Exposing coordinated narrative manipulation across Wikipedia, search, and AI. Subscribe to: https://xitter.cf/t.co/OupmqUX7jz Founded by @ashleyrindsberg
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Israel-Palestine coverage on @Wikipedia has been reshaped since Oct 7 by a core group of roughly three dozen ideologically-motivated editors, the Gang of 40.
NPOV conducted an analysis of the six leaders of this group which shows how it works.
Our reports, published here, reveal how this accretive, mostly under-the-radar strategy run by a handful of accounts managed to undermine knowledge infrastructure on the most contentious geopolitical topic today.
The Key Tactics that our reports reveal:
+ They worked in groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, or all 6, rotating in ways that obscure coordination.
+ Pairs overlapped on up to 1,463 articles, and all six converged on 64 pages.
+ Up to 90% of their edits went to this one topic, sustained for up to two decades.
+ Deletion sprints cleared material faster than others could respond.
- One account removed 14,312 characters from the Labour antisemitism article in two edits, two minutes apart
- ~25,500 from Amnesty's in 22 edits;
- ~11,600 from the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's in 23 minutes.
+ The group shaped the Reliable Sources discussions that decide which outlets can be cited anywhere on Wikipedia.
- Western and NATO sources were dismissed, while outlets like Al Jazeera were defended.
+ They logged 18,000+ edits on Wikipedia's administrator noticeboards, where disputes over conduct are decided.
+ On talk pages, volume stood in for consensus: one editor posted 11 times in four hours on the Zionism page.
+ On Oct 7, 2023, with the attack still underway, one of the Six renamed the article on it from "Hamas attack on Israel" to "Gaza−Israel conflict."
+ May 2024: another removed the section on the Oct 7 attack from the Gaza war article, including the Nova festival massacre, 251 hostages and reports of sexual violence.
+ Eight editors were topic-banned for conduct. Not one of their edits was reversed by the ArbCom proceeding. The pages they built were never audited.
<< Full reports in the Substack, link below >>
NPOV retweeted
In a matter of years since October 7, a handful of @Wikipedia editors captured the entire Palestine-Israel Articles topic area.
NPOV has published a series of reports on the six leaders of this group, revealing the tactics they used to undermine knowledge infrastructure on the most important geopolitical subject today.
We have made the Substack post containing the reports free.
Israel-Palestine coverage on @Wikipedia has been reshaped since Oct 7 by a core group of roughly three dozen ideologically-motivated editors, the Gang of 40.
NPOV conducted an analysis of the six leaders of this group which shows how it works.
Our reports, published here, reveal how this accretive, mostly under-the-radar strategy run by a handful of accounts managed to undermine knowledge infrastructure on the most contentious geopolitical topic today.
The Key Tactics that our reports reveal:
+ They worked in groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, or all 6, rotating in ways that obscure coordination.
+ Pairs overlapped on up to 1,463 articles, and all six converged on 64 pages.
+ Up to 90% of their edits went to this one topic, sustained for up to two decades.
+ Deletion sprints cleared material faster than others could respond.
- One account removed 14,312 characters from the Labour antisemitism article in two edits, two minutes apart
- ~25,500 from Amnesty's in 22 edits;
- ~11,600 from the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's in 23 minutes.
+ The group shaped the Reliable Sources discussions that decide which outlets can be cited anywhere on Wikipedia.
- Western and NATO sources were dismissed, while outlets like Al Jazeera were defended.
+ They logged 18,000+ edits on Wikipedia's administrator noticeboards, where disputes over conduct are decided.
+ On talk pages, volume stood in for consensus: one editor posted 11 times in four hours on the Zionism page.
+ On Oct 7, 2023, with the attack still underway, one of the Six renamed the article on it from "Hamas attack on Israel" to "Gaza−Israel conflict."
+ May 2024: another removed the section on the Oct 7 attack from the Gaza war article, including the Nova festival massacre, 251 hostages and reports of sexual violence.
+ Eight editors were topic-banned for conduct. Not one of their edits was reversed by the ArbCom proceeding. The pages they built were never audited.
