After MRC Free Speech America exposed the extreme leftist bias of Wikipedia, a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor took the online encyclopedia to task.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent company, a day after MRC reported that Wikipedia rates NPR and PBS—both biased, state-funded sources—as “generally reliable” while blacklisting nearly all right-leaning sites. The Free Press obtained Martin’s letter, which warned Wikimedia that it is “subject to specific legal obligations and fiduciary duties consistent with its tax-exempt status,” and must maintain “neutrality, transparency, and accountability” or risk losing that coveted status.
Martin expressed concern over Wikipedia’s disproportionate influence, writing that search engines like Google prioritize Wikipedia in search results and warned against tech platforms promoting Wikipedia articles that may be “biased, unreliable, or sourced by entities who wish to do harm to the United States.” Artificial intelligence large-language models are trained using Wikipedia, increasing the impact of Wikipedia’s slanted propaganda, Martin wrote.
As MRC exclusively revealed in February this year, Wikipedia labeled 84 percent of the listed left-leaning media sources featured at All Sides as “generally reliable.” In contrast, none of the right-leaning sources received this designation. Instead, Wikipedia labeled 22 out of the 29 right-leaning sources negatively, while the remaining seven were categorized under “no consensus.”
On April 23—just one day before Martin’s letter—MRC again highlighted Wikipedia’s bias, pointing to its continued promotion of NPR and PBS as so-called reliable sources. This is the type of bias that Martin criticized.
“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,” Martin wrote. This includes the rewriting of “historical events” on the online encyclopedia and presentation of biased biographies of American leaders. Tellingly, Martin warned that most of Wikipedia’s board consists of foreign nationals.
Martin ended with a lengthy series of questions about Wikipedia’s operations, stakeholders, sponsors, foreign influences, “hateful content” policies, artificial intelligence and search engine partnerships, editorial bias and more. Among other questions, he asked pointedly, “What is the Foundation’s official process for addressing credible allegations that editors or contributors have materially misled readers, engaged in bad-faith edits, or otherwise manipulated content in ways that undermine Wikipedia’s commitment to neutrality?”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Wikipedia and Google be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
