B (3:55)

Great, thank you. How are you?

A (3:58)

Thank you for joining. Thank you for joining me today. You came across my awareness in your coverage of Wikipedia. I don't follow Wikipedia. I don't read the Wikipedia article on Zionism. I don't read the Wikipedia article on the 48 war. They're my expertise. They're my wheelhouse. I talk about them all day. I learn them all day. I read books about them. And so I did not realize that you cannot learn the Jewish Zionist understanding of Zionism from Wikipedia. You cannot learn what Zionism means to the millions of people it literally saved in the 20th century whose lives it saved from Wikipedia. If you go to Wikipedia, you will only learn one very narrow ideological explanation by non Zionists and anti Zionists and foreigners to the Zionist experience. That is the only version of Zionism you're capable of learning on Wikipedia. Wikipedia, on the narrow issues that I know has been totally hijacked, articles are not written. I am just telling you things I learned from from you. And you sent us read that stuff. I first saw your comments on this on Twitter. I went to read your articles in pirate wires and then I went to read the Wikipedia articles. And it's absolutely what you describe. You. You will read those articles and you will never know. And it's the fifth biggest website in the world, third biggest website in the world. It is incredibly important. And in the English language, you cannot go there and learn why Jews became Zionist. You literally can't. You can't Even go there and learn that there's a debate, you will go to that article and you will only learn one side. And it is not the side that actually experienced the thing that to me began to send a few alarm bells ringing, you know, and I had this comments on X I was started. People started posting more things about Wikipedia, articles on Israel, on Jews, on Jewish history, on the 20th century, triggered I think by your, by your work that really kind of began to set a new sense of what Wikipedia is and what it isn't. And by the way, if they can hijack it on our issue, and if that's systemically doable, if the structure of it is you can do that way, then there isn't a controversial issue where it can't be hijacked. This is bigger than just Israel. I of course am concerned about my people, but it's bigger than my people. What I wanted to do today is take the deep dive. You have written several articles, your latest one, it's mind blowing. But I also don't entirely understand it about Reddit. And Reddit is spectacularly important. I don't use it. So I want you to walk us through. Let's start with Wikipedia. Why is the article on Zionism in Wikipedia an article that your average Zionist cannot recognize? Not an article that lays out what Zionists think and then lays out what critics of Zionism think, which is what an encyclopedia should be. An article that I cannot find myself in. And I am about as mainstream and soft relaxed kind of Zionist as you can. I am not any edge of Zionism in any direction and I don't see myself there. How did Wikipedia turn that article specifically, but generally how did that even come about?

B (7:16)

That is a great question and there's a long complicated answer to it. Also very, very exciting and interesting one because it's so the level of coord is almost something you would find in a thriller. But the one thing I actually want to say before I dive in is that you, you mentioned that you don't go to Wikipedia and you don't go to Reddit. The problem is that both of them come to you without you ever knowing. So if Wikipedia or Reddit, but let's start with Wikipedia, if Wikipedia was just standalone walled garden website that like had a lot going on and was very popular and had a lot of traffic, it actually wouldn't really matter. And it just. Who cares. What actually happens in reality is that Wikipedia pipes almost all of its information directly into Google. So you get those results. And the very top spot in Google not just in the search results, but in the knowledge panel that you get in Google with the topic search, in the AI overview that Google will present to you. But also more importantly today it comes through in the AIs, the LLMs, it's ChatGPT, Anthropics, Claude Perplexity, also Alexa and Siri. They pull this information from Wikipedia. So you might not go to Wikipedia, but Wikipedia comes to you on these topics, you and billions of other people, without anyone actually realizing that consciously. So it's precisely because of this reason that we have the effect that you have just described. And what that is is a capture of these spaces. It's a group of editors on Wikipedia, I call them the gang of 40. It's about three dozen plus who have worked tirelessly for years in coordination with each other in often in clusters of two or three. So they sort of evade detection that way to manipulate the most important topics and also a lot of the trivial ones too, related to Israel, Palestine, anything Jew, anything having to do with Zionism for sure. And that includes everything from the mundane. So they will remove like Talmudic history from the setting of the land of Israel so that you kind of like subtly in a way that you would not really be able to spot unless you're an expert. Removing the context of the biblical tradition of the Jewish people from the land of Israel, severing that tie, and it extends through to the extremely obvious, and that would be whitewashing. Iranian human rights abuses mean wholesale removing every single mention from dozens of articles doing the same for Hamas terror attacks. Removing mention of Hamas's 1988 genocidal charter from dozens of articles doing the same for Hezbollah. And these are people who are open about this stuff in many cases. One has a, one of the main leaders of this so called Ganga40 has a user box, just a little box identifying like some of the affinities in this kind of thing that says this user supports Hezbollah, not hiding it. They're, they're, or maybe they're hiding in plain sight. So in this way they've been able to completely reshape the entire landscape having to do with Israel, the Jewish people, Palestinians, et cetera. And we're talking at the tune of around 1 million edits to 10,000 articles combined.

A (10:38)

You, you note in this article from, I guess last year that we're talking about people who are in the hundreds of a percent of top editors in Wikipedia in terms of edit counts. These are phenomenally productive Wikipedia editors with as you just said, 10,000 edits in some in the in the highest cases, but nevertheless, 10,000 edits per person that are almost the entirety of their Wikipedia activity. In other words, this is only about changing Wikipedia. And why do they need to be a gang of 40? How is it possible that they can do this en masse? Wasn't the whole point of Wikipedia that if the, if the public, if Wikipedia, it doesn't have, you know, 10 expert editors on an article, it has 10,000 expert editors or out of 10,000 people, the best versions of the truth will float to the top? That's why Wikipedia could actually, you know, put out a business, the Encyclopedia Britannica, because you could actually trust it more ironically. And that's the cool discovery of this aid. That was the kind of concept behind Wikipedia. And now we're discovering that actually there's this narrow band of ideologues who do nothing but manipulate Wikipedia and Wikipedia has no response to this. How does this, how did it fall from what it was supposed to be? Why doesn't Wikipedia know how to, how to, how to fix this? And again, imagine we're not talking about this. Imagine we're talking about the lab leak theory for Covid. You know, imagine we're talking about, I don't know what, Trump arresting people or national sending the National Guard to Portland just throwing random controversies but, but things that are controversial that somebody might have a reason to go in and edit. Is Wikipedia really totally undefended and incapable of defending itself?

