land Five terror-finance references from Zohran Mamdani's page, scrubbing October 7 controversies from Rama Duwaji's article, and stripping the categories "murderer" and "terrorist" from a Commons image of Che Guevara. Commons talk pages, edit histories, and Wikipedia’s own logs document repeated interaction between the accounts while collaborating on the 2025 Global Sumud Flotilla page and the Gaza flotilla-related mapping projects.

One page brings the overlap into sharper focus: the article for Explosive Media itself. Controlling nearly 50% of the article is Mhhossein, a prolific pro-regime editor and member of Wikipedia’s “Gang of 40,” a coordinated network responsible for 850,000 edits to 10,000 articles, completely reshaping the PIA (Palestine Israel articles) topic area. A previous report titled “Inside Irans Wikipedia War” identified Mhhossein as a key editor involved in sanitizing Iran’s human rights record, made more than 11,000 edits across 2,228 pages.

On May 9th and 11th, 2026, Mhhossein expanded the article’s “Content analysis” and “Reception” sections, using Al Jazeera as a source to explain why Explosive Media had been banned by YouTube. Iran's Foreign Ministry had called that ban a move to suppress "the truth." Mhhossein also actively distributed the group's content on Wikimedia Commons by uploading two Lego-style propaganda videos produced by Explosive Media on May 29, 2026. He uploaded the first file, titled "Lego video by Explosive Media for Josh Rushing" at 14:26. Just 27 minutes later, at 14:53, he uploaded the second file titled "Nothing but WAR-Iran Lego-style videos.webm"

Two more editors appear in the logs. Mellangoose and MarissaTRS uploaded Explosive Media’s LEGO videos to Wikimedia Commons within 24 hours of each other. Both edited the Wikipedia article about Explosive Media—the same organisation whose videos they had just uploaded. Individually, each action can be explained away as ordinary Wikipedia maintenance. Taken together, the pattern becomes harder to ignore. The same cluster of editors repeatedly appears at every stage of the information chain: uploading the videos, embedding them into Wikimedia Commons, editing the pages connected to the organisations behind them, then shaping the explanatory narrative surrounding the media itself. The same videos appear elsewhere. On YouTube, a channel called AI IRAN has accumulated 3.6 million views across five videos. It carries a cryptocurrency donation link.

The videos drew attention first. The upload history revealed something much larger.

In February 2026, an editor known as Ladsgroup posted an alarm at the Commons Village Pump, Wikipedia’s central policy forum:

Anyone can upload anything at any scale. No one reviews it on arrival. If a volunteer happens to notice and has the energy to fight a deletion request — which they may lose — something might get removed. If not, it stays.

The figures suggested something far larger than isolated uploads.

• ~50,000 images from Mehr News Agency, a semi-official news agency owned by the government of Iran.

• ~52,000 from Fars News Agency, an IRGC-linked outlet

• ~63,000 from Tasnim News Agency, IRGC-owned & US-sanctioned

• Thousands from former Supreme Leader’s official website Khamenei.ir.

The next day, an administrator warned the uploader and suggested slowing down, but no enforcement followed and the account remains active as do the files. One editor participating in the Village Pump discussion summarized the asymmetry directly: the Iranian state can mass-produce and openly license enormous volumes of media at effectively no cost, while independent protesters documenting the same events face censorship, imprisonment, or worse.

User:999real, uploaded the files while the Iranian regime was violently suppressing its own people. Nobody reviews uploads at this scale. 999real later admitted posting the material "in a hurry."

Through all of this, the Wikimedia Foundation has said almost nothing publicly. No broad review. No systemic response. No explanation for how a volunteer infrastructure built for open knowledge became capable of absorbing more than 200,000 state-linked media files with effectively no meaningful oversight.

Wikimedia Commons does not function as isolated storage. Its files flow directly into Wikipedia articles across hundreds of languages. Two of the Lego videos are already embedded into Irish Wikipedia Article “The US and Israel's war against Iran”. From there, the material becomes part of a much wider information ecosystem. Files uploaded to Commons rarely remain confined there; they flow outward into Wikipedia articles, search results, mirrors, archives and datasets relied upon by search engines and AI systems. The Wikimedia Foundation has made no public statement and the files remain.

The IRGC didn't need to breach Wikipedia. The system was already there.

The interview is the testimony. For the edit histories, source material, and evidence underlying our reporting, read the full investigation below:

https://www.neutralpov.com/p/wikipedias-india-war

Over nearly a decade, the world’s first crowdsourced encyclopedia has evolved into the locus of dozens of political, geopolitical, social, and cultural conflicts. While American politics, gender, Israel-Palestine, and many more topics have been consumed for years, the flames have spread to a new battleground: Hindus and India.

One of the biggest targets of this effort is Hindu American Foundation (HAF), an influential Hindu-focused civil rights organization in the US. Over the past five years, HAF has been subject to a highly coordinated narrative campaign that has sought to portray the group as an instrument of “Hindu supremacy” working in American politics to silence debate and stifle academic freedom.

Share

A read of the Hindu American Foundation’s Wikipedia page paints a dark picture indeed. In the article’s lead, readers are informed that HAF “aligns with the Hindu nationalist ideology.” According to Wikipedia, the group is responsible for “impinging on academic freedom,” has its roots in a “paramilitary” organization, and its key programs—like an effort to emphasize yoga’s roots in Hindu religious practice—are a covert “attempt to rebrand Hindutva as ‘Hindu rights.’”

These charged moral statements are all presented in the first five sentences of the article’s lead section. Far from offering differing perspectives or balance, the article makes these contentious claims in Wikivoice, the statement-of-fact register that reflects the site’s own encyclopedic perspective. (For example: “Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics.”)

The use of this tone is one of the most valuable tools wielded by savvy editors who work to seed damaging narratives. It gives the distinct impression that these assertions are the product of neutral arbiters of information. And perhaps if that were true—that the editors responsible for crafting this content—were in fact neutral, there could be a case for presenting charged statements as fact through the use of Wikipedia’s voice.

The reality, however, is that Wikipedia’s HAF narrative, and the details that flesh it out, have been constructed by four Wikipedia editors whose editing history raises important questions about their links to the ideological network that opposes HAF and its mission. Together, these four users are responsible for 80% of the text currently on the HAF page.

This is not to allege that the group have colluded in the digital equivalent of smoky backrooms—quiet Discord servers or secret Whatsapp groups. However, neither do these editors appear to be a collection of random Wikipedia volunteers. Proof of this runs straight through the platform’s own public metadata.

The effort to reshape the narrative about HAF began in early 2021. It was then that a small cluster of highly active Wikipedia editors began constructing an interconnected ecosystem of pages surrounding HAF, its critics, and the organizations aligned against it. These users include TrangaBellam, Kautilya3, Llightex, and Shahinshah121. Another user, Vanamonde93, one of the most powerful administrators on the site, frequently intervened in ways that appear to support the core cluster.

▶ Watch the Explainer

Around the time that the effort to refashion HAF’s profile on Wikipedia began, an escalating off-platform campaign was beginning to take shape. In April 2021, a professor of South Asian history at Rutgers named Audrey Truschke launched a series of attacks against HAF, accusing the group of promoting Hindu nationalism in the United States and amplifying claims on Twitter that insinuated impropriety related to federal COVID relief funding received by HAF and other Hindu organizations.

While unknown to the broader public, for people working in the space Truschke is something of a household name. Depending on whom you ask, she is a respected historian of medieval India or one of the most polarizing figures in the American culture war over Hinduism. While her academic specialty is the Mughal court, for at least the last decade she has been known as a prolific Twitter and op-ed presence whose statements comparing Hindutva to Nazism, characterizing Hindu mythological figures in provocative terms, and casting Hindu American civic organizations as proxies for fascism.

In May 2021, HAF filed a defamation lawsuit against Truschke and a network of activist organizations, including Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council. The suit alleged that a coordinated campaign of false public accusations—amplified through social media posts and media coverage tied to Al Jazeera reporting on the group—had falsely portrayed HAF as using federal COVID relief funds to promote Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim extremism

But months before the suit was filed, the Wikipedia infrastructure surrounding the conflict was already taking shape.

In March 2021, just two months before the defamation suit was filed, the leading editor on the HAF entry, TrangaBellam, created the Wikipedia biography of Audrey Truschke. TrangaBellam is still by far the dominant editor on the Truschke entry, with over 57% authorship, compared with under 5% for the third-ranked user on the entry.

Over the next few months, Truschke’s entry would expand in ways that curiously mirrored her own well publicized narrative about alleged threats she was facing from what she publicly called the Hindu Right.

In blog posts , Truschke alleged that she was being victimized by these groups. Within weeks, her Wikipedia entry did not just carry this same messaging, but was structured around it, with the claim made in the very first sentences of the page:

Truschke has been a frequent target of harassment by supporters of Hindutva, who accuse her of having prejudiced views on Hinduism, and making offensive statements; scholars reject the charges.

One of the main sources for the claim that Truschke was being subjected to harassment by "people affiliated with Hindutva” was an oped in the Washington Post—co-authored by Truschke herself. Another source for the claim pointed to the creation of a “Hindutva Harassment Field Manual” created by a group called South Asia Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC), a group co-founded by Truschke.

The claim that Truschke had been targeted by “people affiliated with Hindutva” was added to the entry on July 10, 2021 by TrangaBellam. The same day, that same editor added text to the entry asserting that Truschke had formed a “collective to combat increasing harassment of South Asian scholars,” a clear reference to the SASAC, which Truschke co-founded. (Truschke did not respond to a request for comment.)

The addition of this detail took place just nine days after the domain name for the SASAC was registered, according to WHOIS records, and only four days after the first recorded snapshot of the SASAC website being live. In this space of time, an editor presumably unrelated to the SASAC had not only become aware of this nascent, obscure organization and its new website, but had also found time to write it into the factual record on Wikipedia.

On July 21, less than two weeks after making that crucial edit to Truschke’s entry regarding allegations of Hindu-led harassment, TrangaBellam made their first edit to the Hindu American Foundation entry. Over the next few months, TrangaBellam would begin shoring up one of the key narratives that would shape the page—the claim that HAF’s defamation suit against Truschke and related NGOs represented an unprecedented attack on academic freedom.

The citations for many these claims frequently violated Wikipedia’s own sourcing rules, including a general prohibition against self-published and firsthand sources. Some of these citations used the website of Hindus for Human Rights—a litigant in the suit—as a source for claims against HAF, a clear violation.

But TrangaBellam was not the only editor with an unexplained focus on the SASAC. The day after that editor added the claim that the organization had been formed to protect scholars from the Hindu right, another account, Shahinshah121—another member of the HAF editing cluster—made the same addition to the Hindutva entry.

Shahinshah121 wrote:

In 2021, a group of North American-based scholars formed the and published the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual to, they argue, answer the Hindutva threat to their academic freedom.

Like TrangaBellam, Shahinshah121 added links to the then days-old SASAC website, as well as to the standalone website of the organization’s recently published “Field Manual,” whose domain had been registered 12 days before and whose first recorded snapshot on Archive.org was on July 6, 2021—five days before Shahinshah121 attempted to write the organization into the Wikipedia record.

But that wasn’t the only unusual activity surrounding the account. That same day, Shahinshah began editing the HAF page, inserting claims of anti-Muslim sentiment among some of the group’s members.

Three days before making claims about HAF and the Hindu right, Shahinshah121 had attempted to create the first Wikipedia entry for the SASAC. Shahinshah made this attempt on July 8, just two days after the first recorded version of the SASAC website went live, and a week after its domain name was registered. The submission was rejected by admins for being insufficiently notable—unsurprising since the group was all but unheard of. Despite this, Shahinshah was undeterred. The account would make another three attempts to create the SASAC entry, each rejected in turn. (The SASAC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Shahinshah would go on to make a total of 24 edits to the HAF entry—almost half of all the account’s active entry edits over its lifetime. It made just six edits to its second most edited entry, Hindutva. On the vast majority of entries edited by Shahinsah, the account contributed just a single edit, demonstrating behavior of what Wikipedia calls a Single Purpose Account.

Over the course of the two-dozen edits it made to the HAF entry, Shahinshah would successfully implant one of the most damaging unsubstantiated narratives about the organization—that it’s a foreign agent acting on behalf of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP Party. However, the context surrounding this allegation raises far more questions than it answers.

In 2025, HAF was named in a complaint to the Department of Justice, alleging that the HAF operates as an unregistered foreign agent. The statement, still on the HAF entry, claims that:

In 2025, the HAF was named in a complaint to the Department of Justice, alleging that the HAF operates as an unregistered foreign agent of India's BJP…

This is as damning an allegation for an American advocacy organization as can be imagined. The problem is that it wasn’t true. While the statement might clear some very low bar of technical accuracy, the reality is that the diligently constructed sentence rests on a clever sleight of hand.

Most readers skimming the HAF entry would see the terms “Department of Justice,” “complaint,” and “unregistered foreign agent” and draw the inevitable conclusion: the DOJ had investigated HAF for working as an unregistered foreign agent. However, a closer look at the sources on the HAF entry reveals that a Sikh group in California, the Fremont Gurdwara Sahib, engaged a law firm to write and submit an unsolicited letter to the DOJ making these claims. The group then issued a press release.

On its own, this would amount to very little had it not been for a slurry of headlines in leftwing media based on the press release. Mother Jones, in a story titled The Murky Relationship Between the Hindu American Foundation and an Indian Embassy, called the story a “bombshell.” The Guardian ran its own coverage, noting that the DOJ had been “urged” to investigate.

The reality is that not only did the DOJ never announce any investigation; it didn’t even provide comment for the stories. While the headlines made it seem as if HAF had been on the brink of facing a federal investigation, the reality behind those headlines is that, as far as anyone knew, the complaint could has been sitting in an unread DOJ inbox ever since.

this was not the story told on Wikipedia, largely by Shahinshah, the editors that tried three times to create an entry for SASAC. The context behind the DOJ “complaint” was never included. Instead, a passive construction—HAF was named in a complaint—obscured this extraordinary sequence of events that turned a press release based on a letter from a private law firm into a damning allegation on the world’s biggest knowledge platform.

Months before the July editing spike, another editor had been actively working on the page. The earliest signal of the account’s stance toward the subject came on May 8, 2017, at 18:22 UTC, when Kautilya3 executed an edit that erased an attempt to balance the page’s framing. The edit summary read: “this is not the private web site of the Hindu American Foundation!” The edit suggests that Kautilya3 viewed HAF’s own perspective as something to be excluded from the article—a pattern that would later reappear in the 2021 removal of HAF’s self-defences.

In January 2021, Kautilya3, the second most active editor on the page, began removing blocks of text that presented the other side of almost every major allegation against the group. On January 14, Kautilya3 removed over 5,000 bytes, including a paragraph quoting a former HAF board member saying, “HAF has absolutely no links to any Hindu nationalist social, political or religious groups in the United States or India.”

