#institutional corruption

By: Eden Cohen

Published: Aug 4, 2025

A coordinated campaign is reshaping how the world understands Zionism, Jewish history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wikipedia’s broken system is helping it happen.

If you’ve ever Googled anything about Jewish history, Zionism, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, chances are one of your first stops was Wikipedia. The site isn’t just another online resource; with over 15 billion page views per month, it’s become the default reference for nearly everything — from personal research to school assignments to media coverage.

But what happens when that reference point is deliberately manipulated?

Over the past year, activists have mounted a coordinated campaign to reshape how millions of readers understand the Jewish story, from ancient history to modern Zionism to the Israel-Hamas war. They have removed references to Hamas’ antisemitic charter, reframed Zionism as racism and colonialism, and systematically pushed fringe narratives into the mainstream. 

They’ve rewritten the narrative around the expulsion of Palestinians, erased records of suicide bombings to portray Palestinians as more innocent, and revised articles on ancient history to downplay or omit the Jewish people’s presence and historical connection to the land.

The issue isn’t just the edits themselves. It’s that Wikipedia’s own systems, which rely on unpaid volunteer labor, minimal oversight, and a confusing governance structure, have no reliable way to stop this kind of coordinated manipulation.

This isn’t an obscure internet issue. Wikipedia’s content shapes Google search results and powers knowledge panels (the summary boxes that appear at the top or side of your screen) for countless search terms on a wide range of topics, including “Zionism.” It also influences what’s considered “neutral” information across academia, government, social media, and newsrooms.

When Wikipedia gets Jewish history wrong, the whole world does.

So how exactly did activists hijack Wikipedia’s coverage of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism — and what does that mean for the future of truth online?

Let’s unpack it.

How Wikipedia actually works and why it’s so vulnerable

At first glance, Wikipedia looks like the internet’s ultimate democracy. Anyone can edit nearly any article at any time. Its open model invites collaboration and constant improvement… or so the theory goes.

In reality, Wikipedia is run by a relatively small group of highly active editors who dominate entire topic areas. These core contributors are enthusiastic, but often bring ideological zeal to the table instead of the neutral point of view that Wikipedia claims to uphold. They also frequently lack deep subject matter expertise. Many of these editors frequently manipulate and weaponize academic citations to fit their agendas, giving fringe ideas the appearance of scholarly legitimacy. While Wikipedia claims to value “neutrality,” that neutrality is often shaped by whoever controls the editing process for a given subject.

Administrators and arbitrators — Wikipedia’s closest equivalents to moderators or judges — are unpaid volunteers elected by other editors. Crucially, there is no requirement that admins have expertise in the subjects they oversee, even on complex or contentious topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Jewish history. Their authority is granted primarily through demonstrated familiarity with Wikipedia’s internal policies and social norms, not on any outside credentials. That means major editorial decisions often come down to procedural gamesmanship rather than informed judgment.

This setup can create serious vulnerabilities. Editors with coordinated agendas can influence content by outlasting or overwhelming opposition in what are known as “edit wars.” When conflicts escalate, the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is supposed to step in as a kind of Supreme Court. But it has just a handful of active volunteers, months-long backlogs, and a limited appetite for policing content disputes.

Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit organization that oversees Wikipedia — explicitly avoids editorial involvement except in cases of legal liability. It operates more like a constitutional monarchy: the Foundation is a largely symbolic sovereign, while the real power rests with the self-governing volunteer editors.

This decentralized governance means Wikipedia depends on goodwill, expertise, and transparency to function. But when it comes to politically charged topics, those qualities are often in short supply.

In the case of Israel and Jewish history, activists with sophisticated coordination and strategic know-how have ruthlessly exploited the system’s weaknesses.

A coordinated campaign to rewrite Israel and Jewish history on Wikipedia

Since at least 2022, and with increased intensity after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks, a group of roughly 40 editors has worked systematically to reshape Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel, Zionism, Jewish history, and related topics.

This wasn’t a series of isolated edits. It was a full-scale information operation, targeting dozens of pages, including “Zionism,” the “History of Israel,” biographies of Jewish figures, and articles about terrorist organizations.

