“Stop donating to Wokepedia” Elon Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in December 2024.
Less than a month later, Arno Rosenfeld broke the news that the Heritage Foundation intends to identify and target Wikipedia editors who, according to them, are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content on anti-Semitism.
In the opening throes of Donald Trump's second term, such news must be read with an eye to the media's role in supporting the radical right and fuelling misinformation.
For instance, on 31 December 2024, Musk reposted a tweet that accused Wikipedia of erasing the section of Bill Clinton’s page that explicitly laid out the former President’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. In actuality, the section had been split into three separate articles redirected from the main article. As reported by Wikipedia’s longtime editor and administrator, Molly White, the section had been restored to the original article months before Musk decided to take to X.
In her report, White also notes that Musk retweeted a video from “End Wokeness,” an account most likely run by white nationalist Jack Posobiec, featuring Larry Sanger, a former Wikipedia co-founder. Sanger has long held claims that Wikipedia is “leftist propaganda” for not citing right-wing sources like Fox News and The Daily Mail. He has since become a regular on right-wing media, including Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and Christopher Rufo’s Substack.
However, the Heritage Foundation's attack is even more incendiary. The Foundation is one of the largest conservative think tanks and is heavily involved in policymaking in the United States. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 not only precipitated Donald Trump’s return to the Presidency but also offered Trump a blueprint that threatened labour unions, reproductive rights, poverty programs, and climate advocacy.
But why is the Heritage Foundation going after Wikipedia?
According to Arno Rosenfeld, since mid-2024, Wikipedia has increasingly come under increasing fire for both the content of its articles and its citations when addressing the genocide in Gaza. For instance, a panel of Wikipedia editors had limited the citation of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, calling it a “generally unreliable” source of information about Israel’s war on the Palestinian people.
Conservatives, such as Musk, have long accused Wikipedia of carrying biased language and of demarcating right-leaning news websites as unreliable sources. However, White explained, this demarcation has less to do with Wikipedia’s political leanings than its editorial policies which disallow the inclusion of unverifiable claims. She says, ‘Both right-leaning publications like National Review and Washington Examiner and the left-leaning Media Matters for America, Rolling Stone, and ThinkProgress are labelled “partisan sources”. And right-leaning outlets like The Telegraph, The Hill, Reason, and the Wall Street Journal have earned spots in the “generally reliable” section.’
As stated in the dossier that the Heritage Foundation has been circulating, the think tank plans to find Wikipedia editors who might be ‘misusing’ their power by studying how they write. Their aim is also to find patterns in their editing style, topics they focus on, and how they collaborate and identify if their usernames appear on other websites or in leaked data. The Foundation also wants to trace IP addresses and use fake accounts to interact with the editors to help gather more information.
While not surprising, the weaponisation of media and information to shape a right-leaning perspective has accelerated in the post-7 October world. More recently, OpenDemocracy revealed in a new investigation that the BBC's coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is biased and uses passive language for Palestinian deaths even as they continue to present an asymmetrical view of the genocide.
This media bias highlights a central node of the reactionary international. Business moguls like Musk have repeatedly attempted to reshape public discourse to align with their own views—whether by buying Twitter to counter perceived conservative suppression or threatening to acquire Wikipedia to dismantle so-called “wokeness” without impunity.
Our task remains to ensure that the media remains free and amplifies voices that challenge power rather than those who seek to own it.