The grounds that Kautilya3 provided was that the references for the paragraphs were either “self-sourced defenses” or non-reliable sources. This was a strange note, given that some of the most damaging criticism on the page were sourced to self-published sites, like the SASAC website.

Kautilya continued to edit the page, radically reshaping the group’s profile in a series of quiet edits. On September 16, the account made one of the most impactful edits, changing the second sentence to radically reframe the organization in its entirety. Before the edit, the lead defined HAF as rights group, stating:

HAF is involved in the areas of human rights, civil rights and education among others.

After Kautilya3’s intervention, HAF was transformed into nationalist group working to further a mission rooted in deceit:

The organisation has its roots in the Hindu nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad America and its student wing Hindu Students Council. According to its critics, the HAF has repackaged the Hindu nationalist agenda in the language of “Hindu rights” in a way to suit mainstream American politics.

These edits came on the heels of TrangaBellam’s intensive spate of editing in that same month. With two editors pushing the same narrative frame, working in tandem to reinforce each other’s efforts, there was little chance that the page, which had been more or less stable for a period of years, would have maintained balance—at least without the intervention of an admin.

In fact, an admin did intervene. However, that intervention only crystallized the narrative taking shape. This was, in large part, due to the nature of that admin. On September 16, Vanamonde93 stepped in to make yet another seemingly minor change that would, in practice, have lasting impact. They did so by renaming a section heading from “Alleged Hindu Nationalist Ties” to simply “Hindu nationalist ties.” In a single minute, the claim went from an allegation to an accepted fact.

The real significance was much deeper. There are today 810 registered admins on Wikipedia, most of them accounts with base level “tools,” or admin privileges. However, two much more rarefied groups of admins exist. One is called checkusers, admins with the ability to look up the IP addresses of any Wikipedia editor. Another group is called oversighters, admins who can delete virtually any bit of information on the site, without leaving trace of it being there. There are only 32 admins on Wikipedia who are both checkusers and oversighters. Vanamonde93 is one of them.

Mirroring what had by then become a familiar pattern, Vanamonde93 appeared on another related page two days after editing the HAF article: Audrey Truschke.

In 2018, Truschke sparked controversy with a tweet saying that in a Hindu text, a deity had called another deity a 'misogynistic pig’. In defending that interpretation, Truschke cited a translation of the text by distinguished Berkeley Sanskritist Robert Goldman. Goldman later publicly rejected that characterization, stating that Truschke was “in no way quoting our translation,” describing her language as “extremely inappropriate.” Given the prominence of the controversy, Goldman’s dismissal had itself become a notable part of the public dispute surrounding Truschke’s work.

On September 18, 2021, Vanamonde93 arrived on the Truschke page. Over the next twelve minutes he stripped out the references to Goldman's response—the "shocking and extremely inappropriate" language, and the surrounding context around the controversy. His edit summary asked: "how is this remotely an acceptable source for unattributed controversial assertions in a BLP?"

On the talk page, he argued the source, an email published in Swarajya magazine, was deprecated under Wikipedia policy. By the time he was done, the controversy was still on the page, but it was thinner, and friendlier to Truschke. Material unfavorable to Truschke got rigorous sourcing scrutiny. Material hostile to HAF, including self-published activist material, did not.

On February 23, 2026, between 17:50 and 18:44 UTC, Vanamonde93 made a quick run of edits. Each one cited Wikipedia policy. The most significant removed a public statement from HAF's executive director, Suhag Shukla, explaining the organization's defamation lawsuit. The grounds: Wikipedia's rule against primary sources. Kautilya3 had used the same rule in January 2021 to strip out HAF's self-defenses. HAF's own statement about its own lawsuit was deemed off-limits. The activist sources and op-eds framing the lawsuit as an attack on academic freedom stayed.

On January 12, 2022, Kautilya3 made two consecutive edits to the opening paragraphs that, taken individually, look procedural. At 12:20 UTC, the account reverted the page to what the edit summary described as the “last clean version,” undoing changes made by another editor. Thirteen minutes later, they adjusted the lead’s hyperlinks. The word “Hindu” had previously linked to the Wikipedia article Hinduism in the United States, a neutral demographic and cultural entry. Kautilya3 removed that link. The phrase “Hindu nationalist” was given a new link, pointing to the Wikipedia article Hindutva, the explicitly ideological article on Hindu nationalism.

A reader clicking through from the article’s opening lines would no longer arrive at the demographic context of Hindu life in the United States; they would arrive at the ideology. Alongside enforcing the narrative, Kautilya3 ensures the page remains procedurally defensible under Wikipedia policy. The result is an article that reads as critical but stable, rather than overtly adversarial or editorially driven.

The clearest example came on August 4, 2023, when TrangaBellam inserted the term “right-wing” into the article. Kautilya3 reverted the edit, writing: “there is nothing in the body about being ‘right-wing’, whatever that means.” The distinction reflects Wikipedia’s sourcing requirements for article content.

The article’s framing was established through substantive edits in 2021 that went largely unchallenged, and subsequent attempts to revise it are filtered through procedural standards that reinforce that original structure.

Kautilya3’s operation on the HAF page is not confined to the page. The account also holds 25.3% authorship of the Wikipedia page for the Indian American Muslim Council, one of the organizations HAF named in its defamation suit, and one of the most active advocacy groups in the ecosystem opposing HAF. The same editor curating HAF’s profile as a Hindu nationalist proxy is simultaneously the lead curator of the digital profile of one of HAF’s principal organizational adversaries. The page that frames HAF as an instrument of Hindu nationalism and the page that frames the IAMC as a legitimate civil rights group are being shaped, in significant part, by the same account.

The cross-page work extends further. Kautilya3 holds 41.4% authorship of the Wikipedia page on caste discrimination in the United States, the broader subject that the HAF caste-denialism narrative slots into. On January 22, 2026, the account executed a targeted reversion on that page, scrubbing contextual material including diaspora critiques of SB 403 and methodological challenges to the Equality Labs survey that underpins much of the caste-discrimination framing that would have complicated the picture. The effect is that the academic echo chamber TrangaBellam built on the HAF page is mirrored on the broader national caste page, with Kautilya3 ensuring that the same framing dominates both.

While Kautilya3 enforced the page's structure, another member of the four-member edit cluster on the HAF page, Llightex, presented a different issue. To see why, you have to look beyond the HAF article to the network of pages Llightex has built around it, and at a disclosure the account made on a talk page.

On a talk page, Llightex disclosed "past work with" Hindus for Human Rights, one of the principal defendants in HAF's 2021 defamation lawsuit. The phrasing is vague. Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest rules distinguish between employees, contractors, advisors, and paid editors, but Llightex didn't say which applied. "Past work with" could be a job, consulting, advocacy, anything in between. Whatever it was, the account considered it serious enough to disclose.

That same account went on to become the dominant author of several interconnected pages tied to the lawsuit.

On January 5, 2022, Llightex created the Wikipedia article for Hindus for Human Rights. Just four days later, the account began editing the HAF article, entirely restructuring its lead to cast the group as a far-right nationalist organization—exactly the framing advanced for months by Hindus for Human Rights, the group Llightex publicly acknowledged “past work with.”

Over the following weeks, Llightex would execute dozens of consecutive edits to build out the entry’s history and advocacy sections. By January 2022, Hindus for Human Rights had been a defendant in HAF’s defamation lawsuit for eight months. The litigation was active. The plaintiff was HAF. The defendant was the organization whose Wikipedia page was being single-handedly authored, in that window, by an editor who has since disclosed past work with it. Today, Llightex retains roughly 79% authorship of the page.

The pattern extended outward across 2022. Llightex executed a concentrated overhaul of the Indian American Muslim Council page, another organization named in HAF’s defamation suit. In under forty minutes, the account added the IAMC’s logo, infobox, and content describing its advocacy work—building out the page in a way that would stabilize it, turning it into a robust representation of the group and anchoring its credibility in Wikipedia’s knowledge ecosystem. (IAMC did not respond to a request for comment.)

The edit summary noted the addition of “more information about work with CAG”—The Coalition Against Genocide, an affiliated activist coalition. CAG would itself be cited as a source in characterizations of HAF in its Wikipedia article, which today relies, to a significant degree, on a 2013 CAG dossier mapping HAF’s founding leadership to overseas-affiliated entities. The dossier’s role as encyclopedic citation, and the IAMC’s structural ties to CAG, both pass through pages whose substantial authorship belongs to Llightex.

On July 14, 2022, at 16:51 UTC, Llightex formally linked the Hindus for Human Rights entry to a newly built page for Sunita Vishwanath, the co-founder and a named defendant in HAF’s lawsuit. The account holds approximately 87% authorship of Vishwanath’s biography. The activist organization, its co-founder, and its allied advocacy body, each had with a Wikipedia profile substantially shaped by the same account. (Vishwanath did not respond to a request for comment.)

One editor with a prior relationship to one side of the lawsuit was shaping Wikipedia's coverage of all of it: the defendant, the defendant's co-founder, the allied advocacy groups, and the plaintiff suing them.

On November 4, 2022, at 15:29 UTC, the account applied two moderation tags to the top of the HAF article: {{Lead too short}} and {{POV}}. The Point of View tag, in Wikipedia’s editorial grammar, is an assertion that an article fails the neutral point of view policy. On the talk page, Llightex’s justification for the tag demanded more elaboration on HAF’s “non-Hindu nationalist activities.” The phrasing itself revealed the underlying assumption: that Hindu nationalist alignment was already the article’s baseline characterization, and the question was how much mitigating context should be added around it. The neutrality tag was being used to set the procedural ground for a lead expansion to follow.

Seven weeks later, that expansion arrived. On December 21, 2022, HAF’s defamation lawsuit against Hindus for Human Rights was dismissed. The legal substance of the dismissal turned on technical questions about malice standards and the boundary between actionable defamation and protected opinion. On the same day, the cluster converged on the HAF talk page to determine how the dismissal would be characterized. TrangaBellam, Kautilya3, and Llightex all participated. Kautilya3 produced the distillation that would carry through to the article":

The editor who had built Hindus for Human Rights's Wikipedia page—and who had disclosed past work with the organization—was now helping write Wikipedia's account of how HfHR had beaten HAF in court. (HfHR did not respond to a request for comment.)

Llightex did not stop at participating in the talk page discussion. The same day, the account executed a sequence of substantive edits across the visa, caste, and lawsuit sections—most consequentially, an expansion of the defamation suit section, while restoring disputed material pending later discussion on the talk page. The defendant’s biographer was now writing the plaintiff’s encyclopedic summary of the lawsuit the defendant had won. The expansion reframed the litigation primarily through the perspective of the defense.

At 14:07, Llightex expanded the lead, the edit summary describing the change as bringing it to “fully cover the article’s content.” The expansion added breadth—listing HAF’s stated activities, including its advocacy regarding yoga, caste discrimination, and Hindu persecution. The lead as it reads today retains Llightex’s structural expansion: it still lists HAF’s campaigns on yoga, caste, and persecution. But each of those listed activities is now prefixed with hedging language—HAF “alleges” to focus on these issues and the section closes with the characterization, drawn from critics, that these efforts function as “an attempt to rebrand Hindutva as ‘Hindu rights.’” The structure is Llightex’s. The framing accumulated afterward.

Later that day, at 14:53, the Cisco caste discrimination lawsuit was added, linking HAF into the broader caste-discrimination narrative that Kautilya3 was simultaneously curating on the standalone Caste Discrimination in the United States page. In an edit summary that captures the cluster’s working method, Llightex described their own approach: “Adding back edits except for the lead, so we can discuss the lead on the talk page.” The edits were being installed first; the discussion was being scheduled to follow.

On August 15, 2023, in a concentrated thirty-minute window, Llightex executed a structural overhaul of the HAF article. The activism section was restructured, with the Modi visa material moved into its own section to give it greater prominence. At 04:03 UTC, the Hindu nationalist ties section was relocated under “Establishment”—a structural decision that placed the allegation of Hindu nationalist origins inside the article’s foundational narrative rather than treating it as a downstream characterization. In half an hour, the article’s architecture had been rearranged. The Modi visa material was promoted. The Hindu nationalist ties section was placed in the article’s establishment narrative. The defamation suit section was expanded—again, by the disclosed former affiliate of the defendant.

The conflict-of-interest disclosure is the detail that anchors the section’s significance. Llightex’s user page acknowledges past work with Hindus for Human Rights. The same user page acknowledges paid editing for the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation. The account is, in other words, demonstrably familiar with Wikipedia’s conflict of interest framework. Following administrator guidance, Llightex transitioned away from directly editing the Linux Foundation and OSSF pages in favor of the formal edit-request process. The same procedural transition was not adopted for the HAF page.

The cluster’s reliance on Llightex’s network of pages is structural. The HAF article’s establishment section cites a 2013 dossier from the Coalition Against Genocide—a coalition whose primary Wikipedia node, the IAMC page, is substantially authored by Llightex. The HAF article’s characterization of the lawsuit relies on statements and reporting involving Hindus for Human Rights, whose Wikipedia page Llightex created and largely authored. The HAF article also cites the Georgetown Bridge Initiative as a source for claims linking HAF to overseas nationalist groups, while the Indian American Muslim Council, whose Wikipedia profile is likewise substantially shaped by Llightex, maintains institutional relationships within the same advocacy ecosystem.

A reader who follows the links from the HAF page to Hindus for Human Rights, Sunita Vishwanath, and the Indian American Muslim Council encounters the work of four interwoven accounts, a kind of super-editor working to advance what appears to be a unified ideological objective.

On its own, this is significant. It’s reflective of the kind of ideological warfare that now dominates contentious topics on Wikipedia. The site’s tone, its minimalist interface, and its seemingly authorless claims—which give an impression of unbiased neutrality—turn loaded claims into what passes as fact. Even more importantly, Wikipedia’s place in what Wikimedia Foundation, the NGO that owns and operates the site, calls “global knowledge infrastructure” means these claims get laundered into the downstream platforms like Google and AI.

The deeper problem, however, is that Wikipedia readers, as well as consumers of information downstream of the site, are handed a smoothed-over narrative that covers deeply rooted conflicts and disputes. In this case, readers are never made aware of the Sikh separatist movement in India that is seeking a state of its own, and, because of this, strongly opposes the kind of nationalism advocated by Narendra Modi.

In this sense, the entry’s previous work of associating HAF with Hindu nationalism provided a platform for the foreign agent narrative, itself an element that smuggled into the entry deeper context concerning the geopolitical currents related to a much broader conflict. Had any of this been stated, and had the strange sequences of events that led to the headlines about a “DOJ complaint” been made plain, readers would have been able to access a more complete and accurate account of HAF’s position in this landscape. But doing so would have come with one major downside: a more complete account couldn’t co-exist with a simplistic false narrative that casts HAF as a fascism-adjacent foreign agent.