B (12:21)

Short answer, yes. And I've actually reported on Wikipedia on both the topics you just mentioned, Covid lab leak, where I reported on that topic extensively for two years of the lab leak. And I know for a fact that it's a plausible theory. But when you go to the COVID lab leak entry on Wikipedia, what you will encounter is claims that it's a conspiracy theory to this day, and no serious scientist out there will actually call it a conspiracy theory. They may say it's not the case, but, but they won't say that and Wikipedia will. And same thing with Trump. There's a concerted effort to call Trump an authoritarian, a fascist. And in a lot of these cases, particularly in the Trump case, what you see is that it's one or two editors who completely dominate that effort. And that's exactly the case with the Israel related stuff as well. Wikipedia sort of grew up on this founding myth of everything you just described. It's crowdsourced, therefore it's neutral. Kind of the, the bias gets blended out in the mass contributions from thousands of people. That was actually never true. The Wikipedia is really good at telling a good story. It's probably one of its greatest strengths. And it's always had a really good story to tell. It's why it took off so quickly. Early, early days of the Internet, the early 2000s in reality. In practice, what you have are a tiny number of editors who, who dominate not just an individual article or topic area, but the entire site. So in the case of some of The Gang of 40 editors, like you said, these are guys who are in the 99.9 percentile of editors by the number of edits they do. And these are like all but full time. I mean, you're talking about people are spending hours on the site every single day. And that's not just a question of volum volume. It's also a question of expertise and know how. So if you or I even were to create an account today on Wikipedia and to say, I mean, you know what? This little fact I'm going to correct it is, I know this is wrong. This is just flat out wrong. And you make that correction, I promise you it will not stick. And if you tried it again and again and again and again, your correction will not stick. You will be defeated by editors who have some other agenda, whatever that might be. And maybe they just don't like your edit or they don't like the way you did it. The fact remains it won't stick if you go in and try to do the same thing on a contentious topic, like anything having to do with Israel at all, that fact factor is multiplied by 10x. You have no chance unless you are part of like a, a de equally dedicated effort to correct the record. And even still, you're just going to get outmaneuvered, you're going to be exhausted, you're going to throw up your hands in the air. And this is what we've seen happen in many cases. I tracked one specific case, which was in one of the pieces that there was a sort of a newbie editor who's. There was the, the article on the Mufti of Jerusalem and there was this photo of him touring a concentration camp during World War II. And this newbie editor thought that should probably be in the article about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, important Palestinian film Trigger. Two or three of the editors from the Gang of 40 strongly disagreed. They did not want that photo of the Grand Move detouring the concentration camp in the article in the entry on him. And they coordinated over the space of two, three days. And they just exhausted this guy until he threw up his hands and said okay, goodbye. And that article does not contain that photo. And that's just one tiny little microcosm.

A (15:56)

What does it take? What does it take to build the necessary mass of editor? I don't know, what would you call it? Editor gravitas? Editor level? Editor permission structure? What does it take to build up the necessary numbers and the necessary seniority? Are we really talking about 40 people? Is this something that the tiniest little, I don't know what Iranian intelligence operation literally in three office offices in a single hallway could, could pull off?

B (16:26)

Yes, it's that it's that sensitive to dedicated editors with extreme know how and understanding of sort of the parliamentary rules structure of Wikipedia and that how that, how that actually works. You're I think naturally going to have a bias against Israel on Wikipedia because it leans left. It's very academic. It's what Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia calls a gasp world view, which is global, academic, secular and progressive. And that those four things in concert tend not to favor Israel. But even if you put that aside, it is just so sensitive to dedicated editors that two or three on a given article can completely dominate that article. And we see that with, there's an article on, I forget the exact title right now, but it's, it's essentially Zionism, race and genetics, something along those lines. It's sole purpose is to sort of underhandedly equate Zionism with, with Nazi race science with Nazi style eugenics. It was created by one of the gang of 40 editors and it was edited I think around 90 plus percent by that same editor, the entire thing. And that is an article that will get pulled into ChatGPT. When you ask a question about this topic, it will get pulled into Google. One editor can have that kind of impact. If you were to say, magically wave a wand and say we're going to insert 50 Pro X editors, whatever topic, it doesn't matter. It could be Israel, it could be politics, it could be having to do with a debate on French croissant. It doesn't matter. 50 well trained, highly experienced veteran editors would absolutely be able to make to, to turn the tide and to reverse those gains. But that's not the situation. And I don't think it's going to be because the reality is that it does take I, I can't imagine less than six months to a year for an editor to really get properly geared up and dedicate enough time to be able to fight effectively.

A (18:25)

I look through the Zionism article back in the day when you came out with these articles initially a few months back, I went into the Zionism article and very prominently placed was a sub headline about eugenics and Zionism. You would learn that some nutty Zionist thinker somewhere in 19th century Europe thought about eugenics, which everyone in Europe thought about in nutty, stupid, crazy ways. I should just say millions upon millions upon millions of people have been Zionists. Some of them are racist. That is not an argument. That is not a thing. It's, it's, it's. If I apply those standards to the Arab world, they fall flat on their face as the most horrible people on earth. Not because they're the most horrible people on earth, but because I can find among them, for example, the most important Palestinian leader, not only touring a concentration camp, but touring a concentration camp with his Nazi allies. He was on the Nazi side of that concentration camp equation and actually raising SS brigades among Muslims in the Balkans in the war. And if I can define the other side that way. So the idea that you'll find a racist Zionist is obviously you'll find a racist Zionist. I can tell you some that the Wikipedia article forgot about. That's not the issue. The issue is you will learn about some nutty, weird, marginal eugenicist before you will learn that millions of Jewish refugees moved to the land with no other option and actually became Zionists because of the massive increase in pressure and laws against them and massacres of Jews long before the Holocaust. You will not literally learn the lived experience of the millions of actual people before learning about this essentially just libel campaign about eugenics and Zionism. It's an insane thing. And even to now talk about it means I keep saying Zionism and eugenics together. So I'm already radicalizing people to think in those terms because that's how libels work. And so they throw it out there. Now I went back before we met today and the eugenics thing is not there. There's some race and Zionism article, it's been very upgraded, it's been, it's been made a lot less, you know, on the nose a lot. But it's still, foundationally that argument is still there. The racialization of the Jews as some kind of a Zionist idea. And the most fundamental thing I still can't find in the article, the thing Herzl actually argued would happen, the thing that 90% of Israeli Jews grandparents actually experienced, still isn't in the article. Still isn't in the article. And so you will have this just fantasy world that is entirely propaganda and it runs the place. Have you ever found an example from the conservative side, some kind of a conservative effort that took over on some conservative issue? I'm just imagining abortion, immigration, Wikipedia articles and managed to do that very thing, that very kind of manipulation and takeover in a different political direction or does it only ever work in one direction?

