Larry Sanger, an American philosopher and internet project developer who co-founded Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001. Photo: Georg Hochmuth/Picture Alliance/APA.
Larry Sanger accused the CIA and it’s allies of editing articles for years to spread propaganda
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger accused the CIA and corporate actors of editing the online encyclopedia to serve state and institutional interests during an interview with the German daily Berliner Zeitung published on 7 August.
“I believe Wikipedia is already compromised,” Sanger said.
He added that the platform was identified early as a propaganda instrument, and that its anonymity rule made it easy to use as such.
“What we know as fact through all kinds of evidence: the CIA has already edited Wikipedia. The company Wiki-PR made millions from Wikipedia edits,” he said.
He also cited reporting by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) that Portland Communications rewrote entries for governments and billionaires, including Qatar, the Gates Foundation, and Libya’s sovereign wealth fund.
Sanger added that identifying those behind such edits is nearly impossible “because everyone is anonymous.”
Sanger also cited Katherine Maher, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, who told the Atlantic Council in 2021 that the organization had held talks with governments and other platform operators.
“The powerful are very interested in Wikipedia,” he said, describing the site’s pseudonyms as a mask, saying that the platform treats the positions of institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank as established fact.
He warned that such distortions now spread far beyond the site, as search engines and chatbots draw on the site’s texts and use its content for training.
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“Such models do not develop a life of their own once they are launched. They are functions of their training data,” he said, arguing that the platform is now written from a fixed worldview he labels GASP – globalist, academic, secular, and progressive.
On Gaza, Sanger said Wikipedia’s coverage is “clearly very one-sided,” in favor of Palestinians, and backed founder Jimmy Wales’s intervention on the “Gaza genocide” article, where Wales argued the introduction should contain more of the Israeli perspective.
“That would be neutral,” Sanger said.
Despite his claim that the platform tilts toward Palestinians, information about Israel’s genocide in Gaza is itself the target of a well-funded propaganda and erasure effort.
Israel has spent more than $1 billion on propaganda since 7 October 2023 to reverse the collapse in public support for its genocide in the strip, according to a 24 July report by Responsible Statecraft, with over $100 million of that spent in the US alone through registered foreign agents.
Part of that money goes to what the outlet describes as LLM poisoning – building pro-Israel websites designed to feed chatbots such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok when users ask about the genocide.