For a single institution facing this kind of de facto ideological coordination, the damage can be devastating. Wikipedia’s abuse monitoring and remediation systems are highly problematic. In the best case, abuse is caught and coordination identified. But even when individual editors are censured, their edits, often amounting to years worth of activity (as it is in this case) remain on the affected pages. The damage is done. More than that, as the pages continue to surface on Google and get fed into AI systems, it continues to be done.

But it’s at the broader information ecosystem where the full impact of this kind of coordination is really felt. The underlying promise of Wikipedia is that the power of crowdsourcing isn’t just about the ability to scale otherwise expensive “information labor” (as we might call it); it’s that the very act of including multiple perspectives in the knowledge generation process stamps out noise—like bias, ideological contamination, commercial and political interest—and elevates signal.

In practice, the opposite turns out to be true. It’s precisely on account of Wikipedia’s crowdsourced nature that a cluster of just four editors were able to invert a page, taking it from an account of a civil rights organization advocating for an ethnic minority to a dossier making the most extreme possible allegations about a far-right nationalist group working to subvert the very values it espouses.

Perhaps the involvement of another 10 or 20 editors on a page like this one could actually deliver on the promise of crowdsourced neutrality. But that is not the scenario we see play out in hundreds, if not thousands of pages like that of HAF, where the “crowd” in the dynamic is replaced by a determined cluster.

This phenomenon—what we might call clustersourcing—is altering the information ecosystem in ways we don’t yet fully understand. As knowledge platforms like Wikipedia, continue to serve as disproportionately influential sources for AI systems, what we do know is that four or, in a different context 40, anonymous accounts can have an enormous impact on what millions of people believe to be the truth.

(Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.)

Editor’s Note: NPOV is supported by our subscribers. If you find this investigation valuable, please consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

Wikipedia rarely removes politically damaging facts outright. More often, they remain in place but are subtly altered: phrasing broadens, specificity is reduced, and context slowly disappears.

Watching that process happen in real time can feel less like censorship than sedimentation: layers of procedural decisions slowly reshaping the final narrative.

That dynamic becomes visible when you stop reading the article itself and start reading the edit history behind it.

The Wikipedia pages for Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji offer revealing examples of how politically sensitive information is negotiated on the platform — not through a single act of deletion, but through dozens of smaller disputes over wording, sourcing, relevance, and tone.

At first glance, the pages appear relatively straightforward. The controversies are present. Readers can find references to Duwaji’s social-media activity after October 7, her past use of slurs, Mamdani’s music career, and criticism surrounding some of his rhetoric and political associations.

But the edit history tells a more complicated story.

Open the revision logs and the articles are no longer static. They become active battlegrounds: editors reverting one another within minutes, arguments unfolding across talk pages, accusations of bias appearing alongside appeals to Wikipedia policy. A sentence survives for a short period before disappearing. A source is treated as reliable in one context and insufficient in another. Even individual words become points of sustained dispute.

One recurring dispute centered on how to describe social-media posts liked by Duwaji after the October 7 attacks.

Some editors argued the posts should be characterized as celebrating the attacks. Others objected that such language imposed interpretation rather than describing the posts themselves. The disagreement ultimately turned on a familiar Wikipedia tension: how far language can move beyond observable behavior into inferred meaning.

This pattern becomes clearer when viewed across both articles together.

On Mamdani’s entry, editors spent weeks revisiting — across multiple Talk page threads and successive rounds of revision — how to frame references in his 2017 rap track “Salam” to the “Holy Land Five,” individuals convicted in the Holy Land Foundation case involving Hamas financing. At different stages, the material was removed as irrelevant, reintroduced with caveats, or reframed in more limited language that emphasized association rather than conviction or ideological framing.

On Duwaji’s page, a parallel dispute unfolded over how to characterize social-media activity following October 7. Editors disagreed not only on interpretation, but on what level of inference Wikipedia policy permits: whether “celebrating,” “supporting,” or “liking posts supportive of” constitutes neutral description or editorial judgment. Over time, the phrasing migrated away from specific and interpretive language toward broader, more procedural formulations tied to general political expression.

Taken in isolation, each dispute reflects standard Wikipedia governance: debates over sourcing quality, neutrality standards, and biography-of-living-person constraints. But taken together, they reveal a consistent structural tendency.

Contested claims rarely disappear. Instead, they are reworked through cycles of challenge and revision until they settle into forms that satisfy Wikipedia’s procedural constraints. What survives is not necessarily the most direct description, but the version of the description that can withstand sustained editorial scrutiny under policy constraints.

This produces a distinctive outcome. The underlying controversy remains visible, but its framing is progressively generalized. Specific assertions give way to broader categories. Interpretive language is replaced with descriptive proxies. Over time, the most precise formulations are often the least durable.

What emerges is not a resolution of meaning, but a filtration process: Wikipedia does not resolve disputes in a traditional sense, but narrows the range of language that can survive them.

To critics, Wikipedia’s output can appear as a form of ideological filtering. To defenders, it is simply the predictable result of enforcing neutrality through sourcing standards, procedural constraint, and editorial caution. Both readings capture part of the system, but neither fully explains its behavior at the level of individual articles.

Wikipedia’s editing culture is adversarial by design. Editors routinely challenge one another’s phrasing across thousands of politically sensitive pages, and many disputes that appear ideological from the outside are, internally, disputes over policy interpretation, sourcing hierarchy, and the limits of acceptable synthesis.

The result is not the absence of conflict, but its formalization. Contested claims are not resolved through authority or editorial judgment, but through procedural endurance — repeated challenge, reversion, and consensus-building under established rules.

Wikipedia’s policies reinforce this dynamic. Loaded language is discouraged unless explicitly attributed. Primary-source interpretation is constrained. Biographies of living persons are subject to especially strict sourcing thresholds. These rules are designed to reduce editorial bias, but in practice they also shape which forms of description are more likely to survive sustained scrutiny.

This becomes more visible when disputes accumulate around politically adjacent material.

On Mamdani’s page, for example, editors debated whether criticism related to his response to the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” warranted significant coverage or contextual framing within the article.

Individually, these debates are unremarkable. Wikipedia talk pages contain thousands of similar exchanges across political topics, all governed by the same procedural vocabulary of neutrality, relevance, and sourcing standards.

What distinguishes these cases is not their content, but their repetition. Across both articles, similar patterns emerge: more specific or interpretive language tends to be less stable than broader, more procedural phrasing. Direct characterizations are often challenged, while generalized formulations prove more durable.

That process is fully visible in Wikipedia’s revision history. Nothing is hidden in principle. The question is not access, but interpretation: how to read the accumulation of small editorial decisions that, over time, determine the final form of an article.

The final page presents a stable narrative. The revision history reveals how that stability is produced — not through resolution of meaning, but through repeated narrowing of language under procedural constraint.

In that context, what matters is not what disappears from the record, but the form in which what remains is ultimately shaped.

WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION HERE

Editor’s note: If you value reporting that exposes how digital systems quietly shape reputations, please subscribe to NPOV

A forensic analysis found that more than 80% of the Hindu American Foundation’s Wikipedia page was written by just four editors.

We traced who built that narrative. The same handful of accounts kept appearing across HAF, its critics, activist groups, and key public figures—building an interconnected narrative that now feeds Google and AI systems.

In this video, we walk through some of the evidence—showing how overlapping editors, sourcing patterns, and repeated edits shape how the organisation is presented to readers.

FULL INVESTIGATION

Editor’s Note: NPOV is supported by our subscribers. If you find this investigation valuable, please consider subscribing.

Subscribe now

Claude has emerged as one of today’s most powerful AI models, relied on by governments, tech companies, journalists and finance.

Despite this, IRGC-linked material that entered open platforms like Wikipedia is being surfaced by Claude as verified information. In repeated queries related to an Iran-backed terror group, Claude cited Iranian state media—including outlets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—as sources for its information. It was unable to explain why those sources were selected.

The investigation began as a routine fact-check. While verifying details of a 1989 terror attack, NPOV asked Anthropic’s Claude to confirm the account. The system responded by citing Mehr News Agency and Tasnim News Agency—surfacing the same state-linked sources already documented on open platforms.

Asked to verify the incident referenced in a Mail Online report,“ChatGPT is pushing Islamic terrorist propaganda.” Claude returned corrections, attributing both to Mehr News Agency: the death toll was 16, not 14, and the attack involved militants seizing a bus and driving it off a cliff rather than a suicide bombing.

The source was directly relevant to the subject under examination. The reporting concerned Iranian state media influence on open knowledge systems. The system surfaced that same media as evidence.

When asked why it had cited Mehr News Agency, Claude acknowledged the failure. It stated that it had extracted facts from search results without evaluating the publisher. Claude then repeated the search in an attempt to “find a credible independent source”.

In the subsequent response, it cited the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and Getty Images. While the citation chain shifted, it was not clearly resolved.

The FDD result led to the Tasnim News Agency topic page. The Getty Images result led to material attributed to Tasnim News Agency, distributed via AFP, with a byline for photographer Mostafa Tehrani.

The citation changed form, but still traced back to the same source. Material produced by a state outlet appeared through intermediary systems including think tank references, image distribution pipelines, and wire service attribution. The origin remained embedded.

This reflects a broader system-level failure: state-linked content enters open platforms, becomes embedded at scale, and is then recirculated by AI systems as if it were neutral, verified information. Previous reporting by NPOV established how that material enters the ecosystem.

In a January investigation, NPOV identified more than 10,000 protest-related media files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons over a period of weeks, sourced directly from Khamenei.ir, Mehr News Agency, and Tasnim News Agency. Tasnim is listed by the US Treasury due to its links to the IRGC. That content now sits inside one of the internet’s most widely reused open repositories — and is being surfaced by AI systems as sourced information.

The same pattern appears in Wikimedia Commons. One repository category alone contains hundreds of images produced for Tasnim News Agency by photographer Mostafa Tehrani, including material depicting Iranian military activity and senior political figures.

The issue did not occur just once. Across three separate queries, Claude returned citations linked to Mehr News Agency, Tasnim News Agency, Getty Images carrying Tasnim attribution, and a direct Tasnim News Agency X account.

The recurrence extended across multiple formats: outlet websites, image distribution systems, Wikimedia-hosted media, and social media accounts. Getty Images appeared in the citations, linking to photos by Milad KHORASANI / tasnim news / AFP).

Khorasani’s work for Tasnim includes portraits of Commander of IRGC Provincial Corps Hassan Shahvarpour which is available to licence on Wikicommons. In a

In one instance, hovering over a citation produced the label “Tasnim news agency – Mehr News Agency” while displaying the domain mehrnews.com.

The same queries were then run directly in search engine Brave, which Claude identifies as powering its web search. In the consumer interface, neither Mehr News nor Tasnim appeared. In Claude’s responses, both appeared repeatedly. Brave bills itself on two claims: “Better results, less SEO spam” and “an independent index.”When asked to explain the discrepancy, Claude proposed several possibilities, including differences between API and consumer results, caching, and contamination from prior context. It then stated that it does not have visibility into its own retrieval pipeline at that level.

Let me be honest with you and pull back from some of the confident explanation I’ve been giving,” Claude responded, when challenged. “The truth is I don’t know exactly why Mehr News appeared in my citations. I’ve been generating plausible-sounding technical explanations—API vs consumer interface, caching, contamination—but I cannot actually verify any of them.

A crucial admission came at the end of this mea culpa, when Claude responded:

I don’t have visibility into my own search pipeline in that level of detail.

When asked whether it could be generating citations from context, it stated that it “may be hallucinating citation indices.”

Two explanations remain. The first is that the search API returns results not visible in the consumer interface. The second is that the model generates or anchors citations from prior context.

Anthropic and Brave were contacted for commentary. Neither company replied.

Evidence of Scale

To understand why these sources are consistently available, archival data from the Internet Archive was examined. The Wayback Machine has recorded extensive captures of both mainstream and state-linked outlets:

• BBC: 391,548 captures since 1998

• Tasnim News Agency: 138,131 captures since 2012

• Mehr News Agency: 136,302 captures since 2003

• Khamenei.ir: 34,114 captures since 2002

• Fars News Agency: 18,269 captures since 2004

These figures show that state media has been consistently indexed and preserved alongside established news organizations for decades, increasing its visibility to search systems and AI models.

These domains have been continuously indexed and preserved for decades. They are embedded within the infrastructure used by search engines and AI systems.

The failure in Claude’s search results mirrors the ones identified in Wikipedia, which relies on open contribution and inconsistent source scrutiny. AI systems rely on automated retrieval and inconsistent source evaluation.

The mechanism is the same. The difference is scale.

Subscribe now

The network extends into more than 110 affiliated subreddits, including some of the platform’s largest communities.

In this video, we walk through the findings—showing how content is coordinated, amplified, and distributed across Reddit.

Guy Christensen has three million followers and a simple theory of information warfare.

“We are soldiers in this digital battleground,” he told an audience at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha in February 2026. “And we need to act as such.”

Christensen, who posts on TikTok and X as YourFavoriteGuy, is one of the most widely watched English-language commentators on the Israel–Hamas war on TikTok. His videos regularly draw hundreds of thousands of views.

On the same day that he delivered his remarks in Doha, warning about what he called Israel’s “eighth front” of digital warfare and pointing to efforts to influence Wikipedia’s coverage of Palestine, a Wikipedia article about him was nominated for deletion.

This set off a chain of events that illustrates how digital manipulation takes place online, and the extent to which actors behind this manipulation are able to coordinate across platforms—and even openly admit to, or call for, coordination of this kind.

On February 7, an entry on Wikipedia titled Guy Christensen was created. At that moment, Christensen was either on his way to—or already in—Qatar, where two days later he was slated to appear at the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha, an annual conference hosted by the Qatar government-controlled broadcaster, Al Jazeera.

This nexus between Qatar, Al Jazeera, and Wikipedia is highly significant. In January, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) broke a major story detailing how, for over a decade, Qatar paid a London PR firm called Portland Communications thousands of dollars to edit Wikipedia pages on behalf of the Qatari government.

TBIJ reported on Portland subcontracted much of this Wikipedia work for the Qatari government to firms that specialize in editing on the site:

Portland’s subcontractors have polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, according to the firm’s insiders. They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other.

Less than a month after that story broke, Christensen was at the Al Jazeera Forum, where he laid out his view of digital activism. Platforms, he argued, are not neutral venues for the exchange of information. Rather, he said, they should be seen as battlefield terrain.

“This is war online, of activism,” Christensen said during his panel talk. “We are all engaged online. The things we say about Palestine, criticism of Israel online—even if you are not posting, if you are engaging, you are participating in this war.”

Christensen identified Wikipedia explicitly as one of the major fronts in this ideological conflict.

His panel at the Forum event was titled, “Sources of Influence: The Creator, Content, Platforms and Funding.” Within hours of the panel, a Wikipedia editor operating under the account name Butterscotch Beluga nominated the Guy Christensen article for deletion through the site’s Articles for Deletion process, the community mechanism used to determine whether a page meets Wikipedia’s notability standards.