For example, the 1988 Hamas Charter, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, was scrubbed or downplayed in key articles. The page on Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader who met with Hitler, was edited to remove or bury photographic evidence of this well-documented historical fact.

More alarmingly, some edits softened or sanitized descriptions of Hamas and Hezbollah, questioned their terrorist designations, and whitewashed their violent histories.

Behind the scenes, a group calling itself Tech for Palestine (TFP) coordinated many of these edits off-platform. Operating through a private Discord server, TFP used job boards, task tracking tools, and even “office hours,” to assign Wikipedia edits tasks like a political campaign.

TFP even tried to pressure British politicians by manipulating their Wikipedia pages ahead of elections in the United Kingdom. Once exposed by investigative reporting, the group deleted its logs, shut down the Discord server, and attempted to cover its tracks — but the damage had already been done to over 100 articles.

This isn’t Wikipedia malfunctioning; it’s Wikipedia working exactly as designed, and being exploited by those who know how to weaponize its vulnerabilities.

What the edits actually changed

The activists didn’t just make minor tweaks to wording. Their campaign fundamentally altered how Wikipedia presents Jewish and Israeli history. Here are some of the most significant changes:

Redefining Zionism: Articles reframed Zionism from a national liberation movement into a form of settler colonialism or racial supremacy. Language that was once confined to activist academic circles has been pushed into one of the internet’s most-read encyclopedia pages (See the current Zionism article for context).

Removing ancient Jewish history: References to the ancient Jewish presence in Israel were minimized or deleted in many articles, downplaying Jewish peoplehood and national identity in favor of more politically convenient narratives.

Whitewashing Iran’s record: Pages covering Iran’s regime were edited to remove references to Holocaust denial, antisemitism, and human rights abuses. The result is a sanitized record of one of the world’s most hostile governments toward Jews and Israel, and a leading state sponsor of terror.

Softening descriptions of Hamas and Hezbollah: Their terrorist designations were questioned or removed, and historical evidence of violence was softened or erased. Editors also rewrote the narrative on the expulsion of Palestinians and removed listings of suicide attacks to present Palestinians in a more innocent light.

Freezing debate through a moratorium: In an unprecedented move, a Wikipedia admin imposed a year-long moratorium on editing a disputed section about Zionism. This meant that no one, regardless of sourcing or new evidence, could propose changes. The biased language was effectively locked in as the “truth.” Veteran editors say such moratoriums are virtually unheard of in content disputes, highlighting just how broken Wikipedia’s internal processes have become.

A system that can’t fix itself

Wikipedia isn’t just vulnerable to manipulation; it has no effective mechanism to respond when it happens.

The Arbitration Committee serves as the platform’s Supreme Court but is hampered by its tiny volunteer base, extensive case backlog, and lack of advanced tracking tools to detect coordinated abuse. Its decisions often focus on banning individual users rather than addressing systemic bias or organized editing campaigns.

Core Wikipedia policies, including the requirement for a Neutral Point of View (NPOV), discouragement of coordinated editing (“meatpuppetry”), and prohibition of canvassing, are routinely violated on Israel-related pages. Enforcement of these policies are rare, inconsistent, and often influenced by politics.

As one longtime insider described it, Wikipedia has become a “barn fire,” a platform run by obsessive hobbyists, ideologically-driven editors, and moderators who either ignore or enable the very problems they’re supposed to prevent.

Attempts to bring in balanced, well-trained editors have mostly failed. Newcomers are often discouraged or overwhelmed by entrenched groups, while reform efforts are treated like constitutional amendments — possible in theory, but nearly impossible in practice.

Wikipedia, Google, and the pipeline of misinformation

It would be bad enough if these distortions stayed on Wikipedia. But they don’t.

Google heavily relies on Wikipedia for its top search results and Knowledge Panels — the summary boxes that appear on the right side of search results of the screen when you search for a person, place, or concept. These panels offer a quick snapshot of information, often appearing above all other sources, and are widely viewed as authoritative.

Studies estimate that Wikipedia powers more than 60% of these panels. This creates a dangerous feedback loop: Biased Wikipedia edits shape what billions of people see when they search terms like “Zionism,” “Israel,” “occupation,” or “Gaza.”