B (21:22)

It almost always works in one direction. And this is the problem is that Wikipedia has a worldview and it has, you know, there's almost like a sensibility and aesthetic something that draws people on the left more towards quote unquote word cell type activities. Really being able to manipulate language concepts and ideas that you don't find on the right in those kinds of numbers. But just to go back to the Zionism thing for one second, if you look at the Zionism article today is the lead of the article that's the important top section that most people will read and gets pulled into most other platforms. The second sentence I think of the lead is something that is quite clearly attempting to equate Zionism with ethnic cleansing. And again, this is not an accident. This is not product of a neutral crowdsourced process. This is a product of leaders of The Gang of 40 who specifically went in and added that sentence. But they didn't stop there. And this is what, this is where.

A (22:18)

They kind of took their hand, wanted to create, this is what it says, a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible, right?

B (22:28)

So that last part, that last part.

A (22:30)

Of the sentence created in the downfall of the multi ethnic empires. There is no nation state that, that wasn't its primary objective. Palestinians wanted to create an Arab state with as few Jews and as much land as possible. I mean that is not to have that sentence as if this is some crime of the Jews and not everybody everywhere. It was what the Bulgarians wanted. The Turks and the Greeks exchanged millions of people in the Treaty of Lausanne. People who had lived for millennia where they had lived almost the entirety of the Greeks of Anatolia which had been core Greek speaking the Athenian empire ruled over over city states in Anatolia. Those greeks in the 1920s forcibly were relocated into the state of Greece because Turkey wanted that same thing and Greece wanted that same thing. Ditto for Turks from Suddenly, for example, I don't even need to think it's a good thing. I just need to. It's just I. There's no chance. That's the first sentence of the Greek nationalism, right? There's no chance. That's in the first sentence of the foundation of modern Turkey, which included, incidentally, a genocide of Armenians and mass expulsion of ethnic Greeks and the escape of most Jews. There's no chance that'll be in the first paragraph. It'll be all about Turkish identity and Turkish history and Turkish and the fall of the empire. Right. This is an extraordinary sentence, and it's there right now. And it completely reframes Zionism in a way that it never actually tries against any other nationalism. And people can look this up.

B (23:58)

And not only that. So, yes, there's very, very little chance that you would find anything equivalent for any other group on the planet. But what you absolute promise you will not find is what the same group of editors did after inserting that sentence in there is they. They locked it. They put a freeze on that opening section. They call it a moratorium. It's never been used. There is something called a moratorium on Wikipedia. It's never been used in this fashion where you freeze, you just lock unilaterally. We're just going to say we're going to do this. And they have a vote where they dominate the vote. So they freeze it for a year so no other editor can touch that sentence that they've manipulated. And the reason they chose a year is because after my initial report came out last October, there was a hearing at Wikipedia's high court, they call it ARPCOM Arbitration Committee. And six of these leaders of the gang of 40 were banned from editing in that space for a year, at which point they can appeal. So what they did is they. They quickly stuck in the manipulation weeks before their ban was handed down. They froze that section of the article until their bans can be possibly repealed, at which point they can start fighting the good fight again to keep that kind of language in the article. They made it such that nobody else can touch it. And coming back to the question you asked me, why can't someone else just get in there and start editing? These guys are so adept at manipulating rules in this fashion, and they're so good at using their momentum and their numbers, that they have these procedural mechanisms to make it such that it is now impossible for anybody to change that sentence.

A (25:38)

So they rule the Wikipedia article. And crowdsourcing and what most people think and what most people think, what most people the article is about, think about their own experience, are now totally irrelevant to the Wikipedia editing process.

B (25:52)

Do we know exactly? We do know some of them. I, in this, I did a story for Tablet magazine about the Zionism moratorium, the freeze, and there are a few had publicly been identified before I didn't, I didn't identify them publicly. It's their information was online. A couple of them are Australian academics who are part of this effort. There are others that are British. A lot of foreign, let's foreign to the United States nationals. And that's a problem for Wikipedia because it's a 501c3 tax exempt organization in the United States. It is able to accept revenue without being taxed because it is supposedly contributing to the common good and interests of the United States and social bettering the society and culture of the U.S. but when you have what appears to be coordinated foreign interference on this information platform, you're running into a lot of problems. The Congress has stood up an investigation in the oversight committee into this exact problem of foreign interference on Wikipedia, and particularly with the pro Hamas editors that we're talking about, which came after my, my initial report in October. But it's not slowing down, it's not stopping. And part of the reason you'd kind of alluded to this question, because Wikipedia or Wikimedia foundation, which owns and operates the site, and it's supposed to be its sort of custodian, has no investigative tools to understand these issues whatsoever. All the information that we're talking about right now, everything that we have surfaced up until this point has come from user generated content. That's either me digging in the archives for weeks and weeks at a time, or it's users sources who are doing the same thing. Wikimedia foundation itself is unable to produce this kind of information still to this day, which is remarkable because this is an organization with a $200 million annual budget.