The editor’s activity history shows substantial work in the Israel–Palestine topic area, one of the most contentious domains on the platform. Across dozens of highly contentious Middle East articles, the account routinely sanitized terminology, downplayed events unfavorable to Palestinians, challenged pro-Israel sources, and aggressively policed other editors. In effect, it operates less as a neutral editor and more as a gatekeeper, controlling both language and sourcing to maintain a consistent framing on one side of the conflict.

Share

The motion to delete Guy Christensen’s article was defeated.

(Christensen did not respond to NPOV’s outreach.)

It’s unclear whether Christensen played a role in the effort to have the page removed the first time. But he began publicly canvassing for assistance from editors. On February 12, Christensen posted an appeal on X:

If any Wikipedia editors follow me please DM me. I have a favor to ask.

Whatever DM discussions might have ensued, they apparently were not effective in providing the outcome Christensen was seeking. A week later, on February 19, Christensen posted on X once again. This time he linked his now public campaign to have his article deleted to the broader conflict:

“Zios have overrun and are holding my Wikipedia page hostage like they hold Palestinian children hostage. If there are any Wikipedia editors who stand with humanity I would appreciate it if you were to combat the Zios.”

In Wikipedia terminology, this kind of attempt to recruit editors to sway editorial decisions in a certain direction is known as canvassing, and it is generally prohibited under the site’s complex matrix of rules, guidelines, principles, and best practices.

Wikipedia editors took note of this effort.

On February 28, an editor added a banner to the top of the article’s Talk page alerting editors that participants may be recruiting outside support for a discussion. The banner warned that “there have been attempts to recruit editors of specific viewpoints to this article” and reminded participants that Wikipedia disputes are resolved through consensus rather than majority votes.

While this was standard operating procedure in a situation like this one, other, more unusual activity appeared as well.

On February 26, an account identified in the revision log as ~2026-12764-69, with only three recorded edits—all related to the Christensen article—appeared on the Talk page stating that the editor was Christensen himself. The account argued that portions of the article were “defamatory” and submitted edit requests seeking the removal of these elements.

This page is written about me in a very defamatory manner. Not only does it mischaracterize my online fame as arising from a random video years into my content creation (allegedly "faking my death") despite the fact I had millions of followers already for a comedy series I did called "Monke Explanations" that tracked a billion hits on TikTok.

Echoing Christensen’s panel remarks in Doha, where the TikToker alleged that ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt had led pro-Israel online information efforts, the anonymous Wikipedia editor claiming to be Christensen accused the “ADL and literally the organizations opposed to me” of going to “great efforts” to influence Wikipedia against him. “This is why I want these things addressed asap because I’m afraid it will materially harm me,” the account wrote.

Christensen’s remarks about coordinated Wikipedia editing, which he made in Doha, were ironic, given the reporting that surfaced only weeks prior about Qatari paid editing. But even more to the point was that Christensen himself is allied with one of the only groups to ever have been caught coordinating ideological Wikipedia editing off of the site.

The Gang of 40 and Coordinated Editing

In October 2024, I published a piece in Pirate Wires on systematic pro-Hamas Wikipedia editing conducted mostly by a group I later identified as the Gang of 40. In that same investigation, I also identified a separate coordinated editing group which was part of an 8,000-member Discord server called Tech For Palestine.

A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.

Much of the Wikipedia coordination on the TFP Discord server was initiated and led by notorious pro-Hamas propaganda account, Zei_Squirrel. In subsequent reporting, we identified how Zei_Squirrel canvassing and social media activities across not just Wikipedia but also X/Community Notes, Reddit, Instagram and other platforms. Christensen would likely have been familiar with this activity.

Just two weeks before his appearance at the Al Jazeera Forum, he appeared as a speaker at the Tech for Palestine Tech Summit in Mountain View, California. The event, which founder Paul Biggar describes as “the largest gathering at the intersection of tech and pro-Palestine advocacy,” brought together engineers, activists, and political organizers from across the movement. Among the event’s “Gold” sponsors was the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the same organization named by federal prosecutors as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism-financing case in the U.S. history.

The summit’s speaker lineup also included Basim Elkarra of CAIR and Issam Hijazi, co-founder of the social network UpScrolled, which is backed by the Tech for Palestine incubator.

Christensen heavily promoted UpScrolled, describing it to followers as offering “no censorship” and freedom from billionaire ownership — a characterization later added to the platform’s Wikipedia article by editor Isi96. During the same period, the same editor expanded the page’s “Reception” section, adding praise from CAIR alongside a quote from Christensen himself describing the platform.

In post after post throughout January 2026, Christensen urged his followers on X to migrate to the platform.
UpScrolled is supported by Tech for Palestine, placing the platform within the same organizational ecosystem that hosted the summit where Christensen appeared as a speaker. Seen in that context, Christensen’s later defense of Wikipedia’s neutrality sits uneasily beside his own description of the internet as a battlefield.

In 2025, a committee in the United States House of Representatives opened an investigation into allegations of systemic anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia. This month, Christensen responded in a widely circulated video posted to TikTok and YouTube.

In the video, Christensen promoted a conspiracy theory about "Zionists in the administration” attempting to pressure Wikipedia into adopting what he described as a pro-Israel narrative. For the first time, he said, he was considering donating to Wikipedia in order to defend it. The framing positioned Christensen as a defender of Wikipedia’s neutrality. The record reveals something far more complicated.

Propaganda has long been one of the most prized weapons of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). Manipulating not just information but perception, the regime has managed to offset outdated military hardware and limited strategic projection while cloaking its central strategy: maintaining a regional network of proxy militias across the Middle East.

Nowhere has this approach to information been more visible than on Wikipedia.

In January, NPOV reported Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War, exposing a network of IRI-aligned editors quietly reshaping hundreds of articles related to the Iranian regime. A second NPOV investigation revealed the mass upload of more than 10,000 images and videos tied to the 2025–2026 protests onto Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s global media repository. The files were sourced from Iranian state outlets including the IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency, Mehr News Agency, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s official website, Khamenei.ir.

Together, the uploads saturated search results for the protests with regime-produced material — funeral processions for security forces, footage depicting protesters as violent rioters, and speeches by senior Iranian officials.

Read: Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War

Newly examined records now show that senior figures within Persian Wikipedia were in direct dialogue with Iran’s censorship authorities.

In September 2018, several senior volunteers from the Persian-language edition of Wikipedia participated in a recorded strategy meeting held in collaboration with Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the government body responsible for regulating media and issuing publishing licenses, according to a 2019 report by openDemocracy.

Among the Wikipedia participants was Mohsen Salek, introduced at the event as a senior manager and bureaucrat of Persian Wikipedia. Representing the government was Hamid Ziaei Parvar, head of the ministry’s Bureau of Media Studies and Planning.

During the discussion, panelists addressed how politically sensitive content about Iranian officials should be handled on the platform. At one point, Salek compared the authority of Wikipedia administrators to the ministry’s own censorship apparatus, Vezarat-e-Ershad, which oversees all licensed media inside Iran:

“…these guys here play the role of Vezarat-e-Ershad in Wikipedia… They can close one account, open another, give warnings. They are even stronger than Vezarat-e-Ershad. They have the keys in their hands.”

Participants also discussed locking pages about Iranian officials to prevent what they described as “attacks,” and suggested that information about individuals should not appear on Wikipedia unless it had already been widely reported and verified by Iranian state media outlets.

According to the openDemocracy report, at the close of the meeting, Parvar offered Persian Wikipedia an official base inside the ministry and assistance registering as a non-governmental organization through the Ministry of Interior. While no public record shows the proposal was formalized, the offer illustrates how Iranian officials themselves envisioned the relationship.

Questions about Persian Wikipedia’s vulnerability to state-aligned influence had already surfaced. In 2019, researcher Sina Zekavat found that politically sensitive articles on Persian Wikipedia diverged significantly from their English-language counterparts. Entries dealing with Iran’s regional interventions relied more heavily on state-linked sources and often framed controversial issues in ways aligned with Tehran’s official narrative.

While these differences alone do not demonstrate coordinated influence, the 2018 meeting shows that senior Persian Wikipedia figures were in direct contact with Iran’s censorship authorities.

Following Zekavat’s reporting, the Wikimedia Foundation stated it had reviewed the claims with Farsi-speaking volunteers and concluded that “a number of the claims” were unsubstantiated. The Foundation did not specify which claims were dismissed or the scope of the review.

In 2019, Mohsen Salek also participated in discussions shaping the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2030 global strategy, appearing at Wikimania in Stockholm as part of the process.

This sequence of events is highly consequential. Wikipedia consistently ranks at or near the top of search results for information about Iran, sanctions, and the country’s political leadership. Its credibility depends on the perception—and reality—of neutrality.

The 2018 meeting does not prove that Persian Wikipedia became a state-directed operation. But the documented record shows that senior editors met with Iran’s censorship ministry at a key moment, with a leading administrator going so far as to compare Wikipedia’s authority to that ministry. Discussion of state media served as an editorial benchmark, and the government offered to provide institutional support.

The downstream effects of that proximity are visible in the edit histories documented in NPOV’s earlier investigations.

In Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War, NPOV documented a sustained pattern of edits that consistently moved Iran-related articles in the same direction: less emphasis on regime abuses, fewer independent sources, and increased reliance on state-linked framing.

One of the clearest examples was the Wikipedia page for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A user operating under the name Mhhossein emerged as a long-term gatekeeper on the entry, editing the page 217 times—more than any other editor. Across Wikipedia, Mhhossein’s activity spans 2,228 pages and more than 11,000 edits, with heavy concentration on topics central to the Islamic Republic’s political narrative, including Iranian nuclear policy, political assassinations, and the Supreme Leader himself.

NPOV’s reporting also identified repeated removals of material documenting the regime’s human-rights record. References to key details of the 1988 mass executions—including evidence that women and minors were among those killed extrajudicially—were deleted from some entries. Information about Hamid Nouri’s 2022 life sentence in Sweden for war crimes disappeared. References to the 2018 expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Albania over an alleged bombing plot against dissidents were scrubbed.

Many of these changes followed a pattern we know as “abrasive deletion”: small edits gradually stripping context until the remaining information was later removed as redundant or trivial.

Share

A separate NPOV investigation found that the same narrative struggle extended beyond text into Wikipedia’s global media pipeline.

Over a period of weeks, more than 10,000 images and videos connected to the 2025–2026 protests were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the repository that supplies media to Wikipedia articles across hundreds of languages. The files were sourced from Iranian state outlets including Khamenei.ir, the official website of the Supreme Leader; Mehr News Agency, owned by a regime-linked ideological organization; and Tasnim News Agency, an outlet tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and sanctioned by the United States.

Search results for terms such as “Iran protests,” “Iran protests 2026,” and “Khamenei” increasingly returned this material. Out of thousands of media results, only a small number were not produced by Iranian state outlets.

The uploads were driven largely by a single Wikimedia Commons account known as 999real, which has fewer than 1,000 edits on Wikipedia itself but more than one million edits on Wikimedia Commons. Although the account was created only in November 2023, it quickly became the third-largest contributor to the Wikipedia article on Tasnim News Agency.

The content carried unmistakable messaging. One video widely surfaced in protest-related searches—bearing a Khamenei.ir watermark—opens with a crowd chanting “Marg bar Āmrikā” (“Death to America”) and cuts to demonstrators holding signs reading “Down with Israel.” Other clips depict protesters as violent rioters, show burned mosques and damaged Qurans, and feature speeches by senior regime figures praising pro-government rallies.

Commons attribution links direct viewers back to the originating outlets, including Khamenei.ir and Tasnim.

Whether these uploads were coordinated by Iranian authorities or carried out by individuals sourcing from state media remains unclear. What the record shows is that Iranian government media entered Wikipedia’s content ecosystem at scale during a period when journalists were blocked from reporting inside the country and internet access was severely restricted.

It is against this backdrop—years of contested edits, mass media uploads, and narrative battles across the platform—that the 2018 meeting between senior Persian Wikipedia figures and Iran’s censorship ministry takes on greater significance.

NasDaily has built an audience of tens of millions of people around the world as the creation of Nuseir Yassin. Over the past decade, Nuseir has built something far larger than a content channel. What began as a personal storytelling project—one man publishing daily one-minute videos—expanded into a global media and technology enterprise, backed by major investors and designed to support the next generation of online entrepreneurship.

His platform, Nas.io, allows entrepreneurs to launch businesses, sell products, and build audiences of their own. According to Nuseir, companies employ well over a hundred people. His audience stretches into the tens of millions.

But you wouldn’t know this from reading the Wikipedia page for NasDaily.

Instead, the entry on the world’s largest knowledge platform presents something recognizably connected to Nuseir, but unmistakably diminished. It identifies him primarily as a “vlogger,” a content personality defined by the act of recording and publishing videos. And it strips one of the most consequential Israeli-Arab entrepreneurs of control over his own identity.

Today, Nuseir is working to show the world what happened to his Wikipedia entry—and why. In January, Nuseir released a video titled "My Wikipedia Got Stolen” detailing the narrative campaign against him on the site. In a post on X, he went so far as to write, “Shut down Wikipedia. And seek the truth with Grokipedia.”

This was no knee-jerk reaction by an anti-Wikipedia crusader. Far from it. Over the years, Nuseir and the NasDaily channel have been one of Wikipedia’s greatest champions. In 2023, Nuseir traveled to London to make a video featuring Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. He has also donated to the site and encouraged his followers to use it.

Share

A Narrative Campaign Unfolds

But in recent months, following a sustained effort to revamp his Wikipedia page, Nuseir (like so many others who have been in this position) began to see the site, and its core mechanisms, in a very different light.

While consequential, the shift to the NasDaily page did not arrive as a dramatic rewrite. Instead, it happened through a process of slow accumulation. Over the past two years, a series of incremental edits altered the structural balance of the page. This is the most common approach to this kind of ideologically-driven revision of an entry: a phrase gets replaced, a descriptor is narrowed. No single edit ever appears decisive. But together, they reshape how the subject gets presented to readers—and the digital platforms that sit downstream of it.

In NasDaily’s case, the change is visible from the very first sentence, which describes Nuseir as an “Israeli-Palestinian vlogger who is most notable for creating over 1,000 daily, one-minute-long videos.” The sentence, which contains no obvious falsehood, performs a powerful act of compression by defining Nuseir by the earliest phase of his career. It presents him as a person who made a large number of videos, rather than as an entrepreneur building companies, raising capital, and employing teams to build products used by others.

While this might sound like a small difference, for Nuseir it’s about as important a misrepresentation as possible, akin to having the last decade of a career and professional trajectory arbitrarily deleted. If it were simply the product of error or a page that hadn’t been maintained, that would be one thing. But in this instance, that—as we’ll see—is evidently not the case.

