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Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation Put WIKIPEDIA In Their Crosshairs [1]

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Date: 2025-01-21

Fully empowered by Donald Trump’s presidency, the Heritage Foundation, the most powerful right-wing institution in Washington, D.C., and Trump’s billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk, are launching an all-out attack on Wikipedia’s volunteer editors. Claiming that Wikipedia has, and continues to, discriminate against conservatives and conservative information sources, Musk, has told his followers to stop donating to what he called “Wokepedia.”

Heritage is couching its attack against Wikipedia as a battle against the platform’s antisemitism. According to The Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld, “The Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are ‘abusing their position’ by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward” (https://forward.com/news/686797/heritage-foundation-wikipedia-antisemitism/?utm_source=The+Forward+Association&utm_campaign=515b845573-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_10_24_08_43_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-aaa3b6e98a-273162635).

Heritage reportedly sent a slideshow of its plans to Jewish organizations and other supporters. "The slideshow says the group’s 'targeting methodologies' would include creating fake Wikipedia user accounts to try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information or clicking on malicious tracking links that can identify people who click on them. It is unclear whether this has begun," according to the Forward.

For a number of decades The Heritage Foundation has been the most powerful and prolific Washington, D.C.-based think tank. It produced Project 2025, the policy blueprint for the second Trump administration. Project 2025 is the right wing’s mega-plan for overhauling the so-called administrative state. It’s the plan that Trump denied knowing anything about during the campaign, yet is now filling his administration with Project 2025 contributors (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/11/22/2288010/-Out-of-its-Bunker-Heritage-s-Project-2025-s-Participants-Staffing-Trump-s-White-House).

Rosenfeld reported that “Employees of Heritage, … said they plan to use facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia, who mostly work under pseudonyms.”

In October of last year Rosenfeld reported that Heritage had “released a plan to counter antisemitism. … called Project Esther. Project Esther “suggests the federal government train its sights on ‘virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American groups’ that it calls the ‘Hamas Support Network,’ or HSN, and compares to the German-American Bund that supported Nazi Germany in the 1930s” (https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/antisemitism-notebook/664258/the-group-behind-project-2025-has-a-new-plan-to-fight-antisemitism/).

According to Rosenfeld, “Wikipedia has also drawn the ire from right-wing figures including Elon Musk, the billionaire who has been by President-elect Trump’s side during much of the transition. Musk posted on X (formerly Twitter) in December: ‘Stop donating to Wokepedia.’”

Rosenfeld:

‘Doxxing’ or unmasking the identity of anonymous editors in Wikipedia, violates the site’s rules and can result in users being banned, according to the site’s guidelines. [Tamzin Hadasa] Kelly, who has been a [prolific] volunteer editor on the site since 2012 with a focus that includes sexuality and religion, and serves as an administrator, said that in the past, such problems have usually been rooted in interpersonal conflicts or ad hoc online campaigns

A well-funded campaign against individual Wikipedia editors by an organization like the Heritage Foundation, which is one of the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country, it seems, would be a first.

Molly White, an independent journalist, software engineer and longtime contributor to Wikipedia, wrote recently that Musk’s critique of Wikipedia as part of “growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures to rewrite and control the flow of information” (https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/).

With so many information sources under attack from the right, Wikipedia’s independence remains vital.

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