Chairman Cruz Sounds Alarm Over Left-Wing Ideological Bias on Wikipedia

WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is raising concern about the impact of Wikipedia's partisan bias on AI systems. The letter comes at a time when the public is becoming more aware about ideological bias within Wikipedia entries.

In a letter to Maryana Iskander, the chief executive officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sen. Cruz commends Wikipedia's mission to make information more accessible to the public through crowdsourced contributions and verifiable sources. He notes, however, that while the platform claims to maintain a neutral point of view, its supposed neutrality policy is anything but in part due to its list of "reliable sources" favoring left-wing news outlets.

Sen. Cruz also calls out the Wikimedia Foundation's financial contributions to left-wing organizations, arguing that such contributions reflect ideological bias. Additionally, Sen. Cruz highlights concerns over coordinated editing campaigns on Wikipedia that have spread antisemitic narratives and promoted Hamas propaganda, further undermining the platform's creditability.

Read the full letter here or below:

"I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation.

"Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That's what makes reports of Wikipedia's systemic bias especially troubling. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world, and its articles appear in more than 80 percent of desktop search results for common queries, according to Northwestern University researchers. Its influence extends even further in the age of artificial intelligence, as every major large language model has been trained on the platform. Wikipedia shapes what Americans read today and what technology will produce tomorrow.

"Wikipedia says that its articles must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). But as Wikipedia's co-founder Larry Sanger argues, 'Wikipedia's 'NPOV' is dead.' As Sanger tells it, most Wikipedia editors' 'notion of what is credible' biases them against 'conservatism, traditional religiosity, and minority perspectives on science and medicine.' And indeed, researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias. According to the Manhattan Institute: 'Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms associated with a right-leaning political orientation than to left-leaning terms,'; '[T]erms that suggest a right-wing political stance are more frequently connected with emotions of anger and disgust than those that suggest a left-wing stance,'; and '[T]erms associated with left-leaning ideology are more frequently linked with the emotion of joy than are right-leaning terms.'

"Bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia's reliable sources/perennial sources list, which aggregates the editing community's 'consensus' about the reliability of information sources like news organizations, nonprofits, and other websites. Wikipedia lists both MSNBC and CNN as 'generally reliable' sources, while listing Fox News as a 'generally unreliable' source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a 'blacklisted' and 'deprecated' source that Wikipedia's editors have determined 'promotes disinformation.'

"Another stark example of bias emerged last month after the horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, which became a cause célèbre. Police arrested a 34-year-old man, Decarlos Brown, Jr., who was seen on video footage sitting behind Zarutska before suddenly stabbing her. Yet when a Wikipedia article about the incident was created, editors tried to take down the page, claiming the incident was not notable. Others attempted to scrub details about Brown, such as his name and criminal record.

"Compounding the concern, the Wikimedia Foundation financially supports left-wing organizations that contribute to Wikipedia content. A review of the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking by the Daily Caller News Foundation found that the Wikimedia Foundation 'donated hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 2022-2023 fiscal year to activist groups seeking to bring the online encyclopedia more in line with traditionally left-of-center points of view.' One Wikimedia Foundation grant recipient, Art+Feminism, 'envision[s] dismantling supremacist systems and creating pathways for everyone to participate in writing (and righting) history.' Another grant recipient, Whose Knowledge, aims to 'decolonize the internet' and cover 'queer feminist knowledge from Bosnia and Herzegovina.'

"The Wikimedia Foundation's 'Movement Strategy,' which outlines goals for Wikipedia leading up to 2030, further reflects a left-wing bent. The Movement Strategy has two main goals: 'Knowledge as a Service'-which 'builds tools for allies'-and 'Knowledge Equity'-an attempt to 'focus on the knowledge and communities that structures of power and privilege have left out.' These goals are exemplified by the attitude of the Foundation's former CEO, Katherine Maher, who found Wikipedia's original 'free and open' ethos to be 'recapitulating many of the same power structures and dynamics that exist offline,' such as a 'white, male, Westernized construct around who matters in societies.' Put plainly, the Wikimedia Foundation has actively sought to prop up a Wikipedia editor driven by ideology over neutrality.

"Meanwhile, there is detailed evidence of a coordinated editing campaign to push antisemitic content on the platform. Through more than 1.5 million edits over the past decade, a coordinated group of editors pushed antisemitic narratives on Wikipedia while whitewashing the activities of groups like Hamas. These were not 'organic changes that occur on Wikipedia as editors update pages to reflect evolving understandings of complex issues,' but rather a 'long-running, coordinated scheme that involved serious infractions to Wikipedia's anti-bias policies.' The Wikimedia Foundation has said it is taking steps to combat this editing campaign, raising further questions about the extent to which it is intervening in editorial decisions and to what end."

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