The ideological revision of the NasDaily entry doesn’t end with the reduction of Nuseir’s professional life, but cuts to the very heart of who he is as a person. Earlier versions of the article reflected the complexity of how Nuseir understood his own identity. He described himself publicly as Palestinian-Israeli, an attempt to reconcile the overlapping realities of his birth, citizenship, and ancestry.

All this changed for Nuseir the day after the October 7 atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.

On October 8, 2023, Nuseir published a statement on X reflecting a shift in how he understood his vulnerability and belonging. The violence forced him to confront questions of safety in ways he had not previously experienced.

“I realized that if Israel were to be invaded like that again, we would not be safe,” he wrote. “Which means I only have one home. Israel.”

This was a personal conclusion, not a renunciation of his past history or other elements of his personal identity as an Arab man.

An Unseen Ideological Engine

The question is why this provoked the response it did on Wikipedia. The answer is that, for decades, Nuseir has been a vocal proponent of normalization between Israel and the Palestinians. This, for him, is not as a political slogan, but a lived reality and a necessary condition for peace.

“The fact is I do have a normalizing agenda,” Nuseir told me in an exclusive interview. “In other words, I believe in a peaceful two-state solution between two people at war for the last seventy-five years.”

But for editors active on his Wikipedia entry, normalization is positioned as an ideological stain. This is achieved by presenting the idea of Israeli-Palestinian normalization—one the centerpiece of liberal geopolitical thought—through the frame of the global campaign to delegitimize Israel, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Midway through, the article introduces one of Nuseir’s key initiatives, Nas Academy, a digital platform where people can learn how to turn content creation into a successful business, as the subject of controversy. Editors inserted the sentence:

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign claimed that the training programme was aimed to encourage normalization of relations with Israel.

The sentence appears clinical, sourced, procedural. But its inclusion performs a specific function. It establishes normalization not as a neutral fact about Nuseir’s worldview, but as an accusation brought against him by a political campaign organized explicitly to oppose normalization itself.

Wikipedia Shifts Left

This shift against Nuseir reflects a broader change on Wikipedia. In the first decade or so of its existence, the platform largely embraced center-left liberalism. This was driven by a belief in classic liberal ideals, like open discourse, objectivity, and a sense that conflict can be resolved through consensus.

But over the past decade, Wikipedia has undergone a marked shift in its internal politics, lurching dramatically leftward. Part of this shift was precipitated by Wikimedia Foundation’s Movement Strategy, a long-term vision to re-form the organization’s mission from building an online encyclopedia to serving as a global social justice movement rooted in what it calls “knowledge equity.”

Along with it, ideological dynamics on articles and Talk pages similarly underwent a transformation. The kind of political normalization between Israel and Palestine that Western liberalism had positioned at the very center of its geopolitical project for decades was swapped out by a BDS-driven ethos that seeks to implement a zero-sum approach to the conflict—not in Israel’s favor.

In the context of this shift, Nuseir’s persistent advancement of normalized relations between not just Israelis and Palestinians but the broader Arab world became a threat to the new leftward ideological framework on Wikipedia. That he is one of the most prominent and credible Israeli-Arabs online today made this even more pointed.

The changes to Nuseir’s Wikipedia mirror these shifts. But the shift has been subtle, taking an incrementalist approach to revision favored by most veteran editors. He began to notice that the center of gravity of his page had shifted. Developments that reflected the scale of his work—new ventures, expanded teams, technological platforms—appeared inconsistently or without prominence. The biography began to describe what was said about him rather than what he had built.

▶ Watch the 90-Second Explainer

What happened to Nuseir reveals how quietly digital reputations can be rewritten.

WATCH

When we spoke, he described the dissonance plainly. “I have a hundred people in my company,” he said. “I’ve raised tens of millions of dollars. I built four companies. But if you read my Wikipedia, you think I’m a one-person operation making videos.”

Defamation Anon

Nuseir is by no means alone. Every week, NPOV hears from people who have experienced the same effect. In some cases, the targeting is clear-cut, even out in the open. In others, it’s far more opaque. Some narrative campaigns on the site are driven by a single overzealous editor on a private, unseen mission. In other cases, it’s the product of widespread, highly complex coordination.

Read: How health journalist Max Lugavere was smeared by a self-proclaimed “vegan activist.”

What unites them all, however, is the sense that these people not only have no recourse, but that no one is even listening. Reputations that have been built over the course of decades are tarnished in a matter of minutes. The attacks are public and permanent, but the people carrying them out are protected by Wikipedia’s system of anonymity.

With Google propagating these attacks to the top ranks of its search results, and AI training on Wikipedia data, the narrative campaigns built on a single website get universalized across the internet. Once out there in the wild, they are there to stay—a kind of slow, seeping damage that’s impossible to reverse.

Watch the full interview with Nuseir Yassin below. Subscribe to NPOV for more powerful investigations.

Subscribe now

Max Lugavere is a health and science journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and host of The Genius Life, a podcast with more than 80 million downloads. He is the author of Genius Foods, The Genius Life, and Genius Kitchen, and co-director of Little Empty Boxes, a documentary about his mother’s battle with dementia and the emerging science around cognitive decline.

His work began with a personal crisis.

In an interview with NPOV Chief Investigative Officer Ashley Rindsberg, Lugavere explains that his mother developed Lewy body dementia when Lugavere was in his late twenties. “My mom was the most important person in my life,” he said.

Trained as a journalist rather than a clinician, he approached the diagnosis the only way he knew how—a deep journalistic dive into the scientific literature.

“Because this was the most important thing happening in my life, I decided to take it upon myself to investigate why this was happening to my mom,” he told NPOV. “I had tools at my disposal that I felt few others had. I had media credentials. I started reaching out to scientists around the world to try to understand the risk factors.”

What followed was years of reporting across neurology, nutrition, and metabolic health. That work eventually became Genius Foods, which he wrote while unemployed, treating it as a full-time project.

“I saw it as an opportunity to pay homage to my mom, to memorialize what she was going through, and to pay homage to the science,” he said.

This experience became the foundation for his books and documentary: an attempt to understand whether cognitive decline is inevitable, or whether risk can be meaningfully reduced.

But that’s not what visitors to Lugavere’s Wikipedia page—or users who search his name on Google, which pulls from that page—will learn. Instead, readers encounter a manipulative framing mechanism in the first sentences of the entry:

“Max Lugavere (born May 28, 1982) is an American author who has written about diet and brain health. He promotes diets that contain high amounts of animal source foods and has claimed that veganism increases risk of dementia. He has been described as an ‘anti-vegan activist’. Lugavere’s views about supplements to ‘supercharge’ the brain are not supported by scientific evidence.”

Before Wikipedia mentions Lugavere’s books, his documentary, his journalism, or his mother’s illness, it frames him as someone who promotes meat-heavy diets, advances unsupported claims, and functions as an “anti-vegan activist.”

That phrase is the most damaging element in the lead—and an immediate red flag that there’s a reputational attack at work. This single phrase, coming at the end of the lead (where adversarial editors frequently add the most potent, damaging material) recasts a journalist whose work emerged from personal tragedy into an ideological actor, and it does so in the section that gets reproduced by Google, referenced by AI systems, and read by academics, journalists, and curious readers looking for more background.

Watch: NPOV’s interview with Max Lugavere

The Adversarial Framing

The characterization of Lugavere as an “anti-vegan activist”—not a journalist or health writer—comes not from a medical body, professional association, or even a summary of a broad review of the literature. Rather, it comes from a single institutional pipeline tied into a vast, coordinated Wikipedia editing and manipulation effort.

The editor responsible for inserting and enforcing this language is the account now known as Carrot juice. Wikipedia’s rename log shows that this account previously operated under the names Veg Historian and, before that, Psychologist Guy.

According to the user’s own page, Carrot juice founded WikiProject Veganism and Vegetarianism and participates in WikiProject Animal Rights. Wikipedia data analysis tools show that Carrot juice is the dominant contributor to Lugavere’s biography, responsible for roughly half of the article’s content and for the largest individual insertions during the period when the current lead paragraph took shape. It was Carrot juice, then operating as Veg Historian, who inserted and elevated the criticism into the opening sentences and introduced the sourcing that labels Lugavere an “anti-vegan activist.”

On the Talk pages, Carrot juice, then operating as Psychologist Guy, has often taken a confrontational, prosecutorial tone. This includes framing contested dietary claims as conclusively “fringe,” escalating disputes with allegations of bad faith, sockpuppetry, and canvassing. The user has also been involved in edit-warring reports, NPOV noticeboard discussions, and has been accused by another editor of harassment.

Lugavere went so far as to make an emotional appeal on Wikipedia, but received no meaningful response.

Network Origin Point

A look at the dynamics behind this narrative attack tells a deeper story.

The main citation for Wikipedia’s attack on Lugavere is a 2018 article by Jonathan Jarry titled Brain Health: Max Lugavere and the Bait-and-Switch Maneuver, published by McGill University’s Office for Science and Society (OSS).

In that piece, Jarry writes that Lugavere “lacked the credentials to accurately interpret the scientific literature,” characterizes him as a “naive believer in anything that has a study behind it,” and emphasizes endorsements from Dr. Oz and Mark Hyman to suggest guilt by association.

These lines are lifted directly into Lugavere’s Wikipedia article and form the basis for its opening claims that his views are not supported by science.

User:Carrot juice (formerly Veg historian- Psychologist Guy) does not stop there, but reinforces this framing by citing a second the same institution as Jarry. In fact, it’s Jarry’s boss, OSS co-founder and director, Joseph A. Schwarcz, whose writing is also used by the Carrot juice as a key part of the narrative framework.

Wikipedia presents these as independent expert assessments. Both authors operate inside the same advocacy unit. OSS is a science communications office devoted to public-facing interventions around—what it defines as—misinformation. Jarry has described his role as involving coordination with journalists and deliberate amplification designed to produce reputational pressure.

In an interview with Skeptical Inquirer (more on that publication later), Jarry explains how OSS gathers data, feeds reporters, and escalates narratives across media platforms to influence outcomes. Despite this explicitly interventionist posture, OSS commentary is treated by the editor, and by extention, Wikipedia, as a neutral medical authority.

A Coordinated Edit Ring

What emerges from Lugavere’s case is not a dispute between individual editors. It reflects the activity of a long-running, organized faction inside Wikipedia that refers to itself broadly as the Skeptics—a network of editors, writers, and institutional affiliates who coordinate across Wikipedia, advocacy organizations, and sympathetic media to shape how health, science, and public figures are presented online.

The Skeptics are not ideologically neutral (their political activity is extensive). They operate as a disciplined editorial bloc, controlling or heavily influencing thousands of articles across medicine, nutrition, psychology, geopolitics, and biographies of living people. Their footprint appears repeatedly in Wikipedia governance venues, arbitration discussions, and “fringe” enforcement forums, where they determine which subjects are deemed legitimate and which are framed as pseudoscience or activism.

This network functions through formal projects such as Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia (GSoW), through WikiProject Skepticism and related noticeboards, and through external platforms including Skeptical Inquirer and its parent body, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Its members write the critical articles, author the Wikipedia pages that establish institutional authority, and then deploy those sources against living subjects — creating a closed editorial loop that presents itself publicly as decentralized consensus.

This structure has existed for years. Internal skeptic communications and early Wikimedia-era discussions describe a deliberate strategy: cultivate “trusted” editors, establish specialist authority, override democratic editing when necessary, and propagate approved narratives across large numbers of articles. Many of the same actors also publish in mainstream or semi-mainstream outlets, which are then recycled back into Wikipedia as “reliable sources.”

It is within this context that a key Skeptic operator, User:Robincantin, enters the picture. While not directly active on Lugavere’s entry, Robincantin is central to the activities of the group.

Robincantin created Jonathan Jarry’s Wikipedia biography in 2023 and remains its top contributing editor by authored text. Jarry did not have a Wikipedia article prior to Robincantin creating one, and it’s not clear that Jarry would have independently met Wikipedia’s notability standard.

But Robincantin’s editing doesn’t stop with Jonathan Jarry. The editor also serves as the primary author of the McGill Office for Science and Society Wikipedia page itself, and is the second-ranked author on the page on the OSS’s co-founder and director, Joseph Schwarcz.

In practical terms, the same editor built the institutional profile of OSS, created the Wikipedia entry on OSS’s lead communicator, and operates within the skeptical editing ecosystem that applied OSS material to Lugavere’s biography.

The Media Layer

This connection is not incidental. In a Skeptical Inquirer interview, Susan Gerbic refers to Robin Cantin directly as “my editor,” placing him inside the operational core of Guerrilla Skepticism rather than at its periphery.

Gerbic is not only the founder of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia. She is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which owns Skeptical Inquirer, and she is a regular columnist for the magazine.

Authorship data shows Gerbic as the second-ranked editor on Wikipedia’s Skeptical Inquirer article by character count, meaning a founder of GSoW directly helped author the encyclopedia entry for the publication she writes for.

The overlap is even more pronounced on the Wikipedia article for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry itself, where Gerbic is the top contributing editor, responsible for roughly 38 percent of the article’s authored content. (By comparison, the second-ranked editor accounts for under seven percent.)

Gerbic effectively constructed Wikipedia’s representation of the organization she is a Fellow of and that owns Skeptical Inquirer.

Taken together, the structure becomes visible:

1. Robincantin builds Jonathan Jarry’s Wikipedia biography and the Wikipedia page for McGill’s Office for Science and Society.

2. Jarry produces the OSS critique of Lugavere. Schwarcz reinforces it.

3. Carrot juice inserts that material into Lugavere’s lead paragraph and enforces the framing.

4. Guerrilla Skepticism network serves as a coordination mechanism.

5. Skeptical Inquirer provides a media platform where many of the same figures write, edit, or are interview subjects.

6. Gerbic authors or controls Wikipedia entries for both Skeptical Inquirer and its parent organization.

(NPOV has reached out to Schwarcz, Jarry, Gerbic and Skeptical Inquirer for comment.)
”Everything we put out can be used by anyone, so if someone wants to use some of our it in biographies it is fine with me,” Schwarcz told NPOV. “We stand behind everything we put out. We have no formal relationship with any organization including Guerilla skeptics but xI do approve of what Susan Gerbic does.”

The Attack Deepens

The same editorial pattern appears toward the end of Lugavere’s Wikipedia entry in the treatment of his documentary, Little Empty Boxes.

Rather than summarizing audience reception or the substance of the film, the article selects two negative reviews from highly obscure review outlets and presents them as representative. Wikipedia then summarizes these critiques as evidence that Lugavere’s film promotes questionable science.

There is no mention in the lead that the film took nearly a decade to make, that it centers on Lugavere’s mother’s decline, or that it documents interviews with credentialed neurologists and clinicians. Instead, the documentary is reduced to a handful of hostile lines that align neatly with the broader framing of Lugavere as a fringe health figure.