Google’s 2012 decision to cancel its own competitor project, Knol, and rely entirely on Wikipedia further entrenches this dependency and increases Wikipedia’s influence even further.

Worse still, generative AI tools like Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot pull data directly from Wikipedia when summarizing complex topics. This means misinformation is not only available but actively amplified by emerging technologies.

Why this should matter to everyone

If you care about history, truth, or the ability to have informed debate, what’s happening on Wikipedia should deeply concern you, especially if you care about how the Jewish story is told.

Wikipedia shapes how the world understands Zionism, Israel, and Jewish identity. It influences students, journalists, algorithms, and even policymakers.

When photos of Amin al-Husseini meeting with Nazis are scrubbed, when Jewish indigeneity is erased, or when antisemitic terror groups are given the benefit of the doubt, this isn’t just sloppy editing. It’s historical erasure. It distorts the Jewish story, reframes antisemitism as legitimate resistance, and rewrites reality under the guise of neutrality.

This is not harmless internet bias. It is deliberate, widespread disinformation, designed to legitimize antisemitism and delegitimize Jewish presence in their indigenous homeland.

The fight for accuracy isn’t over

Some activists and watchdog groups are pushing back. Some editors involved in coordinated manipulation have been banned. Tech for Palestine shut down its Discord server after exposure.

Reports by the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish Journal, and others have helped raise public awareness.

However, reforming Wikipedia from within looks increasingly unlikely. The platform’s decentralized volunteer model and minimal oversight make systemic change difficult, especially in the face of well-organized campaigns.

Much of the power to address this problem lies with platforms like Google, which amplify Wikipedia content extensively. Experts and activists are calling for Google to stop treating Wikipedia as a primary source for contentious topics like Israel and antisemitism. Some are petitioning Google to sever Wikipedia as a source in Knowledge Panels until proper safeguards and oversight mechanisms are established. 

Others argue for creating redundant, auditable systems to monitor and verify information on contentious topics (CTOP). At a minimum, CTOP Wikipedia articles should be removed from first-page search results on major search engines until their neutrality can be independently verified. 

Google shareholders must recognize the liability risks tied to Wikipedia’s exploitation for antisemitism weaponization. Beyond Google, there are calls to engage other tech giants like Yahoo and Microsoft to deprioritize Wikipedia in their search algorithms or, at the very least, increase transparency and accountability around how its content is sourced.

Most importantly, the public needs to understand Wikipedia’s structural fragility and how easily it can be hijacked by ideological actors. A crucial part of the response is education, exposing how the platform’s exploitation to rewrite history, deny atrocities, and invert narratives is key to mobilizing broader pressure for reform.

Wikipedia is one of the most powerful information platforms on Earth. Yet its systems were never designed to handle the ideological warfare now playing out on its pages. Just a few hundred anonymous editors are deciding what billions of people read online. 

Without greater accountability, real oversight, and widespread awareness, the digital rewriting of history will continue unchecked. And this problem will not stop with Israel.

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Compare with the entry in Grokipedia.

There are great days and terrible days in history, days a nation or world changed, that you remember forever. For me that's the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the days of Occupy and BLM, and it's Friday in Minneapolis, when the power of love proved stronger than the power of fear and hate and brutality and strong enough for tens of thousands of people to head out into bitterly cold weather, for businesses around the city to close for the day, for a thousand clergy from many denominations and faiths to show up from around the country, many of them committing civil resistance and being arrested. The passionate commitment it takes to go outside on a day of sub-freezing temperatures while also risking state violence and arrest is important to recognize.

That day stands in opposition to yesterday in much the way January 5, 2021 – when nonviolent organizing won back the senate for the Democrats with the election of Georgia senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff – stands in contrast with January 6, 2021, when Trump sent his gangster army to violently disrupt the certification of the election he lost by a landslide. Because yesterday Trump's secret police executed nurse Alex Pretti after he attempted to aid a woman who had been pepper-sprayed and shoved to the ground by some of the faceless soldiers. They pepper-sprayed and shoved him, too, to the ground, and when he was fully subdued shot him in the back repeatedly. (The fact that he had a gun he never drew is immaterial; the videos show that they attacked him before they knew it; they murdered him after they confiscated it.) Then they attempted to murder his reputation as they did with Renee Good's, blaming him, portraying him as an aggressor, calling him a terrorist, with various top administration officials lying on various networks about what had happened and who he was. Minneapolitans responded differently that evening, with candlelit memorials and songs. Veterans Administration intensive care nurse Alex Pretti's name, true nature, and death at 37 will not be forgotten.

