ADL Report - Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel
and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality

A March 2025 Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report has identified widespread anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia across multiple languages. A coordinated group of at least 30 editors systematically manipulates content related to Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, evading Wikipedia’s policies to emphasize criticism of Israel while downplaying Palestinian violence and anti-Semitism. These editors are significantly more active and coordinated than other groups, particularly since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. Additionally, Arabic-language Wikipedia contains pro-Hamas propaganda, failing to uphold Wikipedia’s neutrality standards. The ADL urges Wikipedia to address these biases and warns that platforms relying on its content should deprioritize its coverage of Jewish and Israel-related topics until these issues are resolved.

The following is an executive summary of the report. For the full report, click here.

ADL has identified extensive issues with antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia in multiple languages. These issues include 1) a coordinated campaign to manipulate Wikipedia content related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and similar issues, in which a group of editors systematically evade Wikipedia’s rules to shift balanced narratives toward skewed ones, spotlighting criticism of Israel and downplaying Palestinian terrorist violence and antisemitism; and 2) pro-Hamas perspectives informing Arabic-language Wikipedia content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

ADL has found clear evidence that a group of at least 30 editors circumvent Wikipedia’s policies in concert to introduce antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information.

These 30 editors were much more active than other comparable groups of editors, on average, by a factor of at least two, based on total edits made over the past 10 years.

• The 30 editors were much more likely than other editors to communicate with each other on Wikipedia: they were as much as 18x more active in group communications than comparable groups of editors.
• The editors appeared to coordinate to change pages related to Israel, Palestine, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, downplaying Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.
• These edits have ramped up since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and include the systematic removal of citations to reputable sources and tandem voting to keep content critical of Israel but remove coverage of Palestinian violence and terrorism.

In addition to this multiyear campaign by bad-faith editors to revise Wikipedia’s content on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ADL found evidence of biased and extremist content in Arabic-language Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s rules are not applied consistently outside of some English-language pages, allowing biased pro-Hamas content in the Arabic-language edition.

Pages related to Hamas in Arabic glorify the Palestinian terrorist organization and perpetuate pro-Hamas propaganda, while failing to follow Wikipedia’s rules for neutrality.

This report makes clear that Wikipedia needs to do far more to address anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias and coordination. Until it has done that, those who rely on Wikipedia – from Google Search to large language models like ChatGPT – must deprioritize Wikipedia’s content on issues related to Jews, Israel and the Middle East conflict so that they do not perpetuate this bias. 

Source: “Editing for Hate: How Anti-Israel and Anti-Jewish Bias Undermines Wikipedia’s Neutrality,” ADL, (March 18, 2025).