A (27:35)

Wow, I did not realize they had a $200 million annual budget. Let me ask this very bluntly. When my bank makes a mistake, somehow, through some magic of quantum physics, the mistake is only ever in the bank's favor and it's never in my favor. And so either it's not truly a mistake, it's the bank trying to, you know, see what it can get away with. And I'm in one of, I bank at one of the biggest banks in Israel, mainstay serious bank, or, and this I think is true of all banks, or the bank has instituted to make sure it doesn't make mistakes that cost it money. You know, algorithmic massive, careful checks that are layered checks that make sure that if a bank is losing money on something, something comes in and double checks that it's appropriate and not an error, and it doesn't bother placing a system like that in place for me Losing money, only for it losing money. Those are both kinds of biases, right? If Wikipedia can only ever have this happen in one direction, is it understaffed or does it not care? Is it understaffed or is it totally on board and pretending to be understaffed because it doesn't want to lose its 501c3 status? But I have a hard time believing that it can only ever go in one direction. That this stuff is so egregious that people can shut down deeply controversial ideological arguments and totally seal them off and not actually be representative of the very people it's talking about. And that, and that this. There's literally nothing Wikipedia can do. I don't believe it for a second.

B (29:16)

Wikimedia foundation employs 400 engineers and product specialists. So, you know, that's the size of a medium, maybe slightly large digital tech company. So the notion that they're understaffed is. It's just not the case. They have a. I think she's called the CTO or she might be head of product. Whatever she is, she earns I think around $400,000 a year. This is at a nonprofit. And again, what I said that their.

A (29:51)

Budget, their budget is sending $10 a month in. She earns $400,000 a year. The chief of product, the person responsible.

B (29:58)

Yeah, yeah, right, right. About that. Their head of revenue is making about the same at around 400. Their, their executive director is above that. So they are spending close to the number is. Is massive. I think it's over 150 million on. On salaries. So the idea that they're understaffed is not the case. They're getting tons of money from donations. They have a. They run their own private llc. It's a wholly owned LLC for profit enterprise company. They sell their data to big tech companies. No one really talks about this. Nobody knows about it. So it's not about being understaffed. It's about. It is about not caring. They could address this if they want to. What Wikimedia foundation will tell you is that they are sort of air gapped from the Wikipedia community. It's supposed to be the community that takes care of this stuff. Arbitration committee that I'd mentioned before, the admins, various other people who are volunteers on the site. There are only about 10 active arbitration committee members for 7 million articles. So you can imagine what is the likelihood that any of this is actually going to get taken care of. There's probably only about 600 or so active admins on the entire site. And these are People that are dealing with issues that pop up every single day across millions of articles. The notion that the community is ever going to be able to handle this is just a joke. But the bigger point is that when it so chooses, Wikimedia foundation will absolutely step in and enforce their own prerogatives on the site. They have the complete ability technically and the authority to make any change they want at any time. They can ban any user. They don't have to tell you why they've changed articles. They have, yes. And they, well, the biggest, the biggest tool in their toolbox is actually to be able to just ban an editor for, for whatever reason. They don't state the reason, actually they can just ban it and remove the, they can change articles. They have done. They remove articles when it, when it violates. You know, again, these are processes that they don't surface, they don't tell you there's not. They hold transparency as one of their core values. But when it comes to making these kinds of behind the scenes changes, they don't tell you what they are, why they were made or even sometimes what the changes were. So there is a lot of storytelling going on at Wikimedia foundation and this is one of its great strengths, as I said before, but it's also a massive weakness because they've, they really drink the Kool Aid and they really believe that it's all amazing and this is a huge trust machine and the problems are being overblown by journalists like me and they're being overstated. But what you see is recently actually Jimmy Wales, the co founder of Wikipedia jumped into the thread discussion about the Gaza genocide article. This was only a couple weeks ago saying this article is obviously biased and not in Israel's favor as you might imagine. And of course this was all been manipulated by the same gang of 40 actors. Whale said we need to rethink how this article has been constructed and take a real close look at it. What happened after that is quite wild. He was referred to arbitration committees, sort of like sent to, to, to jail to be judged because he dared to step in. And he is now the subject of an investigation for having voiced his opinion on the discussion page about this article. So the idea that Wikipedia has a self correcting mechanism is not accurate to say the least. What is going on in the site is endemic. And when we come back to your question about conservative stuff, and you know, I have never seen a successful conservative or, or right biased, right skewing influence campaign on Wikipedia, I'm sure there have been attempts. But as an example, one of the more prominent conservative editors or I don't know if she would actually just self identify as conservative, but she was trying to battle what she perceived to be left wing bias in American politics. Topic area and her username is atsme. She was just banned from the space outright. They just topic banned her. They got rid of her. She was vocal in a way they didn't like. She actually went off and created her own competitor to Wikipedia. It's doing really great. But the point is that you're, you're, I, I don't know if conservatives or even let's say if pro Israel people are fighting in this manner. What I do know is that if they were to try, they just would not win.

A (34:35)

So the system itself, the actual crowdsource system doesn't function. It's easily taken over and the organization that should be preserving the crowdsource element, the, you know, the self correcting mechanisms that are supposedly underlying the whole thing, doesn't want to, doesn't want to get involved. It can get involved. It does get involved when something runs afoul of its worldview, but when it doesn't run afoul of its worldview, it doesn't. And so functionally what we have is that Wikipedia, under the banner of this, you know, trust, what do you call it, trust mechanism, trust exercise under that banner is simply a tool of mass manipulation for political ends. It's just one more deeply partisan media outlet.

B (35:28)

Yeah. And it's, it's the, the super outlet. Because what it does is it, it, they're able to, they're training all the AIs and they're, they're gathering this information from other media outlets that are selectively chosen. And there's a list on Wikipedia called Reliable Sources, that's what you can cite as a source. What's eligible, admissible to be cited as a source and what's not. And when you look at the last, you're like, okay, we have, until recently Jacobin, the like far left socialist website was green coded for reliable. Where you have something like the Washington Times or almost anything on the right Daily Mail, others that are either red coded or Fox News is like, I think it's deprecated. They call it depreciated, which means you can never use it as a source. Whereas you go as far as you want on the other direction like the Nation and also Al Jazeera is green coded on Wikipedia. It's considered generally reliable. It doesn't matter to Wikipedia that it is controlled and Ostensibly it's owned by the Qatari government, the royal family. It still gets green coded. Why? I There is no good surface level explanation for that. Even China Daily, which is a, a out andout state owned and operated propaganda organ for the Chinese government, is yellow coated. So China, China Daily, a propaganda organ for an adversary nation of the United States, has a higher ranking on their reliability list than many conservative American news outlets that have a proper editorial structure and oversight and accountability.