The powerful nationwide and beyond opposition to Trump and his authoritarian power grabs has come as a surprise to him and his gang. They believe devoutly in the power of violence and do not comprehend the power of nonviolence. They understand the power that the state has but do not understand the power that civil society has. They understand their own motives--greed, a lust for power, an intolerance of difference--and are baffled or uncomprehending about generosity, the desires for democracy and equality that are about wanting to share rather than hoard power, the tolerance and more than tolerance of difference. Tolerance is such a mediocre word; I recently saw Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi speak about her early days in the house — she entered Congress in 1987 – when she would be told "oh, you tolerate gay people in San Francisco" to which, she says, she would reply, "We don't tolerate them; we take pride in them." On the other hand,"I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is our diversity is our strength," said the dumbest and most unqualified Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, last February. Some of us take pride in the diversity of our cities and country; some of us care about people who are supposed to be divided from us by category but can be united with us by care.

For many in the Trump regime it seems incomprehensible or a scam of sorts that those not categorically under attack by ICE are so committed to solidarity with their neighbors who are, and thereby to universal human rights, to standing up on principle, and since ICE's murder of Renee Good, will risk their lives to do so. The estimable writer and political analyst Jeff Sharlet reports on BlueSky that he came across "breathless reports on Twitter from Project Veritas & fellow creeps of infiltrating ICE watch signals." Project Veritas is the scammy right-wing outlet that uses deceptively edited gotcha videos to attack progressive organizations. They think they've discovered a conspiracy, Sharlet continues, but "the 'conspiracy' is that many people volunteer, take turns on shifts, and train at nonviolence. [Project Veritas founder and head] James O'Keefe says he's never seen anything so organized as the anti-ICE movement, observers – he seems to think this term is code – everywhere he goes. Who is paying for it??? he demands to know. It's like he can't even imagine people caring for one another."

Apparently can't imagine altruism, solidarity, idealism, care that crosses racial lines, interest that is not narrow self-interest, because that is what is behind the way people are showing up for each other in this crisis. You could argue that racism is a border patrol that says your care, your empathy, your relationships must not cross this line across racial difference, that it must be limited and contained. It's an instruction to shrink your heart, to limit your humanity by dehumanizing most of the rest of humanity and numbing your capacity to care for them. This seems to be bolstered by an inability to understand people who have not done so.

The poet W.H. Auden wrote in a review of the final book in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself. Sauron cannot imagine any motives except lust for domination and fear so that, when he has learned that his enemies have the Ring, the thought that they might try to destroy it never enters his head, and his eye is kept toward Gondor and away from Mordor and the Mount of Doom." You can see the attempt to consolidate power in the president, as supported by the conservative six on the Supreme Court, and by the surrender of Congress's powers by the Republican majority, as an attempt to create a one-ring level of power in radical opposition to the checks and balances and ideals of democracy and accountability that have been central to this nation's official ideology, however imperfectly realized.

This is one of our strategic advantages: they routinely fail to comprehend motives that are not selfish, so the idealism, the altruism, the commitment to ideals and principles, that motivates the resistance is seen as a cover-up for the real motives, which helps them cast progressives as criminal or delusional. Empathy is itself an act of imagination, that begins with attention and care: what is it like to be this other being, what are they feeling, what do they need. It arises from and reinforces a sense of non-separation, a sense that we're all in this together, that everyone is your neighbor and no one is a stranger. There is a strong religious admonition to be this way, to see each other this way, in "love thy neighbor" from the Gospel of Mark (which has been inscribed on at least one Minneapolis sign I've seen) or Leviticus's " the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself," in Buddhism's compassion for all beings, in the Islamic commitment to alms for the poor.

