Wikipedia’s War on Andy Ngo

The years-long effort to defame the journalist exposing Antifa

Across Portland and other American cities, Antifa’s black-clad cadres are once again marching under umbrellas, smashing windows, lighting fires, and clashing with police. The scenes recall the chaos of 2020—when political violence on the American left briefly dominated headlines before the country looked away.

No journalist has documented that movement more closely than Andy Ngo (Andy Ngo). For nearly a decade, Ngo has filmed and reported on Antifa protests from the front lines, exposing the group’s tactics, ideology, and its willingness to use violence.

Andy’s reporting made him a target. In 2019, he was brutally attacked while covering a Portland rally—an assault that left him with a traumatic brain injury and turned him into a symbol of the movement’s intolerance for scrutiny. But as horrific as that physical attack was, the real assault came afterward.

“There was a very quick, coordinated effort by media, who wrote all these hit pieces about me with spurious claims and horrific accusations,” Ngo told NPOV in a sit-down interview.

Those stories, written by antagonistic outlets and activist writers, metastasized across the web. But they were brought together in Andy’s Wikipedia entry, which turned even the most scurrilous claims by the most motivated writers into seemingly neutral “fact.”

“These hit pieces were used as citations for my Wikipedia,” Ngo said. “It’s distressing that all these people are working under aliases. Because they are highly biased, partisan individuals.”

The Attack

The all-important lead section of Ngo’s Wikipedia entry frames everything that comes after by imposing a biased lens. The very first sentence of the entry calls Ngo not a journalist but a “right-wing social media influencer.”

For comparison, Elon Musk’s recently released Grokipedia takes a very different view of Andy. The first line of the Grokipedia entry reads:

Andy Ngo is an American independent journalist and author known for his on-the-ground documentation of Antifa activities and associated political violence, particularly during protests in Portland, Oregon from 2017 onward…

The rest of the Grokipedia entry is similarly straightforward, and lacks the adversarial bias of the Wikipedia entry.

Screenshot of the “Andy Ngo” entry from Grokipedia.com

The Wikipedia entry, on the other hand, is almost uniformly negative in its framing, omissions, language, and citations. For example, in the second paragraph of the entry claims:

Ngo’s coverage of antifa and Muslims has been controversial, and the accuracy and credibility of his reporting have been disputed by journalists. He has been accused of sharing misleading or selective material, and has been described as a provocateur. [Emphasis added.]

As we’ll see, that last phrasing—asserting that Ngo ”has been described as a provocateur”—is particularly instructive since the unnamed people who describe Ngo in this way are the adversarial editors who wrote the entry.

Riot Porn & The Distortions of Joan Donovan

The entry leans heavily on quotes from Joan Donovan (former Harvard Shorenstein Center researcher, prominent online-misinformation activist) to characterize Ngo’s reporting as deceptive, citing an article by her that calls Ngo’s work “riot porn.”

The description of Donovan as “Harvard University faculty member” does a lot of the heavy lifting, lending Donovan’s pronouncement on Ngo’s work institutional gravitas. This is one of Wikipedia’s tells, however, where adversarial editors tip their hand to reveal the agenda at work.

Despite Wikipedia’s hair-splitting on even the most banal claims, in this instance it appears that no one caught a key fact here: Donovan is not—and never was—Harvard faculty.

This is not information that’s difficult to uncover. When Donovan left the university, Harvard officials made clear that at no point was Donovan ever faculty. Harvard made this statement at the time:

Joan Donovan was hired as a staff member (not a faculty member) to manage a media manipulation project

This appears in the Washington Post, the greenest of green-coded news outlets on Wikipedia’s much-scrutinized “Reliable Sources” list. Somehow, this key fact did not make its way into the article on Ngo.

But even more important is the context of Harvard’s statement. In 2020, Donovan was told her disinformation project at Harvard would be wound down. According to a lengthy article in Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Distortions of Joan Donovan,” Donovan began accusing the university of kowtowing to Meta, alleging that the company had unduly pressured Harvard to fire Donovan on account of her criticism of Facebook. Donovan claimed—without evidence—that, in return for firing her, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (the foundation of Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan) gave the university $500 million.