“They pulled two reviews from random websites and treated that like critical consensus,” Lugavere told NPOV. “Meanwhile, the audience response is overwhelmingly positive. That doesn’t appear anywhere.”

One of the reviews cited on Wikipedia accuses Lugavere of exploiting his mother’s illness to sell supplements, a claim Lugavere says is not only false, but grotesque.

“The supplements aren’t even mentioned in the film,” Lugavere told NPOV. “They play zero role in the narrative. The movie is about my mom. It’s about dementia. It’s about prevention. To suggest I used her illness to sell products is absolutely insane.”

The Reputational Effect

A journalist whose work grew out of watching his mother decline from dementia is introduced primarily through claims about animal products and veganism. A bestselling author and documentary filmmaker is recast as an ideological activist. His academic contributions are absent from the lead. His motivation is erased. His work is filtered through the lens of a single advocacy office and enforced by editors embedded in coordinated skeptic networks.

Each step is procedurally defensible in isolation. Together, they transform a living person’s public record.

This matters because Wikipedia no longer functions solely as a reference site. Its content feeds Google knowledge panels, informs journalists, trains large language models, and underwrites fact-checking systems. When coordinated activist networks can construct sources, elevate those sources, and deploy them against living people inside the same platform, the consequences extend far beyond any single biography.

Lugavere’s case provides a clear, documented example of how that system operates.

A health journalist whose career began with watching his mother fade from dementia is recast online as a fringe ideologue through an editorial pipeline most readers will never see. They will simply assume Wikipedia got it right.

Share

Yesterday we published an investigative report on how thousands of Iranian state media images and videos are now hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

Here’s the accompanying walkthrough video, showing exactly how this material appears on the platform and where it links.

As Iran’s regime carried out what observers have described as one of the bloodiest two-day massacres in modern history — with estimates suggesting as many as 36,500 people killed — the government simultaneously shut down internet access, blocked journalists, and sealed the country off from outside reporting.

Now an NPOV investigation reveals a surge of protest-related media sourced from Iranian state outlets appearing on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s media repository.

In recent weeks, over 10,000 images and videos from Iranian state-owned or controlled media outlets—most related to the recent protests—have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The content appears as the results for searches on “Iran protests,” “Iran protests 2026,” “Khamenei,” and related keywords.

Out of thousands of pieces of content returned on these searches, only a few dozen—mostly of an anti-regime protest in Sweden—were not sourced from Iranian state media. Pro-regime content continued to be uploaded in real time during NPOV’s investigation—with hundreds more added during the course of our investigation.

Sanctioned State Media in Wikipedia’s Media Pipeline

The Iranian-sourced images and videos are produced and licensed by three Iranian government media outlets: Khamenei.ir, the official website of Iran’s Supreme Leader; Mehr News Agency, owned by Iranian government’s Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization; and Tasnim News Agency, an entity sanctioned by the U.S. government on account of its ownership by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terror Organization.

The presence of this content on Wikimedia Commons, which, along with Wikipedia, is owned and operated by Wikimedia Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit, raises potential sanctions-compliance and liability questions.

Wikimedia Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.

Clicking on the attribution section on the Wikimedia Commons files leads users directly to the Iranian state propaganda outlets’ website. This includes Khamenei.ir, where the footer notes that the site is The Official Website of the Office for the Preservation and Publication of the Works of the Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei.

Nearly all of the content has been uploaded by a single user, 999real, an account with less than 1,000 edits on Wikipedia, but over 1 million edits on Wikimedia Commons.

999real is the third-ranked author on the Wikipedia entry for the Tasnim News Agency. This is despite the fact that the account was registered less than three years ago, in November 2023. (By comparison, the first- and second-ranked authors on the Tasnim entry were registered 20 and 17 years ago, respectively.)

It’s unclear whether 999real’s mass upload of Iranian state-affiliated media is coordinated by Tehran. What is clear is that the content of the images and videos distinctly present the viewpoint pushed by the government. The titles and content provide strong indication that these are narrative artifacts designed to depict protesters as violent extremists while portraying regime gatherings as expressions of national unity.

Reshaping the Narrative Through High-Impact Video

The first video in the results returned for “Iran protest 2026” is titled Memorable moments of Iranian people’s tremendous participation in rallies in Tehran. The video, which bears the Khamenei.ir watermark, begins with a man shouting over a loudspeaker “Marg bar Āmrikā”—death to America. A crowd responds with the same chant. The video cuts to a man holding a sign that reads “DOWN WITH ISRAEL.” Seconds later the video shows a crowd chanting “Khamenei, I respond to your call.”

Another top video result is titled Exclusive interview conducted by Khamenei.ir World Service. It, too, carries the Khamenei.ir watermark. The video begins with an Iranian state media figure stopping people at a pro-regime protest to ask them questions on camera. A young woman in a chador and wrapped in the Islamic Republic of Iran flag tells the camera, “We came to say that it’s not our country that’s coming to an end. It’s the devil’s time that’s running out.”

In the video, another woman, holding a picture of the Supreme Leader, says, “We came here today for our martyrs, for Ayatollah Khamenei, for Iran.” Interviewees are given a small grey box with a zip carrying a fake press pass that reads:

Congratulations, you’re now a Western media journalist. For your first report on Iranian youth prepare an interview so the world understands the following. Point one: Iranian youth are politically dependent on the West. Second point: Iranian youth have turned their backs on religion. Third point: Iranian youth are morally corrupt.

Interviewees react with disgust or ridicule. As the music swells into an orchestral cinematic score, the video closes with a speech by Khamenei about “brave Iranian youth” and their struggle against the enemy.

In these two instances, and dozens others like them, the Wikimedia Commons files include licensing and attribution details that take users to the official website of the Supreme Leader, or the regime media outlets listed as the source.

Other video titles include The Iranian nation is strong, powerful and aware and Confessions of an armed rioter arrested in Khorramabad protests. Several clips embed direct statements from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, including a January 12, 2026 address warning “traitorous hirelings” and praising pro-regime rallies. In addition to Khamenei.ir, Mehr and Tasnim repeatedly appear as credited sources.

Once on Wikimedia Commons, this content becomes available to Wikipedia articles across hundreds of languages. NPOV queried ChatGPT asking where users might find videos from the 2026 Iran protests. The first suggestion provided is to search for videos on Wikimedia Commons.

Martyrs, Mosques, and the Visual Language of Retaliation

In the Tasnim News report, People’s Reaction to Trump’s Renewed Support for Armed Rioters, the visual language shifts to the iconography of state martyrdom. Filmed during the funeral for security personnel on January 14, 2026, the video is saturated with the imagery of the Islamic Republic flag draped over coffins.

The soundscape is dominated by Shiite mourning chants—and the rhythmic thud of chest-beating. Amidst this sea of green, white, and red flags, the camera focuses on women in full black chadors weeping for “security martyrs.” One woman clutches a portrait of the Supreme Leader and shouts a direct rebuttal to the American president:

“Trump thinks he can break us with his tweets? These are our sons! We will never let the rioters take our streets!”

Central to the state’s January 2026 media strategy was the constant circulation of imagery showing burned-out mosques and charred Qurans. Included in the uploaded repository are clips featuring high-definition footage of the Abuzar Mosque in Tehran (notably the site of a 1981 assassination attempt on Khamenei) showing gutted interiors and smoke-damaged prayer rugs.

Imagery of “rioters” attacking religious sanctities has been used to mobilize the government’s religious base and to justify the “Red Line” policy declared by the Revolutionary Guards on January 10.

Filtering for images on Wikimedia Commons brings up dozens of the images stamped with distinctive red corner brackets and HUD-like overlays alongside organizational branding, also in red, from Tasnim News Agency and Khamenei.ir. On Wikimedia Commons, the files are identified as part of a collection labelled “We will not let go of them.”

Targeting Trump: Direct Threat Imagery

In several of these assets, English-language messaging appears within the same graphic package, including the headline “We will not let go of them.” The phrase is a reference to a January 17 speech given by Khamenei, where he said:

We will not lead the country into war, but we will not let go of the domestic criminals and—more importantly—the international criminals.

Khamenei referred to Trump in that speech as a “criminal” and blamed the American president for the “casualties and damage” caused by the protests.

Several Commons images also contain direct references to Trump. Multiple crowd photographs show demonstrators holding professionally printed posters of Trump with a bloody handprint across his cheek—an apparent threat aimed at the U.S. president. The presence of Tasnim branding on these posters indicates they originated from Iranian state media before being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

999real is not the first account to do mass uploads of Iran state-media-sourced content to Wiki Commons. In 2017, an account named Mbarzi uploaded hundreds such images. Mbarzi—whose User page features a shining gif of an Arabic caligraphy of the Quranic invocation “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”—is the top editor on the entry for IRIB Ofogh, a channel on the Iranian state-controlled TV network Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

Another user who engaged in the same pattern of mass uploading Iran state media content was subsequently banned for operating a number of sock accounts. The user admitted to being Iranian but did not admit to overt government coordination.

This is not isolated misuse of an open platform. It is large-scale ingestion of Iranian state-produced media into Wikimedia Commons—and by extension Wikipedia itself—at the precise moment the government was violently suppressing dissent at home.

While journalists are blocked and internet access is restricted inside Iran, professionally produced content from Khamenei.ir, Tasnim, and Mehr is being uploaded into one of the world’s most trusted knowledge infrastructures, licensed for global reuse and embedded into reference systems relied upon by millions.

Whether these uploads are coordinated by Iranian authorities or carried out by third parties sourcing directly from state outlets remains unclear. What is clear is that sanctioned and state-affiliated media has been systematically introduced into Wikipedia’s media pipeline at scale, shaping how the 2026 unrest appears to the outside world. The material remains live. The uploads continue. And the historical record of the crackdown is being re-constructed—raising urgent questions about platform governance, sanctions exposure, and how open information systems can be leveraged during moments of mass violence.

Editor’s Note: NPOV is bringing influence operations online to light. We rely on reader subscriptions to help us continue this work. Please consider a paid subscription or sharing this investigation.

Share

Wikipedia has imposed a site ban on Iskandar323, permanently removing one of the platform’s most influential editors. A site ban is Wikipedia’s most severe sanction, revoking editing access entirely and ending an editor’s participation across all articles and administrative processes.

NPOV reported earlier this month that Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) had voted unanimously in favor of the ban. At the time, enforcement appeared imminent. Instead, the decision entered a period of uncertainty, as procedural challenges and internal disputes delayed implementation and raised questions about whether the ruling would ultimately be carried out.

Last week, it was.

Iskandar323 had operated for years at the center of a coordinated network of editors —known as the Gang of 40—responsible for shaping over a million edits across articles related to Hamas, Iran, Zionism, and the broader Middle East conflict. The group enforced ideological alignment through edit disputes, administrator channels, and procedural pressure, while marginalizing dissenting sources and softening material unfavorable to Islamist actors.

NPOV’s recent reporting documented Iskandar’s role within this network and the scale of his activity. Earlier investigative work, including a 2024 exposé by NPOV Founder and Chief Investigative Officer Ashley Rindsberg (), first mapped the Gang of 40’s coordinated editing patterns and identified Iskandar as a central operator.

Those findings helped precipitate Wikipedia’s fifth major arbitration case on the Israel–Palestine topic area, known internally as PIA5, which resulted in sweeping topic bans and restrictions across dozens of accounts. Iskandar323 was among the editors sanctioned, receiving a ban from Palestine–Israel articles intended to curb coordinated behavior within the group. Enforcement quickly became contested, with editors pushing the boundaries of what constituted participation in the topic area, resulting in the latest motion to site-ban the editor.

Throughout the final days leading up to his site ban, Iskandar323 remained highly active on Wikipedia. As the Arbitration Committee’s deliberations were ongoing, his contributions included revisions to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran article —a page outside the core Palestine–Israel topic but one he had edited repeatedly in the past and that figures prominently in broader debates about Iran-related coverage.

In our recent coverage on pro-regime coverage, Inside Iran’s Wikipedia War, NPOV reported on editing patterns in Iran-related topics highlighted Iskandar’s broader activity across both active conflict pages and historical subjects:

Iskandar323 operates as a battleground editor focused on active conflicts alongside his edits on past events, editing on the 1988 mass executions as recently as 18 January.

The final action against Iskandar323 did not hinge on a single clear violation. Instead, Arbitrator Guerillero cited a “continuation of PIA [Palestine-Israel Articles] related editing just outside of the topic area,” pointing to a small number of diffs involving historical articles such as Hellenistic Palestine and Yahweh.

ArbCom argued that adjustments to ancient historical language—including edits touching on terms like “Judea” or “Israelite”—constituted proxy engagement in the modern conflict.

This interpretation sparked backlash. Veteran administrator Zero0000, a Gang of 40 leader who was warned as a result of PIA5, criticized the evidentiary standard, writing: “Now we have two claims that personal impressions, not supported by a single diff, are good enough. This case is turning into a real scandal.”

Iskandar323 echoed the concern during the proceedings. “I was quite sure that ‘trust me bro’ was the standard of proof here,” he wrote, “but now people are telling me it isn’t.”

Other editors reviewed the cited diffs (Wikipedia edits) and pushed back forcefully on ArbComs decision. “I find it amazing that the motion is passing 7-5,” Kingsindian wrote in Iskandar’s defense, arguing that ArbCom had been “bamboozled by a blizzard of diffs.”

The Pirate Wires Connection

One of the violations cited in the enforcement log involved Pirate Wires itself. Iskandar was penalized for a comment referencing the “bad math” of a Pirate Wires article—the same investigation that had originally exposed the Gang of 40’s coordinated activity.

Administrators ruled that because Pirate Wires had published “How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative,” any negative reference to the outlet by Iskandar constituted a violation of his topic ban.

“Talking about a PW piece… about editing in the Arab–Israeli topic is a violation,” administrator HouseBlaster wrote. Iskandar argued that he had merely pointed out factual looseness in a media outlet. ArbCom disagreed.

A Partial Reckoning

The ban removes one of the Gang of 40’s most active operators. NPOV’s reporting has shown that the group collectively carried out millions of edits, including the removal of Hamas’s 1988 genocidal charter language from major articles.

Iskandar alone accounted for an unusually large share of activity in the topic area and frequently coordinated with other core figures, including Nishidani, who remained a vocal defender throughout the proceedings.

While the unanimous vote projects institutional unity, the process itself revealed a governance system under strain — reliant on subjective inference, vulnerable to manipulation, and increasingly unable to separate procedural authority from ideological enforcement.

For now, one of the most prolific architects of Wikipedia’s distorted reality has been removed. But the machinery he helped build, and tens of thousands of edits made by him, remain intact.

Share

This investigation is fully available to free subscribers. Paid subscribers can scroll to the end for primary-source documentation, including representative Wikipedia diffs and links.

