US Atty for DC investigates not-for-profit Wikipedia over foreign influence

Ed Martin, the interim US Attorney in Washington, DC, and Trump's pick for the position, sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, which said that its subsidiary Wikipedia is "engaging in a series of activities that could violate its obligations under Section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code." The law deals with nonprofit status in the US.

The letter added that the large online encyclopedia has been “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.” Anyone can edit Wikipedia, however, staff behind the website have the authority to remove edits and restrict how much some pages can be changed.

“As you know, Section 501(c)(3) requires that organizations receiving tax-exempt status operate exclusively for ‘religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes,” Martin wrote later adding, “It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission.”

Martin added in the letter that the Wikimedia Foundation board is composed "primarily of foreign nationals” who are “subverting the interests of American taxpayers.”

The letter from Martin added that he is “aware that search engines such as Google have agreed to prioritize Wikipedia results due to the relationship that Wikipedia has established with these tech platforms.”

The letter then touches on AI, and how Wikipedia is fed to large language models in order to train them, meaning that the data on Wikipedia is "consumed by masses of Americans and American teachers on a daily basis," the letter noted.

As part of the investigation, Martin asked Wikipedia to provide a series of different documents and information to further the investigation into Wikipedia's compliance as a nonprofit organization. Martin requested information having to do with mechanisms to "fulfill its legal and ethical responsibilities to safeguard the public from the dissemination of propaganda," practices related to the editor misconduct, steps to exclude foreign influence, and other policies in place to "ensure that content submissions, editorial decisions, and article revisions reflect a broad spectrum of viewpoints, including those that may be in tension with the views of major financial or institutional backers."

A number of other policy details and documents were requested by Martin as well. This comes as there have been reports that anti-Israel editors on the site have “hijacked the Israel-Palestine narrative” to push pro-Hamas propaganda.