It takes just a little bit of digging to understand that Harvard separates the finances of its various schools as part of its “every tub on its own bottom” policy. In this case, none of the money went to the Kennedy School of Government, where Donovan had been employed. As the Chronicle article notes, “Donovan doesn’t offer a theory for how [the donation] might have affected her status [at the Kennedy School].”

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a generally reserved, even staid publication, so the subtitle of the article on Donovan—”Is a world-famous misinformation expert spreading misinformation?”—gives an indication of just how far down the rabbit hole things went. Despite this, neither the article on Andy Ngo nor the one one Donovan makes any mention of this episode.

The problem is that Wikipedia is often used in exactly this way: a strategic backdoor into our information ecosystem. While the attack surface remains highly visible, the mechanisms of the attack stay hidden.

For example, ask ChatGPT about criticisms of Ngo and one of the main responses you get is that, according to Joan Donovan, Ngo has produced “riot porn.” What you don’t get is any of the countervailing context, including what appears to be Donovan’s own peculiar relationship with the truth.

Sentiment Skew

Just as importantly, positive descriptions of Ngo’s work (e.g., coverage in The Wall Street Journal or his book Unmasked) are followed by rebuttals drawn from The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and Vice, outlets that have previously published overtly hostile pieces about him.

Roughly one-quarter of the article is dedicated to “Criticism and controversy,” while sections on his career, education, and publications are a fraction of that length. Phrases such as “has been accused of sharing misleading or selective material” (an allegation made in the entry’s lead) appear repeatedly without identifying who made the accusation, creating the impression of broad consensus.

Ngo himself is rarely quoted, even where interviews or first-person accounts are available, depriving readers of his own explanations for contested events.

I noticed that certain biased phrases used against me in the Wikipedia entry were very often repeated in articles that smeared me.

The cycle feeds on itself: bad-faith journalists read Wikipedia, echo its wording, and then their work gets cited back on Wikipedia. In Wikipedia terminology, this is a phenomenon know as “citeogenesis.”

“Any time I read hit pieces about me, I could tell the author wasn’t familiar with my work or my book,” Ngo said. “What they did read was Wikipedia.”

When I asked whether he saw his Wikipedia page as a kind of opposition-research file, he didn’t hesitate: “It’s a shit dossier.”

This is how “idea laundering,” as Ngo puts it, really works.

“People’s opinions from various comments or essays are used as citations. Some random left-wing person’s opinion of me is cited as evidence of something. That was quite surprising to me — but that’s one way ideas get laundered on Wikipedia.”

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Unpacking the Attack

A review of the Andy Ngo talk pages shows two usernames shaping nearly every line: Noteduck and Cedar777. Between them, they expanded the article’s Criticism section until it dominated the page, framing Ngo as a “provocateur” and resisting every effort to describe him as a journalist — even after a formal consensus required it.

In one exchange, Noteduck argued that calling Ngo a “provocateur” would be “perfectly acceptable” despite the rule to identify him as a journalist. They repeatedly added and defended that language, prompting arbitration complaints for edit warring.

Noteduck was even awarded a barnstar—an informal badge of honor editors give each other—“in recognition of your efforts to summarize significant viewpoints covered by reliable sources at Andy Ngo.” The user who gave Noteduck the award was none other than Cedar777, whose broader record shows heavy editing on politically charged pages — Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Kyle Rittenhouse, Capitol Hill Occupied Protest — suggesting a consistent ideological focus.

The barnstar award from Cedar777 to Noteduck.

At least for Noteduck, the attack seems to fit a pattern as the user also went after another prominent journalist, Douglas Murray (Douglas Murray), adding a lengthy section on what the user describes as Murray’s “far-right views.”

Together, Noteduck and Cedar777 locked the narrative. Editors such as User:Springee who tried to restore balance were overridden or ignored. By early 2021, their framing—provocateur, far-right, controversial figure—had become Wikipedia’s official version of Andy Ngo.

In 2021, Noteduck and Cedar777 staged an intense attack against Ngo, focusing specifically on trying to characterize him as unreliable. In one thread, Cedar777 cited Noteduck’s “extensive” list of news outlets claiming Ngo was unreliable:

There is a wealth of sourcing that supports the fact that Ngo’s name is frequently mentioned in terms that express concerns regarding his credibility. Many qualified journalists have addressed this broader issue. Noteduck’s list is extensive and the text should remain as is. Cedar777 (talk) 06:23, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

One key source Cedar777 and Noteduck relied on when pushing this claim is a 2019 article in Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) about Newsweek magazine, which makes precisely one mention of Ngo, calling him a “discredited provocateur.” The article does not cite a single source for this bold claim, nor does it make any argument in its favor.