A (36:55)

How do you fix it? What would fixing it look like? Who would you expect to fix it? Is it fixable if you were placed in charge? If you were, I don't know what testifying before Congress and a congressperson says, what do you want me to do? I'm not going to now legislate that a private website is going to change its opinion, by the way, as you and I have agreed that any that if they had just been a website that called itself, you know, the opinion of we 4,000 people, that would have been a completely legitimate platform that says whatever it wants. It's the claim to neutrality. It's the pretense to being crowdsourced information that isn't crowdsourced information. It is ideologically captured and very right. What, what is there to be done? Is there anything to be done?

B (37:41)

I mean the biggest thing I think that we can do right now is what we're doing right now at this very moment. We're just talking about this. People just don't know about it. There has been a dearth of analysis and reporting on the topic often except in Wikipedia's favor because again, they had this amazing story, this like early 2000s Internet thing and neutrality and crowdsource and it, you know, kind of like confirmed a lot of biases. And so the media predominantly told that story. They didn't do the deep dive, the dumpster dive kind of stuff. It's not fun. It's not that rewarding to be in these edit histories for weeks on end to like Surface and try to find the patterns. We didn't have technology until today that could really help with these like tools that could do this in a better way. So what can be done, number one is the investigations and reporting. There is another journalist who I've worked with named Aaron Bandler, who's been really great on this stuff. Aside from Aaron and a couple other people, there are just very few people looking at this. So getting this to the national sort of conversation in the US is particularly important. And we're finally there. Larry Sanger, the co founder of Wikipedia, published A series of essays called the Nine Theses of about a month or so ago, maybe a little more, where he called out the biggest issues on the site right now. And he, you know, it's like this pretense of consensus that's not a real consensus. The fact that we don't know who the most powerful admins and editors are. People have extraordinary powers on the site. We just don't know their identities, that kind of thing where we're actually starting to talk about these things. It's a big deal. It is a big deal. Yeah, yeah. There are editors.

A (39:20)

How do you move on from that one fact? You don't know the identity of the most powerful editors. And we've established that hierarchy of editorship is profoundly influential and can shut out entire interpretations and worldviews. Even if they are the majority of the actual people being discussed. Those use can't enter because of hierarchies of editorship. And the people at the top are not known to Wikipedia.

B (39:42)

Yeah, and it's actually even more serious than that because there are certain select users on the site, they're called check users, who have the ability to track IP addresses to. It's extremely sensitive. Like even if you're logged out with a vpn, you go to the site, they will still, they have tools on the site that if you're on the, on the website on wikipedia.org they will be able to track your, your, your IP address and ban you if they so decide. We don't know who those people are and there's, there's not that many of them. There's just probably Larry, Larry Sanger calls it the Power 62. So there's 62 ultra powerful users and those include the check users, the arbitration committee and one other classic category that I forget right now. We don't know who they are and I don't know that anybody else does either. I think maybe Wikimedia foundation has some insight into who they are, but the rest of us don't know. So to answer the question, we need to be. We need focus on the issue of Wikipedia's influence and what's actually happening on the site first and foremost before anything else. Whether or not it can change or could be saved, I don't know. I'm. We might be moving fast enough technologically now. We have Elon Musk releasing his competition, his competitor site Grokopedia, which is AI driven, AI driven encyclopedia. And that might make a enormous dent in Wikipedia's control. The key thing to understand up until today and again Nobody talks about this. Wikipedia had a complete and total monopoly on topical information online. There was no competitor. And part of the reason they had such a great monopoly is because they were in a very, very close enmeshed partnership with another massive monopoly, and that's Google. Without Google providing that most favored nation status to Wikipedia, such that every single article gets the number one search ranking. And if anyone out there has done any kind of SEO, or if you're running a small business, some kind of thing, you know how hard it is to get that first ranking on a Google search result. You know, it's monetary value. And if you take that across hundreds of thousands of articles, we're talking about Google granting Wikipedia literally billions of dollars in, in, in SEO value. And the reason they did that is because in exchange in the early days when Google was still growing up as a company, it got all this valuable so called vetted verified content for free. They didn't have to pay anyone to write these articles, which would have been a very expensive. Google in you know, the early 2000s, mid and 2010s, was not a trillion dollar company. It was a company that was still rising, had, could not support this kind of effort. So you had this mutualism. And what it, what it basically created was what I consider to be a knowledge cartel between two organizations locked together. Nobody talked about this, nobody even noticed it. And this is the result today.

A (42:34)

A knowledge cartel fairly easily captured by small commando units.

B (42:39)

Yeah, which also because of it, its structure made it, I think, the biggest backdoor into the information ecosystem by far. It's the, the easiest to exploit vulnerability with by far the biggest effect on what we call the downstream effects, the down the, the side where the information appears.

A (43:03)

Ashley, what is Reddit?

B (43:06)

Reddit is a community structured. So you have these, it's a, it's almost like a forum in a way, like an Internet forum as we thought about them in the earlier days. But it's built around small communities or some sometimes very big communities that each dedicated to a given topic. So on Reddit you have the Judaism community where people could be members and they write messages to each other and they post and they, they talk to each other. So unlike X, formerly Twitter, where it's just this open system and the, the algorithm surfaces content, but there's not a structure to the site by topic. Reddit actually has that kind of structure where each community is its own enclosed thing and you're only supposed to talk about those issues. And each community has volunteer moderators that determine the rules for their community and Enforce them as well. Reddit works in a very different way than X because of this, which is that it doesn't have this kind of algorithm that surfaces more engaged or engaging content. Rather people have upvoting and downvoting. So if you like a piece of content or you like a post, you upvote it and if you don't, you downvote it. And it's a very one to one thing. So that the content that is more upvoted than other content rises higher into the feed and sometimes it rises high enough that it gets put onto like the Reddit main page all and it is extremely important as well like Wikipedia for both Google, you get the results high up on Google searches and also for AI because it's extremely well structured. It's unlike, unlike X Twitter where you have just kind of like really choppy posts and like language that doesn't often make sense to the outside world. On Reddit you have people writing, writing mostly and sentences and the posts are longer. That makes it the data very valuable for AIs. And the other thing is that unlike a lot of the other platforms whose owner companies are developing their own AI, Reddit is not doing it. So Reddit can is free to sell its data to virtually everybody, which is pretty much what it does.