While Iranian security forces have killed up to 20,000 protestors since December 2025—with the real toll feared much higher—another battle is being fought in the digital realm. As internet blackouts prevent Iranians from documenting their own repression, pro-regime editors are working to control how these events, and Iranian history more broadly, are recorded on Wikipedia.

The dual strategy is deliberate. Kinetic violence silences dissent at home. Digital propaganda shapes the narrative abroad. Together, they form what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “vindication jihad”—a soft war in the information space designed to rewrite reality itself.

An investigation into Wikipedia editing patterns reveals a years-long, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. According to a 2024 Times investigation, entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities. Key details about the regime’s 1988 mass executions—including that victims were women and children murdered extrajudicially, and that current senior officials were involved in the death commissions—were deleted. Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 sentencing to life imprisonment in Sweden for war crimes has disappeared. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania for their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents have been scrubbed.

This matters beyond Wikipedia. When AI systems like ChatGPT are queried about Iranian leaders or events, they often draw from these compromised articles. The propaganda doesn’t stay contained—it flows downstream into the broader information ecosystem that millions rely on daily.

The regime’s reach extends beyond digital propaganda. MI5 and police have disrupted at least 15 plots to kidnap or kill Iranian dissidents in the UK since 2022. When activists like Vahid Beheshti, who has been on hunger strike pressuring the UK government to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, attempted to establish a Wikipedia page, the text was repeatedly removed. His wife told The Times: “We believed it was the Iranian cyber army.”

The Mechanics of Memory Manipulation

The operation exploits Wikipedia’s consensus-based structure through sophisticated tactics. Chief among them is what NPOV calls “abrasive deletion”—making small edits over time that gradually erode entire sections. In one edit, context disappears. Two weeks later, someone comes along and deletes the now-contextless information as irrelevant. When anonymous users are challenged, they justify removals by citing the need for “trimming” or claiming material is “trivial”—language that makes the erosion appear like routine maintenance rather than coordinated manipulation.

Source reliability becomes another front in the battle. On the 2017-2018 Iranian Protests page, for instance, editors—including Mhhossein, a prolific pro-regime editor—deleted entire paragraphs about poor conditions in Iran, their reasoning being that the source, Iran News Wire, a dissident outlet, wasn’t deemed reliable enough. The deletion happened in August 2018, months after the protests had ended in January—a kind of ideological mop-up operation that sanitized the historical record once the world had stopped paying attention.

The playbook includes two main tactics that work in tandem, a tactic that appears when coordinated groups act as voting blocs on article “Talk Pages,” outvoting individual editors trying to add verified facts. Authorship dominance allows single editors or small groups to maintain control over 80-90% of an article’s text, camping on pages and reverting any challenges. Anonymous users carry out numerous edits—citing needs for “trimming” or claiming material is “trivial”—making it impossible to determine their motivation, though the pattern of deletions is clear.

A Wikipedia arbitration case has documented editors citing state media outlets like irdiplomacy.ir as sources. The so-called “Gang of 40”—editors working Israel-Palestine topics from a pro-Iranian regime perspective—controls over 90% of dozens of articles.

The Gatekeepers

Two editors exemplify the scope of pro-Iran editing: Mhhossein and Iskandar323.

Mhhossein functions as a historical gatekeeper. He has edited the Ali Khamenei page 217 times—more than any other user—removing information about Iran’s nuclear program and protests. He is the top contributor on Assassinations of Iranian Nuclear Scientists, 1981 Iranian PM’s office bombing, and Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons.

Mhhossein validated state media sources while deleting information from dissident outlets—including the Iran News Wire deletions from the 2017-2018 protests page months after the events themselves had ended. In total: 2,228 pages edited over 11,000 times.

Iskandar323 operates as a battleground editor focused on active conflicts alongside his edits on past events, editing on the 1988 mass executions as recently as 18 January. Last week, we reported on Wikipedia’s ongoing procedure to site ban him—one of the platform’s most severe punishments—following years of systematic narrative manipulation. Three days after the October 7 atrocities, Iskandar removed thousands of words about human rights abuses, replacing them with a single paragraph. He deleted information about Jewish immigration to Israel, claiming Western expulsion was only relevant to “Jewish History.” He authored 71% of the article on Fascism in the United States, adding multiple images linking American officials to fascist politicians. His reach: 16,000 pages across more than 49,000 edits over more than 12 years.

The Live Battleground

Since protests erupted in December 2025, Wikipedia’s 2025-2026 Iranian Protests page has drawn from over 400 sources. Authorship remains relatively distributed—no single editor controls more than 8% (as of time of writing).

But the Talk Page reveals the pressure campaign in real-time. Some argue that calling the Iranian government a “regime” violates neutrality, despite most sources using that term. One editor claims Reza Pahlavi, a prominent opposition figure, shouldn’t be mentioned as notable.

User SwedishDutch disputed reported casualty figures, claiming that two sources that have provided critical coverage of the regime—Sunday Times and Iran International—were unreliable. The SwedishDutch account had been created just two hours previously and has since been deleted.

For now, the page remains well-sourced. But the pattern established in previous cases is clear: once protests fade from headlines—once internet blackouts prevent real-time documentation and bodies are quietly buried—coordinated editors move in to reshape the historical record.

This is what authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026. There’s violence in the streets to silence dissent in real time. Then come the internet blackouts, preventing real-time documentation and cutting off the flow of evidence to the outside world. And once the immediate crisis fades from international attention—once bodies are quietly buried and the news cycle moves on—the propaganda operation moves in to systematically rewrite what happened. The Islamic Republic isn’t just killing protesters. It’s erasing the evidence that they existed at all.

Wikipedia’s open editing model was designed to democratize knowledge. On Iran-related topics, it has become another battlefield where the most persistent and coordinated voices can overwrite truth. The encyclopedia that millions trust has become, in these corners, an extension of the regime’s propaganda apparatus.

The edit histories are public. The question is what Wikipedia—and the platforms that rely on it—will do about it.

Share

What follows is primary-source documentation underlying this reporting.

Read more

One of the least examined forces shaping global political understanding is neither a government nor a media outlet, but Wikipedia. On issues of war, nationalism, and historical legitimacy, a small number of entrenched editors exercise disproportionate control over how events are framed for hundreds of millions of readers.

One such network, the Gang of 40, has built one of the most powerful narrative operations online. The group has weaponized Wikipedia’s sourcing rules and enforcement processes to reshape coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Among its most prominent figures is Iskandar323. This week, ArbCom—Wikipedia’s highest authority—voted in a unanimous decision to site ban the user, handing down one of the most severe punishments on the site. While the vote is clear, the arbitration proceeding itself has not yet formally closed.

ArbCom did not limit its action to a site ban. It also proposed an indefinite topic ban barring Iskandar323 from:

“any edit related to Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Antisemitism, Palestine, Palestinians, or anything else that is related to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”

“Enough is enough,” wrote Aoidh, an ArbCom member and one of Wikipedia’s most powerful administrators. “When you’ve been warned, topic banned, blocked for topic ban violations, let off with time served then topic banned again by Arbcom, warned, blocked, and continue to violate your topic ban another warning or broadened topic ban isn’t going to fix things,” ScottishFinnishRadish, another influential arbitrator, weighed in.

The Pattern

Iskandar323’s edits follow a consistent logic. Jewish history, identity, and antisemitism are treated as provisional—open to dispute and, in many cases, illegitimate. He renames terms, qualifies claims, excises key facts, and repeatedly reopens settled questions.

Islamist movements—notably Hamas—receive opposite treatment. Edits involving Hamas systematically remove facts that complicate the preferred narrative, soften terminology that assigns moral responsibility, and add caveats that deflect blame from designated terror organizations.

Iran receives even more sustained attention. Across multiple articles, Iskandar323 works to reclassify state violence, downgrade legal characterizations, and strip language that assigns responsibility to Iranian institutions.

Iranian State Violence

Iskandar323’s most direct interventions appear in articles documenting Iranian atrocities. He repeatedly downgrades crimes with established legal definitions into narrow procedural descriptions.

In July 2023, he intervened extensively in the article on the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners, reversing language that described the killings as extrajudicial. He removed terminology framing them as unlawful acts carried out outside legitimate judicial process, recasting them instead as actions “carried out by the judiciary.” He argued explicitly that this classification was “antithetical” to calling them extrajudicial—despite the fact that victims were executed without due process and in violation of international law, as the article’s own sources document.

In 2024, a Wikipedia user filed a case against Iskandar323 and another editor alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.”

Earlier that year, The Times reported that Wikipedia entries had been altered to downgrade Iranian human rights atrocities, “raising concerns that agents or supporters are using the site to manipulate publicly available information about the hostile regime.” Iskandar323 was not named in that report.

Islamic Terrorism and Hamas

On Islamist terrorism, Iskandar323’s edits shift focus away from perpetrators and toward contesting the category itself. In a May 2023 revision to the “Islamic terrorism” article, Iskandar removed what he labeled “opinion pieces” and restructured the lead around the claim that “Islamic terrorism” is a disputed term that is politically “damaging”—steering readers into a semantic debate before they encounter substance. That same month, he deleted a claim that some Islamist terrorism has a “transnational character.”

His treatment of Hamas is particularly revealing. Across multiple edits, he removed references to the 1988 Hamas charter’s antisemitic and genocidal language, arguing it was outdated or “anachronistic”—even when other editors restored the material with sourcing. He stripped this context repeatedly across different articles, despite its continued relevance in reliable secondary sources and objections from other contributors.

In a particularly noteworthy case, Iskandar edited the article “Allegations of genocide in the October 7 attacks”—an article he lobbied to have deleted—to describe Hamas terrorism as “resistance against Israel.”

Israel and Jews have not been Iskandar’s sole targets. In one representative case, he excised an entire section from the article, “Persecution of Copts,” removing a documented list of persecutions that Coptic Christians faced at the hands of Egyptian Muslims.

Jewish Identity and Antisemitism

Iskandar323’s interventions against Jewish identity operate at the structural level that includes article titles, leads, and narrative emphasis.

In June 2023, Iskandar folded the contents of the article “Hellenistic Judea” to a new article, created by him, called “Hellenistic Palestine.” This imposed a nomenclature (“Palestine”) from a later period onto the Judean period. Iskandar justified the change as a shift to a “common name,” then rewrote the lead to describe the subject as “the history of Palestine (region) or Judea”—relegating Judea to secondary, optional status rather than the historical core. The change was locked in procedurally by moving associated talk pages and preserving redirects, consolidating discussion under the new framing.

The same approach appears in modern contexts. In edits to “Antisemitism in the British Labour Party,” Iskandar323 removed or diluted language foregrounding antisemitism as a defining problem. He rebalanced the article toward procedural disputes, internal party dynamics, and contested interpretations—shifting focus away from the substance of antisemitic conduct itself.

Iskandar323’s site ban marks a rare moment of institutional accountability on Wikipedia. But the mechanisms that enabled years of systematic narrative manipulation remain intact. The editing patterns documented here are not the work of a lone actor but reflect a broader infrastructure of influence that operates largely invisible to the platform’s hundreds of millions of users.

Wikipedia’s power lies in its perceived neutrality. When that neutrality is systematically compromised on the most contested geopolitical issues of our time, the consequences extend far beyond any single article or edit war.

NPOV investigates information influence and narrative manipulation across major digital platforms. This reporting is part of an ongoing examination of coordinated editing networks on Wikipedia and their impact on coverage of geopolitically sensitive subjects.If you found this reporting useful, consider sharing it

What follows is primary-source documentation underlying this reporting.

Read more

“Where did this year go?” We’ve all had that feeling. Some of us have it every year. In NPOV’s case, it’s hard to believe that we only launched three months ago. Since then, we’ve taken a deep dive into Wikipedia, bringing to light a very different picture about the world’s most influential information repository than the feel-good version we’ve heard about from the media for 20 years.

Wikipedia has told a compelling story about neutral, crowdsourced information—a virtual panacea to the timeless human conundrum concerning truth and falsehood. The problem is the story itself glosses over reality: the site is replete with narrative hijacking, edit gangs, information cartels, and pervasive bias.

The grittier, grainier story we’ve started to tell over these months is about how Wikipedia actually works. We’re doing it case by case, wherever we find bias, ideological editing, or attack campaigns.

We’ve traced how a small handful of editors turned the democratically elected president of the US into an “authoritarian”—a term they refuse to invoke when it comes to actual authoritarians, like the Supreme Leader of Iran.

We’ve shown how Wikipedia editors revised the truth about a group of Jewish Australians who were victims of a mass doxxing event in 2024—part of a cadence of digital attacks against the country’s Jewish community that culminated in the Bondi Beach massacre this month.

We’ve shown how journalist Andy Ngo was defamed, as ideological combatants aligned with his literal, physical attackers concretized unsourced, unsubstantiated allegations that he’s a “far-right influencer” into so-called fact.

We’ve also shown how none of this is new: early in the site’s lifecycle, one of America’s most prestigious journalists, John Seigenthaler, was defamed when an anonymous editor alleged that he played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy (the latter of whom was a personal friend of Seigenthaler’s).

We’ve reported on the “pandemonium” that erupted when Jimmy Wales decided to step into the Talk page of the grossly biased “Gaza genocide” entry, which earned Wales a referral to Wiki-court.

And we’ve shown how Wikimedia Foundation executives have grown their salaries at a staggering rate—756% over a two-decade period, to be exact (compared with a 66% national average in the same timeframe).

We’ve produced dozens of videos on X and Instagram. And we created more than one news cycle on social media, including with a post on X about Wikipedia’s attempt to delete the entry on the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska—a post that eventually racked up 103,000 likes and 3.4 million views—and why Wikipedia was working so hard to smear Charlie Kirk.

We’re exceedingly proud of our work, as well as the success we’ve had in bringing the issue of the Wikipedia Crisis to the forefront of the national (and international) conversation. On a personal level, I was honored as a recipient of the 2025 DAO Prize for the work I did on Wikipedia at .

But by far our greatest achievement is that we’ve planted the seeds for a community. Our platform isn’t big (yet), but it’s growing fast.

People—like you—who have subscribed and followed NPOV have learned to cast a critical eye on the online information that shapes all of our lives. You might have acted on your intuition that something isn’t right. Or you might have knowledge of specific instances of where things are going wrong. You might simply be curious to learn more.

Either way, it’s this early community that will serve as the foundation for the project we’re building. For this, I’m deeply grateful to you.

Looking ahead, we have a lot more planned. One of our major areas of focus will be unpacking the foreign influence on Wikipedia, from state actors like China to foreign terror organizations like Hamas, to far-left edit gangs run out of Australia. The problem runs very deep.

We look forward to shining a light into all these informational crevices—and finding what’s there. While we’ll continue to focus on Wikipedia, we will begin to diversify and grow our coverage to include other platforms, which are just as susceptible to the same forces.

Wishing you a Happy New Year.