That, on its own, is very problematic. But the bigger issue is that the author of the article, Daniel Tovrov, was (according to his own LinkedIn) at that time a full-time employee of telecommunications giant, Verizon, which owns numerous news outlets, including Yahoo and TechCrunch. This conflict-of-interest was not disclosed.

Meanwhile, the few editors trying to hold the line on neutrality were out-maneuvered. Springee, one of the longest-serving participants, objected that “the closing has an issue in that it doesn’t say some other noun is more prominent than journalist,” noting that the majority of reliable sources still used that label.

But the debate was repeatedly closed by TarnishedPath, an editor later identified in other reporting as a key figure in the “Gang of 40” network that commandeered Wikipedia’s Israel–Palestine topic area.

In previous reporting, I’ve shown how as few as two editors working in coordination can commandeer, create, or tear down not just an article, but important segments of entire topic areas. This is precisely the modus operandi of the “Gang of 40” editors that ijacked the Palestine Israel topic area, working in small clusters of two or three editors as they made 1 million edits to around 10,000 articles in the space.

As I reported for Tablet Magazine, TarnishedPath led the charge to have the Zionism article locked through a largely invented moratorium mechanism. In 2023, TarnishedPath pushed for all references to Ngo’s role as a “journalist” be removed from the entire entry:

”Given that Ngo is no longer referred to as a journalist in the first sentence of the lede, it’s no longer appropriate to refer to him as a journalist in the short description. This is all the more so true as journalism is not what brought him to notability in the first place.” - October 13, 2023

The Admin Professor

Earlier in the ongoing saga that played out in 18 archive pages of the Talk section of Ngo’s article, a powerful admin stepped in to set the tone on the “debate.” In November 2020, an administrator named Drmies weighed in, writing:

“The man is not a journalist. Haha, publishing videos on Twitter, that’s not journalism. If that’s the case, I need a Pulitzer, because I put my videos on Instagram AND Facebook.” — Drmies (talk) 01:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Drmies isn’t just another editor. He’s one of Wikipedia’s most powerful administrators and, by his own admission, an English professor whose academic work is recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. His presence on the Ngo talk page—not as a neutral arbiter but as a participant dismissing Ngo’s profession outright—exemplifies how academic and ideological authority now merge on the site. When administrators take sides, consensus becomes enforcement.

I first learned the name Drmies while reporting my earlier piece, “How Wikipedia Launders Regime Propaganda,” for Pirate Wires. At the time I thought I was simply tracing the site’s internal politics. I was wrong. What I found was one of the most powerful administrators in the English-language encyclopedia—and an emblem of Wikipedia’s quiet fusion with academia.

Drmies is the handle of Michel Aaij, an English professor at Auburn University Montgomery who publicly acknowledges the connection between his real life identity and his Wikipedia username on his own Wikidata page. In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation’s “Diff” blog announced that Aaij had received university tenure partly on the basis of his Wikipedia work—an extraordinary admission of how the site and academia feed each other.

With more than 400,000 edits, Drmies ranks within the top 0.01 percent of all editors by volume. In stark contrast to Wikipedia’s narrative about a crowdsourced encyclopedia fed by tens or even hundreds of thousands of editors, the reality is that a tiny, elite circle shapes policy, enforces bans, and determines which narratives stand.

While Drmies is just one editor, his case—and his involvement in Ngo’s entry—shows the extent to which Wikipedia and academia operate as a mutual-reinforcement system, each validating the other’s authority, each laundering the other’s ideology. As Larry Sanger describes it, Wikipedia works from a GASP worldview: Global, Academic, Secular, Progressive. Drmies fits the pattern on at least three of the four criteria.

Conclusion

Andy Ngo’s story is much more than a dispute over a biography. It’s a window into how the platforms that define our reality—from social media to reference sites—have merged with the institutions meant to check them.

The result of this five-year process is visible today: a dossier selectively curated and shaped by a small cluster of adversarial editors.

Watch the full interview with Andy Ngo below, and be sure to subscribe for more NPOV investigations.