That inseparability is echoed by modern science, notably climate science that recognizes we are all beneficiaries of a biosphere shaped by all our actions when it comes to the climate and thereby makes us all responsible for preserving it; as I've often noted, this interconnectedness and responsibility is intolerable to those worship the isolated individual and his infinite freedom and deny this connectedness. (Like tolerance, responsibility is a dismal word; indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer's term reciprocity is a better one, recognizing that if we give, we are giving back to the nature from which we have received so much, including life itself.)

One of the striking developments about the extremism of Trumpian violence, lying, and abuse of power is its recruitment power – but for the opposition. A lot of mild-mannered moderates are now ferociously against ICE, the attack on immigrants, and in some cases the whole Trump Administration. Each attack of a constituency is a recruitment drive – against the administration, both by those in the constituency and those who care about its members, be it women serving in the military, or federal workers trying to do their job ethically, or medical professionals, or scientists, or educators. Bill Kristol, once famously arch-conservative, has himself said, "abolish ICE."

Of course the Epstein files were a bridge too far for many right-wing former Trump supporters and that too is in part about empathy and decency, since those files are about vicious abuse by the most privileged and the institutional corruption and social inequalities that allowed it to go on for so long. It seems more and more that Trumpists live in a bubble they've created among themselves and with the help of online influencers and social media. It's a bubble in which coexistence with difference is intolerable, cruelty is to be admired and snickered about, racism and misogyny likewise smiled upon, and lies the currency of people who scorn the obligation to others, institutions, justice, and the public record that underlies telling the truth. In which a minority matters infinitely and a majority not at all. Sometimes when they speak publicly, they seem clueless that the rest of us see things so differently, or think that it doesn't matter that we loathe them.

They have made a massive gamble, and I believe they are losing that gamble. One part of it is as I have written before about the nature of power itself: that they have most or all of it, because they do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Another part is about human nature; they seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we'll come on over. Like Sauron they suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us.

Yeah, so the FBI just returned ALL OF THEM.

Stop being such a fake fan of your God and take it seriously then

If I can use your own book against you in an argument AND YOU DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT PASSAGE IM QUOTING

Then you aren't really a true fan.

Your just doing it for clout

And to have an excuse to be horrible to others and feel morally superior "cause my religion says I can"

Considering how many paedophiles join the church knowing its a safe place to abuse children you have no right to accuse anyone or call them pedos just cause you don't understand that there is more advance biology texts beyond basic high school/primary school lessons

Trans people deserve better

Those kids deserve better

The church itself deserves to burn.

By: NPOV

Published: Jan 20. 2026

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.

Three days after the October 7 atrocities, Iskandar removed thousands of words about human rights abuses, replacing them with a single paragraph.

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.

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By: Joe Figliolia

Published: Feb 5, 2026

From the collapse of a shared American monoculture and the rise of hyper-personalized information streams to the flood of AI-generated content, it has never been harder to separate digital wheat from digital chaff. The promise of shared cultural literacy feels increasingly remote as our information environment grows more complex, while our capacity for comprehension and critical thinking fails to keep pace. Even with access to more knowledge that makes the Library of Alexandria seem almost quaint in comparison, many of us remain lost in an informational hall of mirrors.

This problem is especially acute when it comes to subjects with a genuinely high barrier to entry. Pediatric gender medicine is one such topic. To understand it in any serious, holistic way requires at least a working familiarity with several disciplines that are typically siloed from one another: evidence-based medicine, endocrinology, clinical psychology, bioethics, and sociology, among others. Given that reality, it’s easy to understand the impulse to defer to supposed experts when time, background knowledge, or both are in short supply.

But a recent essay in Newsweek, titled “Bad Medicine—How Secretary Kennedy Is Jeopardizing LGBTQ Lives,” inadvertently illustrates the costs of uncritically outsourcing judgment to ostensibly authoritative voices who, in this case, fail to serve their function or the public interest. The piece is written by Adrian Shanker and Sam Ames, both of whom served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Biden-Harris administration. They characterize HHS’s recent peer-reviewed report on pediatric gender dysphoria as the product of conspiracy thinking and “transphobia,” while framing it as an extension of Health Secretary Kennedy’s more eccentric views on controversial topics like autism and vaccines. In doing so, the authors present themselves as clear-eyed defenders of truth cutting through pseudoscience.