<< Full reports in the Substack, link below >>
NPOV retweeted
I've seen a few takes on this piece. As someone who not only read the piece but also wrote it, I can tell you:
1. The piece not about whether @nickshirleyy's allegations concerning daycare fraud in Minnesota are right or wrong. I happen to think the FBI raids, indictment, and guilty plea all point in that direction, but that's me.
The piece is actually about the fact that (a) a debate exists on this topic and (b) on @Wikipedia—the closest the internet has to a common knowledge repository—that debate has been "settled" in one direction: Shirley's claims are "unsubstantiated."
2. This outcome was achieved by a small number of highly persistent editors who focused their efforts on keeping the phrase "unsubstantiated claims" not just in the entry, but in the lead, where it matters.
But, by far, the editor who played the leading role in effort, Sibshops, is an account that stretches back almost 15 years to 2012, when it was registered.
In all but three out of 165 months between January 2012 (when it registered) and October 2025, Sibhops logged exactly the same number of edits: 0
3. Then in October, Sibshops emerged from a decade-plus of cryosleep. Immediately it launches into intensive activity on the Hasan Piker entry, leading an effort to keep any mention of Piker's dog shock incident off of the entry—and succeeds.
Sibshops uses highly sophisticated editing tactics as part of this effort. It appeals to Wikipedia policies, essays, and guidelines: the kind of skill not possible for an account that had made barely a dozen edits in as many years.
4. Then Sibshops turns its attention to the Nick Shirley entry, inserting itself into the "unsubstantiated" debate very early on. Within a few months, Sibshops becomes the top editor on the Nick Shirley page.
Again, this is an account that had made 0 edits for the better part of 13 years.
5. There's much more to the story. It's about the battle over contested knowledge spaces, who determines the claims that become functional ground truth, and how they do it.
Read the whole story. Link in thread!
Wikipedia still describes Nick Shirley’s fraud reporting as “unsubstantiated” — despite one of the subjects of that investigation pleading guilty.
It’s the result of a six-month edit war: one that reveals exactly how “consensus” is manufactured on the site.
@AshleyRindsberg 👇
NPOV retweeted
More Wikipedia shenanigans!
As we know, Audrey Truschke & the wiki editors who protect her page, insist that it is “academic consensus” that @HinduAmerican is a “Hindutva advocacy” org.
Well, someone challenged that “consensus” by citing actual academics that say this framing is wrong. They provided citations. What was the response?
They blocked all suggested changes & locked the page!
Read the argument and see how Wikipedia is weaponized in real time en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:H… :
“There is not a scholarly consensus that HAF is a Sangh Parivar organization.
Anybody that has provided sources to contradict that has been summarily reverted. Calling HAF a "Hindutva advocacy" organization in lead and the infobox is a complete mockery of undue weight and doesnt even reflect what is written across a wide swathe of reliable sources.
Earlier the article had "Jeffrey Long, a professor of religion and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College states that "the reality of HAF is clearly a complex one, not reducible to a single factor or ideological orientation." (Knut Jacobsen (2007). Hindu Diasporas. Oxford University Press) but that was removed even though it was a peer-reviewed academic source.
Walter Andersen (who wrote the most comprehensive volume of work on the RSS and is a much stronger source than Truschke) notes that HAF "despite its past advocacy alongside the HSS, is not formally linked to the Sangh Parivar" and describes the HAF as a "Hindu advocacy" group ("Messengers of Hindu Nationalism How the RSS Reshaped India" - Walter Andersen, Shridhar D. Damle, 2019)
Long in this book (Diaspora in Development The Comparative Indian Experience, Editors: Ajay Dubey, Sushmita Rajwar, 2025) notes that "While it is true that, as a Hindu advocacy organization, HAF will naturally have overlaps with the Hindu nationalist movement, to the degree that both see themselves as advocating for the cause of Hindus and Hinduism, to reduce the HAF to an extension of Hindu nationalism into the American scene without attending to the varied ways in which this organization expresses the ongoing quest of Hindu Americans to define themselves—ourselves—in the wider multicultural reality of which we are all part is to do a disservice to this quest, and to the aspiration for greater inclusion, and, ultimately, social justice, which informs it."
Mary Yu Danico describes HAF as a "Hindu advocacy" organization in her text, Asian American society : an encyclopedia, 2014.
