Wikipedia has become a powerful weapon in the left’s political arsenal. Initially launched to democratize access to information, it has debased itself through partisanship.
No longer a straightforward source of facts, Wikipedia today is pure left-wing propaganda — and its intense campaign against Vice President JD Vance is just the latest example of its bias.
The Media Research Center’s Free Speech America division has previously reported how Wikipedia’s editors aggressively deployed the platform against nearly all of President Donald Trump’s high-level Cabinet nominees, including now-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel, ahead of their Senate confirmation hearings.
But their methods were already well tested by then.
The Cabinet stealth bombs were simply an extension of a troubling pattern of editorial deception aimed at Republicans and conservatives.
In the spring and summer of 2024, Wikipedia and its army of anonymous editors launched a massive smear campaign against one of Trump’s leading vice-presidential contenders, then-Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.
These editors made nearly 900 slashing revisions to Vance’s Wikipedia page in less than three months during the hotly contested VP sweepstakes from late April to mid-July.
We detail these findings in a new MRC report, released Thursday.
Meanwhile, during this critical period when the term “JD Vance” was being heavily searched online, Google’s algorithms continued to give Wikipedia’s entries top placement in its search results, escalating the platform’s presentation of falsehood as fact.
MRC’s research found that in 2022, prior to launching his US Senate run, Vance’s Wikipedia page painted him in a largely positive light, including bipartisan praise for his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Over the course of a five-year span (March 2017 through May 2022), about 500 edits were made to the Vance page — far fewer than the Wikipedia hit squad made in just a few weeks in 2024.
Wikipedia editors were not rushing to their computers to fix grammatical errors.
Their avalanche of edits reflected a coordinated and deliberate election interference initiative.
It was an attempted death by a thousand cuts — or 883 of them, to be precise.
For example, Wikipedia editors inserted a new section, “Relationship with Donald Trump,” that hyped past comments likely to cause friction between the president and his potential running mate, while minimizing Vance’s subsequent pro-Trump shift.
In another instance, editors attempted to recast Vance’s positions on immigration and border security as “far-right,” even accusing the then-senator of harboring “white nationalist” views — a nasty slur in light of his wife Usha’s Indian heritage.
Wikipedia’s turn against Vance began in 2022, when he first entered politics as a Republican.
At that point, the platform didn’t just question Vance’s motivations to run for Senate, it rewrote them.
Editors reworked the then-candidate’s page to suggest that he founded the Our Ohio Renewal nonprofit purely to lay the groundwork for a political career — not to combat the opioid crisis that devastated his home state and much of Appalachia, nor because the issue had personally shaped his life, as his book recounted.
The support for this assertion was simply the say-so of Vance’s Senate opponent, Democrat Tim Ryan.
Wikipedia also added accusations that Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist affiliated with Our Ohio Renewal, had direct ties to the disgraced Purdue Pharma. Satel flatly denied any relationship with the company, yet the accusation remained live for millions to read.
Wikipedia’s Vance entry even labeled as false the verifiable claim that President Biden’s wide-open border policy had caused a deadly flood of fentanyl into Ohio, omitting key context and outsourcing its fact-checking to the GOP-hostile New York Times.
Essentially, Wikipedia created an artificial opioid-crisis connection for the potential Republican vice president — while denying Biden’s very real opioid catastrophe.
Wikipedia’s editors went so far as to add a negative review of “Hillbilly Elegy” to Vance’s page — one that dismissed the book as a “sloppy analysis” of “collections of people” in “flyover America.” It’s a critique that was completely absent from his profile before he became a prominent political figure.
Wikipedia’s corruption, as MRC has repeatedly demonstrated, is undeniable.
Yet Google and other major search engines continue to elevate these manipulated, biased pages to the top of their search results, as we have documented — making Wikipedia’s misinformation the first impression for millions of Internet users.
It still bills itself as the world’s “free encyclopedia,” but Wikipedia has become nothing but the tool of an ideology that gleefully uses America’s institutions against its own citizens.
Dan Schneider is vice president of MRC Free Speech America. Jerris Jackson is the Media Research Center‘s external affairs manager.