This is unfortunate, because whether driven by bad faith or genuine scientific illiteracy, the essay amounts to a sweeping misinformation campaign against the HHS report—one that corrodes public trust in both experts and institutions. What’s at stake is nothing less than our ability to inhabit a shared, intelligible world governed by scientific norms rather than surrendering to the buzzing confusion of relativism.

What makes the Newsweek piece especially damaging to civil discourse is the gap between its sanctimonious confidence and its evident lack of engagement with the underlying material. Despite repeatedly asserting that the HHS report lacks scientific merit, the authors give every indication that they either did not read the report in full or, if they did, failed to understand it. This impression is hard to avoid given their reliance on claims that the report itself directly contradicts, as well as their apparent confusion about how evidence hierarchies function in evidence-based medicine.

Shanker and Ames declare the report “methodologically muddled,” but fail to expand on this critique. What they fail to acknowledge is that the report’s peer-reviewers—including evidence-based medicine experts from Belgium—praised its methodology as clear and reproducible. Nor did any reviewer dispute the central finding of the report’s umbrella review—a review of systematic reviews—that the evidence supporting medical transition is of only “low certainty.”

Although critics like Shanker and Ames portray the HHS report as a political hit job with predetermined conclusions, its findings are anything but surprising. Systematic reviews—the highest tier of evidence in evidence-based medicine—conducted in Sweden, Finland, and the United Kingdom have reached the same conclusion. Just weeks ago, New Zealand announced a pause on all new puberty-blocker prescriptions over ethical concerns. Yet Shanker and Ames appear either unaware of, or uninterested in, this international context, instead telling readers that the HHS report exists merely “to create the appearance of a genuine scientific debate.”

The authors also assert, irresponsibly, that so-called “affirming care” is a “common sense” intervention, claiming that decades of research demonstrate a 60 percent reduction in depression and a 73 percent reduction in suicidality and self-harm. But the characterization of these interventions as “common sense” falls apart under even minimal scrutiny. They remain unapproved by the FDA for the treatment of gender dysphoria, and their adoption was shaped in part by earlier efforts to address poor outcomes among adult transitioners, not by robust evidence of benefit in pediatric populations.

More troubling still, Shanker and Ames fundamentally misrepresent the evidence base itself, undercutting the HHS report’s central aim of helping the public understand what the science actually shows. The dramatic figures they cite trace back to a single 2022 observational cohort study by Diana M. Tordoff and colleagues, a study that has persisted in public discourse like an invincible zombie, despite having been carefully and repeatedly fact-checked since its publication. Its methodological flaws have been documented by Leor Sapir, Jesse Singal, and, several months ago, by me, after the study was cited in a Continuing Medical Education course by a member of the Texas Medical Association.

Readers should understand that within evidence-based medicine, studies like Tordoff et al. (2022) sit near the bottom of the evidence hierarchy for straightforward methodological reasons. As an observational study without a control group, it cannot establish causality. Any reported benefits are further confounded by the fact that participants simultaneously received psychotherapy and psychiatric medications. In short, the study design makes it impossible to isolate the effects of medical intervention itself. This is precisely why systematic reviews exist: to weigh the totality of evidence and assess whether an intervention actually works.

Either Shanker and Ames do not grasp this basic framework, or—perhaps even more troubling—they do and choose to ignore it. When writing confidently and publicly about one of the most conceptually and ethically complex issues of our time, there is a responsibility to get the underlying facts right, even when reasonable people may disagree about what those facts imply for public policy.

This abdication of responsibility extends to their defense of medical societies that endorse pediatric gender medicine, which they treat as conclusive evidence that the practices must therefore be evidence-based. As they write, “What the report fails to adequately address, is the longstanding consensus of every major medical organization that gender-affirming care is linked to improvements in the health of transgender youth” (and the consensus has recently shown signs of cracking with the groundbreaking position statement by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons opposing surgical interventions for minors). They go on to claim that “what was formerly a generally-accepted medical consensus has been thrown into a flashy culture war whose proponents rely on bluster and noise to appear on equal footing with empirical evidence.”