A (45:11)

So I, I used Reddit in the past, but in a very limited way, basically for I don't know what memes, guitar stuff, extremely banal. It's extremely helpful when 4000 people upvote a trick with I don't know what some home improvement I'm trying to work on. It's sent to you from an audience that has tried it and that is an incredibly useful thing. I have never gone into the Palestine group, I have never gone into the Zionism group, I've never gone into the conflict group, the Gaza war group. All of these, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these groups dealing not with world affairs, but just with world affairs that I happen to know something about and deal with in some way. You have a piece in which you identify a network that coordinates across platforms that is connected to the 40 editors on Wikipedia and that has systematically used Reddit to send armies of users to different places to achieve the kind of crowdsourced up voting and all kinds of different platforms, not just Reddit. It's connected to the Discord servers where they have these discussions. Tell us about that network. First of all, how did you find it? What is it? How big is it and what is it actually achieving? What is it capable of doing?

B (46:31)

I was tipped off to this by sources who are sort of deep in the Reddit world or experienced Redditors and had found this happening after October 7th because as one of the sources said to me, it was like someone flipped a switch. It wasn't October 8th or 9th or 10th, it was October 7th where they started receiving this tidal wave of pro terror, anti Semitic abuse. And they themselves took it upon themselves using, using their own tools, their own time. This was like not, not something that anyone prodded them to do. They're just regular users to track it and to, to try to understand where this was coming from. And what they found was that there is a coordinated network on Reddit. It's basecamped out of one of the communities called R Palestine. R is first, R is for Reddit and slash is for Palestine. That, that's the structure of the naming of the communities. And it wasn't just that these guys were promoting unsavory or abusive or even intimidating stuff that wasn't that. If that had it, I mean that'd be enough. And that's bad. But what the kernel of this effort is that this group in our Palestine goes to Telegram, where there's pretty much no content moderation policies or enforcement. So you can post anything. And the terror organizations understand this. So on Telegram you have channels for Hamas, Houthis, Hezbollah, literally dozens of other Islamic terror groups.

A (48:05)

Just to, just to emphasize this point literal, I mean we Israeli journalists follow these telegram accounts. These are Hamas spokespeople, Hamas infrastructure that is talking to the world, putting out videos of themselves killing Palestinian dissidents who oppose them, things like that. So literally goes to these Hamas, actual Hamas, Correct?

B (48:24)

Yeah, this is like as official as it gets as communication channels for these groups. So the, our Palestine group, the network, what they do is they go to Telegram, they take posts from the terror group's own channels, they translate them into English and then they post them out into the broader channels across not just Reddit, it's like I said, it's base camp. It's sort of headquartered, headquartered out of the Our Palestine group. But they then spread it across Reddit, they spread it into X, into Discord, into Instagram, on community notes, basically into the, the social media, groundwater, sort of poisoning the groundwater. This is something that is done deliberately, it's done systematically. It's not the only thing they do. They also do boost terror promoting content. They pro, they, they post anti Semitic content. They are extremely active. And again, a lot of these people are appear to be dedicated as in this is what they do with most of their day. A lot of this cannot be done within an hour here. There, you know, some of the users are that and they're sort of like useful idiots. But for the core group it looks to be something that is beyond a hobby. It looks something that is in borderline professional or some cases actually does appear to be professional. We're talking eight to ten hours a day of activity. Including one of them.

A (49:49)

How many people? Sorry? Including one of them.

B (49:53)

Including one of them who is, let's say the, the top, I would say the. One of the top boosters of Hamas online today is called Zay Squirrel. On X mostly. So how many people? Zei Squirrel? Yeah.

A (50:09)

How many people are we talking about? What does this look like on Wikipedia? You have the core core, maybe hundreds of supporters. What does it look like on Reddit?

B (50:17)

I would say it's around dozens of core group members, including a lot of moderators. So the moderators of communities are probably number in the dozens. And what they've done is they haven't stayed within their own like pro Palestinian or anti Israel communities as moderators because they wouldn't be really effective. You can't expand your reach that way. So what they've done is they've systematically infiltrated mainstream non political communities like our documentaries, which has 20 million people. It's supposed to be about just documentaries, but the moderators from the our Palestine core group are now moderators in that community. And if you go and you look carefully, you can't see this at first glance, but if you really go and look, you'll see there's a cadence every three, every four documentaries that get posted in that channel, in that community are anti Israel. It's the rhythm that you don't see with regard to any other topic and it's boom, boom, boom. And that is even more effective than just posting crazy screedy stuff into their own communities. Because you're exposing up to 20 million people who are non aligned and that's what you really want to capture. You want to capture hearts and minds of people who are maybe on the fence or don't have an opinion and poison them using these tactics and this information.

A (51:29)

I have a question about Reddit. I read the piece on Wikipedia. It's very clear to me this is just a mass ideological manipulation. The people who want the whole world to only know what they know and only read what they read, I can't blame them. They're not exactly cagey about it. Wikipedia has completely and utterly collapsed. And the one thing it had One job, right? The one thing it's supposed to be able to accomplish, it cannot accomplish. That is very clearly a design flaw that the current staff at Wikipedia enjoy about Wikipedia. They like the fact that they have crashed Wikipedia from its foundational core mission and promise in order to serve certain political agendas and ends. Okay? But it is a fault. It is a failure driven by political manipulation that is very easy to do and has tremendous consequences for public discourse. How do I know in Reddit that it isn't just organic activism? Because again, the Palestine group in Reddit is a quarter million people, something like that. And the documentaries is 20 million. You listed a couple others of 10 million and 5 million groups that are these neutral groups that they've infiltrated. But it's still a large group of people interested in the topic, supporters. Only a few of them are, you know, fanatically activists, but only a few people ever are fanatically activists on any topic, even on my side of issues, on any other side of issues. What is, can this be organic activism? And that's the shape of it in, in Reddit and you know, bad on my side for not having these dedicated fanatical activists to push back and, and build their own campaigns. Is, is that, how do I know in Reddit that it's like the Wikipedia manipulation and not just organic?