—Ashley Rindsberg

Founder & Chief Investigative Officer, NPOV

The massacre of Jews in Bondi Beach will forever change Jewish life in Australia. The extent of the shooting, the seeming helplessness of law enforcement present at the scene for over 10 minutes, the deliberate, clinical targeting by the gunmen: almost no framework of normal communal life can withstand such an onslaught.

The shock of events often compels us to zoom in, to become hyper-focused on the particulars of the present case. But one of the many gruesome lessons history teaches about the systematic targeting of Jews is that the violence is almost always a manifestation of carefully laid ideology. In this case, that ideology hasn’t just been out in the open—but, brick by brick, is busy building its ideological altar, including on the world’s biggest knowledge platform: Wikipedia.

Many still think of Wikipedia as a crowdsourced online encyclopedia rooted in the principle of neutrality. It’s a compelling story, but it omits the fundamental dynamic at work on the site—which is that it is a critical information layer in virtually every ideological or geopolitical battle playing out online. The unfolding global attack on Jewish communities is no exception as Wikipedia articles increasingly serve as a legitimizing reference point for narratives that cast Jewish collective life as an inherently legitimate target for “resistance”—of both the information and kinetic variety.

This September, I reported for Tablet Magazine that a number of leaders of the Gang of 40—an edit cartel that works to delegitimize Israel, sever ties between Israel and the Jewish people, and whitewash the activities of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah—had successfully pulled off its most audacious and impactful operation. Leaders of this group inserted language into the first sentence of the lead of the “Zionism” article, the most important resource online defining Zionism to the world. This group then froze the lead section with a “moratorium,” an unprecedented move in this context, so their ideological edit to the lead could not be altered.

Two of the most important actors in this operation—Nishidani and Zero0000—are Australian academics. Another account, TarnishedPath, worked to implement the moratorium, pushing to extend its initially proposed three-month duration to a full year—the length of time the six ringleaders of the Gang of 40 would be banned before the possibility of an appeal. The ban, resulting from an investigation triggered by my October 2024 report on the Gang of 40 in would be handed down by Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia’s equivalent of a High Court, just weeks after the moratorium was put in place.

TarnishedPath, who was not part of the internal Wikipedia investigation into the Gang of 40, is a highly experienced and intensely active editor. He has appeared in the effort to smear journalist Andy Ngo () as a “far-right influencer.” The user has led an attack campaign against J.K. Rowling, slapping a neutrality dispute box on her entry in June in an attempt to brand the author as “anti-trans.” He fully controls the entry on independent journalist Avi Yemini, contributing nearly two-thirds of its content, and he has been instrumental in enforcing orthodoxies concerning COVID-19 lab leak theory—among many other similar ideological campaigns waged by him.

But TarnishedPath, who is very likely Australian, has also positioned himself as a gatekeeper to a critical digital attack on Australia’s beset Jewish community.

Last year, hundreds of Australian Jews were victims of a coordinated doxxing campaign, known as Zio600 or Z600. The episode began after New York Times reporter Natasha Frost leaked material from a private WhatsApp group of Jewish creatives and academics. A cadre of anti-Israel activists “enriched” the dataset, adding photos, names of members’ spouses and children, which was made publicly available. Several victims filed police reports, and the incident sparked a national debate over the need for stronger protections against doxxing.

Share

In the subsequent weeks and months, an effort was launched to revise the history of the Z600 doxxing. The locus of this effort is Wikipedia, where two editors, TarnishedPath and Damien Linnane, gained control of the Wikipedia entry, “2024 J.E.W.I.S.H. creatives and academics doxxing incident.” Working closely in tandem, TarnishedPath and Damien Linnane succeeded in inverting the moral dynamic of the events, turning the Jewish victims of the doxxing into members of a “conspiracy” who were justly targeted.

This effort began early in the lifecycle of the entry, which was created on January 18. Three days later, Linnane initiated the revisionist attack, inserting into the entry’s lead a key assertion: “members in the [J.E.W.I.S.H.] group discussed ways to jeopardise the employment of pro-Palestinian activists.”

To substantiate this claim, Linnane cited a single source—an opinion column by Bernard Keane, the political editor of news site Crikey who posts anti-Israel content on social media at near-obsessive levels. Linnane furthered the attack with another key edit the same day, altering a sentence about the doxxing that read:

The ostensible justification for the leak was a desire to expose Australian Zionists, who the leakers contended were conspiring in the group chat against pro-Palestinian public figures.

Importantly, this phrase was not written in Wikivoice—the site’s own perspective used to assert plain, unobjectionable facts (e.g. “The sky is blue”) but expressed the viewpoint of a certain group, in this case the “leakers.” Linnane, however, would remedy that, replacing the sentence with a definitive assertion, this time very much in Wikivoice:

The justification for the leak was a desire to expose Australian Zionists, after a minority of the members of the group conspired in the group chat against pro-Palestinian public figures…

Once again, the source for this claim was the same opinion columnist—the same column—mentioned above.

A day later, Linnane advanced the narrative by removing “antisemitic” from the description of the event as a “mass antisemitic doxing.” But Linnane went further, adding that “some defended it as a form of whistleblowing.”

The source Linnane used to support this claim was an oped in The Conversation, a UK-based platform for academics to share opinion and commentary. The author of that column is a PhD student in sociology, whose “Disclosure Statement” states that he “signed a statement of solidarity with Palestine from academics in Australian universities.”

According to Wikipedia’s policy on Reliable Sources, material published by The Conversation is to be viewed under the site’s WP:RSOPINION policy, which holds that “Some sources may be considered reliable for statements as to their author’s opinion, but not for statements asserted as fact.” In this case, the The Conversation oped was used not to show the author’s opinion, but to support the assertion of a fact. The “some” of Linnane’s inserted phrase was actually just one pro-Palestinian academic activist.

Subscribe now

Over the subsequent weeks, Linnane and TarnishedPath continued to build this narrative. In February, TarnishedPath removed a number of media citations from the article’s lead. A look at those references reveals that they advanced a point of view that discounted the one he and Linnane were building through their edist.

One of these excised references, published in Ynet, is titled, “Doxing, arson, and graffiti: Can Australia combat the surge in antisemitism?” Another, by Seth Mandel in Commentary Magazine, is titled “Casting out Australia’s Jews,” and described “Jew-baiting chaos that seemed completely uncharacteristic of a country known for its relaxed vibes.” A third reference stripped out by TarnishedPath wrote that “every single member [of the list] was scapegoated — and photos and employment details of 200 were shared on social media so they could be further targeted — because of an unshakeable belief that groups of Jews discussing their concerns amounts to an evil conspiracy.”

Edit by edit, the doxxing was turned on its head. The mass antisemitic doxxing of Australian Jews was diligently reframed as a mere “leak.” That leak soon became a case of whistleblowing. Jews were not “victims” of the attacks but, as one subtle edit has it, “subjects” of the events. Jews who were targeted with abuse, even death threats, were transformed from victims into conspirators.

Jewish members of the group were subject to bans and cancellations, including some who were blacklisted from galleries and theaters.

Talia Emsalem, a Jewish influencer in Sydney who was a member of the doxxed group, says the online targeting of Jews is a mirror to the physical violence. “It’s like the digital pogrom that preceded the physical one,” Emsalem says. “Anti-zionism is the excuse everyone gets to hold onto for not being antisemitic because they can go to the Wikipedia page about Zionism and justify that it’s a hate movement, or whatever they’ve decided it is. Every part of our history, our identity, our self-determination is being re-written.”

What happened at Bondi did not begin with the gunmen—and it won’t end with them either. In footnotes and leads, “neutral” sentences have quietly trained readers to see Jewish collective life as sinister and Jewish self-definition as extremist—even, or especially, in that community’s own victimhood.

This is the danger of Wikipedia’s capture. It does not shout: it normalizes. It teaches millions of readers—and the super-intelligent machines that now learn from them—that Jews are the problem, that those who dox them are “whistleblowers,” and that those who are attacked somehow had it coming.

Editor’s Note: NPOV launched a little more than eight weeks ago. And while we’re off to an incredible start, we need your help. Please subscribe if you haven’t. But, just as importantly, I’d ask you to send this article to one or two friends. This is critical in our mission to raise awareness about the Wikipedia Crisis.

Subscribe now

Over the past few years, Reddit has become one of the most influential upstream sources of training data for the world’s most widely used AI systems. What gets upvoted on Reddit today becomes the answer AI provides tomorrow. The “front page of the internet,” as Paul Graham famously called the site, has become the backdoor to AI.

A recent Semrush study examined AI search results from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, analyzing more than 200,000 prompts and identifying hundreds of thousands of Reddit links surfaced in those answers. Reddit ranked among the top-cited domains across all systems—often ahead of news sites and Wikipedia. Many of the cited posts had very low engagement, sometimes fewer than 20 upvotes. Reddit trumpeted its AI primacy in a recent shareholder letter where the company boasted that “Reddit is the #1 most cited domain for AI across all models.”

Subscribe now

While the Semrush study doesn’t track intent or attribute manipulation, it does shows something how even small or niche activity on Reddit can quietly shape what AI systems present as trusted information. For Reddit this is great—it makes its content exponentially more valuable. But for the integrity of the information ecosystem it’s a major vulnerability, perhaps one of the greatest online today.

Over the past year, I’ve documented two large-scale manipulation campaigns on Reddit. What I found illustrates how this vulnerability plays out in the wild. (I did both stories for .)

The first investigation was in February, when I exposed a propaganda network linked to U.S.-designated terror organizations that have infiltrated Reddit at scale. At the center of this network is r/Palestine, a 311,000-member subreddit tied to a Discord server that functions as command-and-control for the network. There, moderators administer “ideological purity tests” and coordinate posting, upvoting, and downvoting across more than 110 affiliated subreddits—including some of the largest non-political communities on the platform like r/Documentaries (20 million members), r/PublicFreakout (4.7 million), and r/therewasanattempt (7.2 million).

A core activity of the network is to launder translated content from Telegram channels operated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other designated terror groups. Members of the network have reposted a translated Hamas Al-Qassam Brigades battlefield messages and have pulled directly from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, celebrating attacks on “the Zionist enemy.” Moderators in the network also shared Houthi propaganda (“Yemeni air defenses enjoy grilling” U.S. drones) and a Hamas “resistance” explainer ending with “Together, we are united until liberation.” Even rallies organized by Samidoun—a U.S.-designated terror-linked entity—were promoted by the network as ordinary activism.

Reddit management completed a six-week internal review that denied my reporting, both in its main thrust and in its details. The company declared it had found “only four pieces” of terror-supporting content. In a subsequent review after the investigation, I was able to easily identify over four dozen pieces of terror propaganda still active on the site—some of which was called out in the original report but, nonetheless, went un-actioned by Reddit.

In April, I chronicled what appeared to be a mass influence campaign targeting Elon Musk, specifically aimed at banning all links to X across major sports subreddits. Within minutes of each other, massive mainstream sports communities—particularly UK football—began posting near-identical proposals to ban links from the Musk-owned social media platform. These posts instantly surged to the top of their communities. In r/liverpoolfc (the community dedicated to the Liverpool Premier League club), the X-ban proposal became the most upvoted post in the subreddit’s history, surpassing the celebration of Liverpool’s first Premier League title in 30 years by thousands of upvotes. As I noted:

The response to the post in r/LiverpoolFC… dwarfed it. With 40,000 upvotes, it became the subreddit’s most popular post of all time. For context, the second most popular post of all time… celebrated Liverpool’s championship win of the British Premier League in 2020 — its first such win in 30 years — and received 8,000 fewer upvotes.

The campaign spread from subreddits dedicated to English Premier League teams to major U.S. sports communities—including fans of the New Orleans Saints, Pittsburgh Steelers, Boston Celtic, and Seattle Mariners—where X-ban posts likewise surged to the very top of each subreddit’s all-time most-upvoted list. It jumped beyond sports entirely into state- and city-focused subreddits from Minnesota to Hawaii, Los Angeles to Seattle, national communities in Ireland, Finland, and South Africa, as well as niche spaces like r/Cybersecurity, r/Autism, and r/WhitePeopleTwitter.

There was no smoking gun. No one told me, “Yes, this is a coordinated campaign.” But as I began asking users who were among the first to post proposals to ban X links—some of whom had not posted for years, and some had not posted ever into the respective communities before making their X ban proposals—I was blocked by a number of these users.

The campaign was a massive success, with major media headlines rolling out for days. The target wasn’t just X, but Musk himself, who was targeted by another overlapping campaign called Tesla Takedown, basecamped on Bluesky.

On Reddit, both the r/Palestine and X ban link campaigns were able to slot neatly into the site’s culture, which affords them what you might call plausible organicity: given the cultural dynamics on Reddit, these left-coded campaigns could possibly be organic.

Subscribe now

In both cases—the r/Palestine network and X bank link campaign—what makes the Reddit dynamic far more dangerous than a political flash mob is what happens after the manipulation. Unlike Facebook or X, Reddit content isn’t just influencing other users, but is directly shaping the behavior of artificial intelligence systems that millions rely on.

As I reported earlier this year, the r/Palestine network was likely never intended to work in isolation. It targets subreddits that LLMs depend on: large, high-engagement communities whose content is routinely ingested into models like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. Because Reddit’s upvote system functions as a machine-readable trust signal, a brigaded post (one that pulls in numerous ideologically aligned users to achieve an outcome) doesn’t just win a local information fight but serves as what AI models read as “high-quality human consensus” in the eyes of downstream systems.

This is exactly how propaganda transitions from coordinated influence campaign to model-baked “truth.” The narrative starts on Reddit and is upvoted into credibility by the given influence network. Then, the narrative reappears when a user asks a chatbot a seemingly neutral question, for example, “What’s happening in Gaza?”, “Can I trust X.com?”, “Who is responsible for the war?” The user receives the answer engineered upstream by a small and unaccountable group.

In this way, AI chatbots denature highly charged information, removing any trace of the edit warring (Wikipedia) or brigading (Reddit) that have shaped the final representation of that information. Like the Wizard of Oz, behind the curtain there’s a lot of lever pulling, but in front of the curtain all users get to see is an authoritative informational “face.”

What Reddit Really Matters

Reddit is one of the critical choke points where that kind of information laundering happens. It is one of only two platforms—the other being Wikipedia—that enjoys what we might call structural primacy in AI training pipelines. But unlike Wikipedia, which at least aspires to putting on a kabuki show of editorial governance, Reddit’s editorial power rests in the hands of volunteer moderators, who are often ideologically aligned with each other, face no disclosure or accountability requirements, and can act with near-total operational anonymity.

That makes Reddit uniquely susceptible to counterfeit consensus. Two or three active moderators can decide what posts are allowed in a community of millions. Each mod is like a rural county judge—their authority is limited by jurisdiction but, within that narrow band, they wield considerable power.

In a world in which Reddit is more or less a walled garden—i.e. an ordinary social media platform—that might not be a big deal. But in a world in which its a headwater feeding every other garden, it’s a major risk.

Subscribe now