Contrary to their assertion, the HHS report devotes an entire chapter—Chapter 12—to explaining how U.S. medical associations arrived at an artificial consensus around pediatric gender medicine despite contrary findings in systematic reviews. As the report details, American medical organizations rarely evaluate the underlying evidence base for “affirming care” themselves. Instead, they tend to endorse guidelines issued by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the U.S. Endocrine Society—guidelines that have been deemed unsuitable for use in clinical practice because of serious deficiencies in developmental rigor. These guidelines have nonetheless done much of the heavy lifting in persuading the public that pediatric gender medicine is both safe and effective.

In WPATH’s case, the organization commissioned evidence reviews and then declined to publish them after the findings conflicted with its goal of expanding access to pediatric medical transition. The Endocrine Society’s recommendations, meanwhile, are classified as “discordant” in the parlance of evidence-based medicine, meaning their clinical guidance is not supported by the conclusions of their own systematic reviews, which focused largely on adult, rather than pediatric, transitioners.

The authors’ appeal to medical consensus also ignores a basic point that consensus-based medicine is not the same as evidence-based medicine. The very purpose of federal evidence standards was to move beyond professional agreement as an authority in itself. History offers no shortage of cautionary examples. Frontal lobotomies, insulin coma therapy for schizophrenia, and routine bloodletting were once considered standard care. There is good reason to suspect that many pediatric transition interventions will one day be viewed in much the same light.

Ironically, the authors’ uncritical deference to the U.S. medical establishment makes it more difficult to reestablish treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria on empirical grounds. What Shanker and Ames appear not to recognize is that the current position of many American medical associations is fundamentally at odds with the principles of evidence-based medicine. That tension helps explain why several European countries, which adhere more closely to EBM standards, have reversed course on pediatric medical transition. In the United States, by contrast, defenders of “affirming care” tend to rely on institutional consensus—an appeal to authority—rather than on the strongest available evidence.

There are also clear incentives discouraging U.S. medical associations from breaking with the consensus they helped construct. As I documented in a recent report on institutional capture within the Texas Medical Association, policymaking on “LGBTQ” issues is often delegated to ideologically homogeneous subcommittees, some of which carry intellectual or financial conflicts of interest. These bodies frequently treat “affirming care” as a civil rights imperative rather than as a medical intervention that should rise or fall on evidentiary grounds.

Finally, acknowledging error on pediatric gender medicine would carry significant reputational and legal consequences. Organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, which continue to endorse pediatric medical transition, appear to be pursuing a short-term survival strategy of reputational preservation. But the longer these organizations hold out, the greater the damage is likely to be in the long term. Given the rapid leadership turnover in many professional societies—where presidents often serve only year-long terms—there is little personal incentive for those at the helm to correct course, even when doing so would better serve best interest of their organizations and the public they claim to care for.

At the individual level, many clinicians who have invested deeply in this intellectual project are likely grappling with a profound degree of cognitive dissonance. Confronted with the possibility that well-intentioned interventions may have harmed vulnerable patients, there are two paths available: revise one’s understanding in light of new evidence, or rationalize away that evidence to avoid damaging your positive self-concept. One of these paths is plainly easier than the other.

The issues raised by the Newsweek essay are complex, and I do not pretend to have all the answers. A good-faith exchange of ideas about gender medicine is not only desirable but necessary. Yet, as the article itself illustrates, too many participants in this debate—whether driven by tribal loyalty, ideology, or moral certainty—avoid substantive engagement with criticism, opting instead for ad hominem attacks or speculation about the sinister motives of “the other side.”

Some readers may recoil at the messenger. A Trump-era HHS Department is, for many, an uncomfortable source of authority. But dismissing the report on that basis alone would be a serious mistake. However imperfect the messenger, the message deserves to be confronted on its merits.

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About the Author

The suppression of video courses I was featured in is yet another blow to open and honest debate about pediatric transgender medicine.

By: Kristopher Kaliebe

Published: Nov 18, 2025

Who’s afraid of medical evidence? Unfortunately, the “experts” who oversee continuing medical education. They’re so terrified of transgender activists, they won’t even let physicians listen to skeptical conversations about invasive and irreversible sex-change treatments for children.