B (53:18)

We can see it behind the scenes. So you can't see it as a regular user. And I actually can't see it either, but my sources can because they infiltrated a lot of the behind the scenes groups, the channels that are not supposed to be seen by anybody but the insiders of the group. And you can see their coordination. You can see that they are pushing this stuff in coordinated fashion. And we've seen that the overlap that you mentioned between the Wikipedia stuff and anti Israel, pro Hamas stuff and Reddit, a lot of it happened in a place called Tech for Palestine, which is this group of people who are like doing activism and advocacy for the Palestinian cause. And again, group on Reddit it's on, it's across channels, but primarily it was on Discord. They run it on Discord, right?

A (54:04)

This was a Wikipedia article from, from back then. Yeah.

B (54:08)

Yes. So a lot of the same people are active in the Tech for Palestine discord, and the same thing with the just Reddit people alone on their own. They work on Discord behind the scenes to coordinate the editing and the posting that they do on Reddit. So if you are just a regular user, you will have no idea that there is coordination going on. But because the sources that I have are extremely skillful and dedicated and they, they've really, because they, they value Reddit so much. It's not that they came to from, from the point of view saying we need to tear this down for them. These guys have been on the, on the site actively, some of them are, for a decade, and you're talking about daily activity. These are friendships for them. This is really meaningful for them. And when they see this kind of thing happening, they say to themselves, this is not normal, it's not natural. And they've, they've spent the time to do this kind of thing where they can actually dig up what's happening. So that is what they did. They found the places where this coordination was happening, they stood up new accounts that were used to do this kind of thing so they could get insight into what was happening. They brought this to the attention of Reddit's management. And this is where the story has a twist. Because Reddit, in response, did not take any action. Far from actually doing something about the problem. What they did is they instituted or encouraged a series of policy changes for the Jewish users that sort of locked them into their own communities. They couldn't post out of their own communities, they couldn't post into their own communities, they couldn't report content outside of the communities. And it had the effect of creating what these sources describe as a digital ghetto.

A (55:44)

I should say that's kind of Reddit's solution to everything. In other words, there was, and you hinted at the piece. I don't remember if I read this in your piece or in other things that I was looking at about Reddit to try to understand our conversation today, because again, you know, I've dipped into Reddit for fun little ditties, not, not anything serious. Reddit had a problem, a systemic problem with conservative groups. Anybody can establish groups, you can have a lot of people flock to them. You upvote, you downvote. It doesn't pretend to be some kind of objective arbiter of knowledge. It's literally just an upvoting social media kind of group. And it had conservative groups, and then it had these moderation problems, these claims made by conservative groups and obviously on controversial issues, because when you have political groups that lean left or right, they're going to talk about the controversies. They're not going to talk about the things they all agree on. And they shut them down, they banned them, they quarantined them. They, they, they created very separate and distinct rules for conservative groups. And so in as much as Reddit, the organization has gotten involved and again, I, I don't feel that Reddit has betrayed me, the user. By the way, for many years I was a donor to Wikipedia. Not a big donor, 10, 15 bucks a month, something like that. I thought it was a wonderful idea and then I discovered what was going on there and obviously I canceled my donation. Now Wikipedia doesn't miss my 10 bucks, but I did identify with Wikipedia and I do feel betrayed by Wikipedia. Reddit has no such mission, so it doesn't betray me. It's a, it's a neutral platform that's manipulated by people who, I don't know what are paid salaries to do this, are organized to do this. My side doesn't organize to do these things, so I don't hold it against them. But they've done this not just to Israelis, not just to Jews, not just to Zionism, not just to Israel in the Gaza war context. They've done this to conservatives on conservative issues. Is there some way to come to the Reddit organization and say, guys, either you are a platform or you will, I don't know what, not be as successful. In other words, it's a. People who go there thinking they're experiencing diverse opinions don't know that in fact, in practice, functionally, it's a, It's a walled garden. It's not a walled garden, it's. What is it? How would you describe it? It's curated, essentially. It's, it's an echo chamber. It's a careful. Curated to remove things that the organization isn't willing to defend. I think that would be the standard the organization sets or the mechanism the organization works with.

B (58:13)

So it's true.

A (58:14)

Way beyond the Israel question.

B (58:17)

Yes. The problem with that analysis is that you may, Reddit may just not like Israel, which is fine as a, as a culture that just may just have that bias. No problem. Like you can, if you're on the platform as and you like Israel, maybe it's on you to go somewhere else. But what we're talking about here is boosting prescribed terror organization organizations. These are US designated terror organizations whose content is being laundered by this group active on Reddit. And the bar for them to ban a community is actually not that high. As you kind of mentioned, they banned the Donald. This was by far the biggest pro Trump community on the Internet, period. They banned it and I believe they did that in advance of the, the 2020 election. I, I would have to go back and check. They ban fat shaming communities, they ban anti trans communities. There was one instance where the, the sort of head of trust and safety there banned 2,000 communities in a single day. She just banned them all. So they don't have a problem stepping in in a very heavy handed way when it meets their agenda. And again, that's okay. The problem is when you're not taking that kind of action when it comes to terror, laundering, pipelines. Yeah.

A (59:42)

Hamas, Hezbollah and you specifically show there Hezbollah and terror groups from Iraq. And it's again, it's beyond Gaza. It's a systemic Islamist voice at a mass scale with careful and massive organization to make sure that it is constantly upvoted on Reddit where AIs among other places AIs are learning one of the most important places. AIs are learning about the world and how to teach everybody everywhere who now turns to AI for everything. By the way, ChatGPT has replaced Google for me. I'm typing about some, I don't know what, some, something about the 1956 war. I want to fact check myself, make sure my memory is correct. I don't go to Google anymore because I'm going to get 11 pages of meaningless drivel before I get to the actual, I don't know what academic who actually carefully analyzes the fact that I need to know. So I go to ChatGPT. You have to make sure to say send me the link. Because ChatGPT also hallucinates. It's in the nature of LLMs to also tell you things that aren't true. But nevertheless it's basically become if it has a link onward, it's almost always the correct link. It's, it's just a better Google and that's now being trained on those Reddit platforms. And if I'm doing it, everybody's doing it. I'm not a new car. I'm not like at the vanguard of anything on the Internet.