Barbara McGraw in "The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Politics in the U.S." describes HAF as "the first Hindu umbrella organization to have a professional structure and full-time staff".
This is just a small selection of what reliable sources have to say on HAF, and the lead is wildly inappropriate given experts on the RSS/Sangh Parivar are contradicting claims made by Truschke and the other pet sources favored by the people controlling the article.
(talk) 15:45, 15 June 2026 (UTC
The discussion around our investigation by @AshleyRindsberg into @HinduAmerican has now reached India's most-trusted news broadcaster
@AdityaRajKaul invited Wikipedia co-founder @lsanger on air to discuss the findings. Within seconds, the conversation turned to a bigger question:
Can Wikipedia still be trusted?
NPOV retweeted
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: Search "Iran war" on @WikiCommons and filter by video. One of the top results is a LEGO-style video produced by an organization linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But the video is only the beginning.
We traced the upload trail and found the same editors appearing across Commons uploads, @Wikipedia article edits, and the pages connected to the organizations behind them.
The IRGC didn't need to hack Wikipedia. The system was already there.
Full investigation. Receipts 👇
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: Search "Iran war" on @WikiCommons and filter by video. One of the top results is a LEGO-style video produced by an organization linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But the video is only the beginning.
We traced the upload trail and found the same editors appearing across Commons uploads, @Wikipedia article edits, and the pages connected to the organizations behind them.
The IRGC didn't need to hack Wikipedia. The system was already there.
Full investigation. Receipts 👇
Read full article by @AshleyRindsberg:
npov.substack.com/p/irans-le…
Who decides what the internet "knows" about an organization? That process starts on @Wikipedia.
In the case of @HinduAmerican, we found that four editors were responsible for most of the page's content—helping shape how the organization is represented across search, AI, and the wider web. 👇
Learn more: neutralpov.com/p/exclusive-i…
📢NEW: HAF RESPONDS. After our investigation into the networks shaping the @HinduAmerican profile, we sat down with their leadership for an extended conversation.
They address the allegations, disputed claims, and editor activity examined in our reporting.
Watch the full interview with @AshleyRindsberg.
Link in comments 👇
NPOV retweeted
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: A Fortune 500 company reportedly cancelled a @HinduAmerican training session after employees circulated its Wikipedia page.
That page tells readers HAF aligns with Hindu nationalism, threatens academic freedom, and has been accused of acting as a foreign agent.
We traced who built that narrative. The same handful of accounts kept appearing across HAF, its critics, activist groups, and key public figures—building an interconnected narrative that now feeds Google and AI systems.
Full investigation in thread. Receipts 👇
NPOV retweeted
Just four Wikipedia accounts can smear the reputation of an organization like the Hindu American Foundation.
Think this an isolated case?
BTW, Ashley Rindsberg (@NPOV) does some of the best reporting about Wikipedia and its bias—not just left-wing bias. Follow.
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: A Fortune 500 company reportedly cancelled a @HinduAmerican training session after employees circulated its Wikipedia page.
That page tells readers HAF aligns with Hindu nationalism, threatens academic freedom, and has been accused of acting as a foreign agent.
We traced who built that narrative. The same handful of accounts kept appearing across HAF, its critics, activist groups, and key public figures—building an interconnected narrative that now feeds Google and AI systems.
Full investigation in thread. Receipts 👇
Where does Wikipedia's version of @AlJazeera come from? One editor account appears repeatedly across related pages — shaping how funding, governance, and editorial independence are framed. Google summarizes that version. ChatGPT repeats it. Journalists cite it.
Full analysis by @AshleyRindsberg and @TobyDersh 👇
As featured in @RCPolitics.
Read full article: thecipherbrief.com/wikipedia…
🚨NEW INVESTIGATION: A Fortune 500 company reportedly cancelled a @HinduAmerican training session after employees circulated its Wikipedia page.
That page tells readers HAF aligns with Hindu nationalism, threatens academic freedom, and has been accused of acting as a foreign agent.
We traced who built that narrative. The same handful of accounts kept appearing across HAF, its critics, activist groups, and key public figures—building an interconnected narrative that now feeds Google and AI systems.
Full investigation in thread. Receipts 👇