On October 29, the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education pressured Washington State University to stop offering seven video courses that review a range of topics concerning pediatric transgender medicine. I spoke in one of the videos, and while I’m well aware of the medical establishment’s bias, I’m still shocked at how quickly the ACCME caved to activists.

The campaign against these continuing medical education courses — which any physician in the U.S. could take to maintain his or her license — went from zero to a hundred in less than a day. On the morning of the 29th, a transgender activist posted a blog article criticizing the courses. The blog attacked their creator, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, for being a “hate group”; it also attacked Washington State University for hosting the courses for nationwide use. The blog then provided a link for readers to complain to the ACCME, which has the ultimate authority to decide what constitutes legitimate continuing medical education for physicians.

The ACCME’s president, Dr. Graham McMahon, told the blog that his organization couldn’t comment “on an activity we have not (yet) reviewed.” Yet before the day was over, the ACCME had launched an investigation of the courses, and the university stopped offering them for credit. Physicians can no longer watch them through the school’s continuing medical education portal. As far as I can tell, the ACCME has never before launched an investigation immediately after receiving complaints. While there’s no telling how the ACCME will rule or when, its near-instantaneous decision to pressure Washington State University — the only university to offer the courses for continuing education — speaks volumes. There wasn’t even enough time for a single person to view all seven videos, which can still be viewed on the SEGM website but not for credit.

But what, exactly, is in these courses? Two things that ought to be utterly unobjectionable in the context of medicine. First, a focus on scientific evidence. Second, earnest discussion about what that evidence means for patient care.

The seven courses were all drawn from SEGM’s 2023 conference on “International Perspectives on Evidence-Based Treatment for Gender-Dysphoric Youth.” The conference featured medical experts and researchers from more than 30 countries, specializing in everything from psychology and psychiatry to endocrinology and bioethics. Many international presenters had played a pivotal role in systematic evidence reviews that led their respective countries to limit or prohibit children’s access to transgender treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. In the U.S., meanwhile, professional medical organizations have uniformly suppressed discussion of this same research, as it doesn’t align with their advocacy of child sex changes.

The course that featured me focused on “the role of social and cultural context” in the rapid rise of child transgender identification in recent years. For just over 30 minutes, my fellow panelists and I discussed the data showing that a large percentage of children who identify as transgender struggle with other physiological and mental health issues, including autism or depression. We also discussed the evidence pointing to the role of social media in convincing children that they were “born in the wrong body.” All of us want to help these children, including through therapeutic approaches instead of rushing toward chemical interventions and genital surgeries. All the countries that have commissioned systematic reviews, including Finland, Sweden, and the U.K., now recommend therapy as the first line of treatment.

It is inconceivable that these courses violate the ACCME’s standards for continuing medical education. SEGM designed them with those standards in mind, and Washington State University spent nine months reviewing the courses before approving them. And while these courses are now unavailable for credit, physicians still have access to a slew of continuing medical education offerings that promote sex changes for children. I have viewed many of these presentations from the professional medical associations, and I can safely say that they place advocacy over science. Yet there’s little chance that the ACCME will launch an inquiry against them, much less pressure the professional medical associations to take down their courses.

Physicians depend on continuing medical education to provide the best care, and for the sake of their patients, they deserve to hear an honest discussion of the science. But the people who oversee this critical part of the medical profession are mainly concerned with appeasing activists and appearing virtuous within their academic and bureaucratic bubbles. I wonder if all of ACCME’s leadership — including a medical director at UnitedHealthcare and a deputy undersecretary of Veterans Affairs — know what this organization is really doing.

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: May 19, 2025

Stroud Pride has said that it does not welcome those with “LGB views”. Many will be baffled as to why a Pride event would turn against gay people, but it actually makes complete sense once one understands how the gay rights movement has been hijacked by genderism.

On last night’s episode of Free Speech Nation hosted by Josh Howie, I discussed the Stroud Pride story, as well as the wider implications for gay people. Support for gay rights is on the decline, and it hardly helps matters that the groups purporting to be pro-gay are also infected with a homophobic ideology.

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These organizations are not what they used to be or what you might think they are. They're corrupt and parasitic, having been invaded, infected and hollowed out from the inside, a skinsuit being worn by ideological fanatics.