B (60:57)

Right? Yeah. And it's, it's one to one. You can we, we've tested this, we've looked at it. We, it's in some of my reporting where you can ask a question about, let's say which, which organizations should I donate money to to help Palestinians in Gaza? You're going to get posts from Reddit by this group of our Palestine activists, coordinated propagandists, whatever they are, that are recommending organizations in their favor and organizations that are extremely problematic and have links to organizations that you don't want them to have links to. But the key point is that it pulls directly from those posts into your chatgpt and A lot of times you just, you know, it may cite a source, it may not, but you won't necessarily click through that link to understand what it's about. And even if you did, you as a user with your own profession and your busy life, are you going to actually go and investigate who those users are on Reddit that posted that? What is our Palestine? What does it mean? How is it tied into, Are you even going to go and take the time to read like four of my 3,000 word articles about the. You're not, you're just going to believe it. And, and that's the core issue here, is that there, there is no filter mechanism for what's coming through from Reddit or from Wikipedia because they are open ended. They, they are not backstopped in that way and the information is not secured. And propagandists know this. It's again, it's not just about Israel and on Wikipedia, I'm right in the middle of a report about pro China and CCP infiltration of Wikipedia, which is massive and widespread. It's about Qatar, it's about Russia, it's about everybody who has an interest in warping the conversation in their direction.

A (62:45)

There's a wonderful video put out by a YouTube channel called Kurzgesagt, which in some European language means something. I apologize, it's an English language channel. I don't know what they, what that means, but they produce wonderful cartoon videos about science. Extremely high level, extremely interesting, extremely good, extremely well produced. And they put out a fascinating video about a month ago and I will, my kids love watching it. I show my kids these videos and this video is about how, how they tried to create a video, a science video about brown dwarf stars using AI. All the other videos they've ever made have been humans. They have a staff of I think 60. It's an enormous operation and maybe they can save some money and just have AI do the research for them. And their experience was so fascinating and so horrifying that they made a video about it. Because it's a scientific question today where basically what it did was it produced for them a script of a video and it had sources and the sources sounded great. But some of them were invented by the AI on the spot. Some of them went to other places that were articles that when they fed those articles, those scientific journalism articles basically into AI spotting software were mostly AI. And so there was one specific enormous fact, I believe, about the prevalence of brown dwarf stars in the universe that was a just a hallucination of AI that Worked its way into some unscrupulous journalist's article and was then used by other AIs as a sourced fact from scientific journalism to create scripts for these videos. And they said, you know, if we didn't have our three layers of fact checking for our human editors who we then applied to this, we wouldn't have caught that. We would have said, look, some magazine, I don't think it was Scientific American, but let's say Scientific American wrote this. That's fantastic. I have a source, I have a footnote, I can put it in the show notes. And it was fantasies built upon fantasies built upon fantasies of how AI just learns and where it goes to learn. We live in an age where all of this stuff that was meant to democratize knowledge has just turned knowledge into the province of propagandists at a level and at a personal level. In other words, it brings it into my home, into my hand, onto my phone that we've never experienced before. You know, to get regime propaganda or to get mass coordinated ideological, you have to go outside your house and you had to join a crowd and you had to go to a speech and you had to read a book. You don't anymore. The simple questions fed to you come from these self referencing AIs that are unbelievably easily manipulated without many people and without much money. You just have to know how the system works. And most people don't know how the system works. I'm terrified if it's happening to just a science YouTube channel for kids. I'm terrified. I deal with Israel, Jews, Gaza, war, history. I'm a political reporter from Israel. Was my day job before October 7th. And you deal with digital reporting from in the west and all this new information space. We come from very different places, but in our separate spaces. We see it. But what we're seeing, and this is I guess my last question to you. Sometimes questions are speeches. What we're seeing is a whole new way of doing information that means that we are far more easily manipulable than we've ever been. Instead of what all this technology was supposed to do, which is the opposite. And nobody notices and nobody cares except the malign actors who are actually doing the thing.

B (66:30)

Yeah, that's I think where we are, where, where this is all headed. And it is, it, it's not just in the AI sphere. A lot of it is, but even just the, the sort of digital video space where you have, you know, people like Candace Owens who can just go and spin these, these fantasies about Israel being involved in the, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and, and she's engaging and she's present and she's there. And that's enough to get people over the line and to get them to think maybe this is true. So it's coming from, from all directions, in all formats, all the time. And as you said, it's in our hands. It's, it's everywhere we go. We take our propaganda with us. So what do we do about this? I mean, I, I, long term, I have no idea for what I can do and what I am doing. I run now an investigative project that just focuses on digital information. It's called NPOV. Right now we're focused 100% on Wikipedia. We'll move on to the next platform. But the key thing more than anything else is to raise awareness so people understand that this exists. And to the extent possible, how it works, people just have to know that this is happening. ChatGPT and the LLMs are a wonder. That's a marvel of human achievement and accomplishment. It's incredible. I mean, I'm awed by it almost every single day. And we can get caught up in the awe and our marvel at what this, what we've been able to produce as human beings and as a civilization. But you have to stop and pay attention to what's actually happening because it's to your own detriment that this is happening. It's not just at a geopolitical level. It's not just on the social and cultural level. It's, as you said, it could be as simple as miseducating your kids accidentally without knowing. So it's about staying informed, aware of what's happening here. Just as we would do with any other threat that we face in life as human beings or adults or as parents or as educators, this is now incumbent upon us to have that same level of awareness that the threat is real.

A (68:48)

Ashley Rinsberg, thank you so much for joining me. You made me very, very pessimistic and worried because now, you know, it's good journalism.

B (68:57)

Thank you. Havish.