At least 40 pro-Hamas Wikipedia editors misrepresented information about Israel

At least 40 Wikipedia editors hijacked the narrative about Israel and the Middle East conflict. Pro-Hamas editors pushed pro-Palestinian propaganda on the online encyclopedia. They did so by erasing key facts about Hamas and reframing the narrative around Israel.

"Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article on Hamas,” explained a report by Pirate Wires, which revealed the information.

This was carried out under the Requests for Arbitration/Articles on Palestine and Israel, known as ARBPIA in Wiki terminology.

"The campaign delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream," the report highlighted.

Similarly, there are indications that the group also tried to further the interests of the Iranian regime through a series of articles, which included the omission of large numbers of human rights violations.

According to the information, a Wikipedia user filed a case with the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) in March complaining about the removal of the information.

"The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators,” the Pirate Wires paper stated.

"One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history.”

Meanwhile, it was also revealed that a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) launched a different but complementary campaign after October 7, which violated Wikipedia's policies by trying to edit articles about Israel and Palestine on a Discord server with 8,000 members.

TFP became a well-coordinated operation that even attempted to use the online encyclopedia as a means to pressure members of the British parliament to change their positions on Israel.

"Tech For Palestine abandoned its efforts and its members went into a panic after a blog discovered what they were doing; the group deleted all its Wiki Talk pages and Sandboxes they had been using to coordinate their editing efforts, and the main editor deleted all her chats from the group’s Discord channel,” Pirate Wires stated. 

The group's work violates many of Wikipedia's policies. One of them is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that "Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not to engage in them. The goal is to inform, not to influence. Editors, while naturally having their own views , should strive in good faith to provide complete information and not promote one particular viewpoint over another."

But above all, the group has been violating a guideline called Canvassing. This prohibits secret coordination with the intent of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.

In addition, pro-Hamas editors have a strategy to avoid being caught. They work in small groups with only two or three people active on the same article at a given time so as not to get caught.

However, they have a significant impact. Pirate Wires has made two million edits on more than 10,000 articles.

An example of what they do is the "Jews" article. The term "Land of Israel" was removed from an important sentence about the origin of the Jewish people. In addition, the brief description of the article was changed from "Ethno-religious group and nation of the Levant" to "Ethno-religious group and cultural community."

"Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, 'cultural communities' don’t require, or warrant, their own states," said Pirate Wires.

Among the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is user Iskandar323. The user removed, in a matter of minutes, a paragraph criticizing the Iranian government, deleted a story about Jewish immigration to Israel in the 16th century, deleted a reference to the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler and made dozens of similar edits.

"Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated 'swarm' tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale," the report explained.

Meanwhile, journalist Ashley Rindsberg attempts to point out how Wikipedia has become an easy target for manipulation. "There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue,” Rindsberg said.