Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 65: The unseen editors rigging the information war, with Ashley Rindsberg

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

The internet has democratized information. Or so we are told. The world's knowledge is now at everyone's fingertips. No government and no power structure can gatekeep what everyone sees and hears.But as our lives increasingly move online, we are all discovering just how many forces are at work trying to control and manipulate the flow of information online. The information that comes our way is driven by algorithms shaped by corporations or foreign governments. And those who know how to game those algorithms now possess unprecedented control over what everyone sees on their phones and computers. Governments, political campaigns, advocacy movements all invest vast resources in shaping these environments to ensure their message dominates and opposing messages are suppressed.In this episode, we take a deep dive into the surprisingly small number of editors who have managed to take control of Wikipedia's articles related to Israel, Israeli history and Zionism, and to skew them into narrow ideological screeds that no Israelis or Jews would recognize as representing them or their story.It's a microcosm of a much larger story about the vulnerability of this new information environment in which we all swim to such manipulation.Wikipedia is a critical reference for hundreds of millions of people. It is often counted among the five most visited websites in the world. But its real influence is far larger: it's a favored result in any Google search and a favorite source for AIs when they answer our questions. So it matters that a tiny group of no more than 40 editors, through careful coordination, can completely dominate all editing and content in a major arena of contested knowledge.Wikipedia, Reddit and our new age of algorithmic information flows are our subject today, and Ashley Rindsberg, an American writer and a senior editor at Pirate Wires, is our guide.This episode is sponsored by Nancy and David Rosen of Guilford, Connecticut, on the fifth anniversary of the passing of Dr. Gerald Rosen of Glendale, Wisconsin. "Jerry was devoted to his family, his profession as a veterinarian of "50+ years," to his Glendale community, and to Judaism. He was a longtime member of Congregation Beth Israel and at some point in the mid-1990s, he likely crossed paths with Haviv, who was then living in Glendale as well.Though Jerry did not live to witness the tragedy of October 7th, 2023, or the momentous joy we experienced this past October 13th—on Simchat Torah—with the return of our people from captivity, he would have deeply appreciated Haviv’s thoughtful and nuanced exploration of the history of Jews and Arabs, and of the ongoing story of Israel and our people.""Last year, we were privileged to help host Haviv as Scholar-in-Residence at our synagogue, Temple Beth Tikvah, in Madison, Connecticut, and we were fortunate to spend three meaningful days studying with and learning from him.""We remember with gratitude our loved ones who came before us, and we dedicate our learning to those who will continue the story. We are profoundly thankful for Haviv and for his unwavering commitment to telling the story of our people in a way we can all understand."Thank you to the Rosens for their sponsorships and this beautiful dedication.If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of Ask Haviv Anything. Thank you for being here. This is going to be a very fascinating, but I think very frustrating for me episode, because we're going to take a deep dive into the scale of online manipulations that we all are subjected to. We're subjected to as Jews, as Israelis, on the Israel question, on the Gaza question. But everything we're going to learn today is true on all issues undertaken by modern societies. These are structural. problems. And if you learn how propaganda and algorithms and manipulation online works on issues that I happen to know about, that you happen to know about, you will also begin to be able to have the tools to see it everywhere else. This is a new feature of our world. And so I'm really glad that Ashley Rinsberg is here to walk us through it, specifically on issues that, you know, I happen to understand. But nevertheless, I think this is really, universally applicable. Before we get into it, I want to tell you that this podcast, just give one minute to wonderful sponsors. Nancy and David Rosen of Guilford, Connecticut, who

write that they are honored to sponsor this episode of Ask Aviv Anything on the fifth anniversary of the passing of Dr. Gerald Rosen of Glendale, Wisconsin. Jerry, this is dramatic because I went to high school in Glendale, Wisconsin. So thank you for sending this in. Jerry was devoted to his family. His profession is a veterinarian of 50-plus years to his Glendale community and to Judaism. He was a longtime member of congregation Beth Israel. That is the synagogue that we belong to when I lived in Milwaukee.

And at some point in the mid-1990s, he likely crossed paths with Kaviv, who was then living in Glendale as well. Though Jerry did not live to witness the tragedy of October 7, 2023, or the momentous joy we experienced this past October 13, on Simchat Torah, the same holiday that was underway on October 7, 2023, with the return of our people from captivity. He would have deeply appreciated Khabev's thoughtful and nuanced exploration

of the history of Jews and Arabs and of the ongoing story of Israel and our people. Thank you for that. Last year, we were privileged to host Kaviv as scholar in residence at our synagogue, Temple Beth Tikva in Madison, Connecticut. That was a wonderful time and a wonderful town. and we were fortunate to spend three meaningful days studying with and learning from him. We remember with gratitude our loved ones

who came before us and we dedicate our learning to those who will continue the story. We are profoundly thankful for Kaviv's unwavering commitment to telling the story of our people in a way we can all understand. Thank you tremendously.

That means a lot. We've built out a community here and as part of that community we meet somewhere. We meet on Patreon on. There's a very small monthly fee of $5 and you join a community that is now thousands. And we ask questions there that guide the topics we talk about. I want to invite you to join us. There's discussions. People share resources, comments. People have already met each other in real

life. People have met me and my travels. It's a wonderful platform to really make use of this community. And we have a monthly live stream where you get to ask me questions and I answer them live and we schedule it for an hour and it has so far stretched almost every time to two hours and more and everybody has fun it's great almost everybody stays for the whole thing so thank you so much to the Rosens it's great to get a blast from the past and and to hear about about a wonderful person and join us on Patreon Ashley how are you doing great Javiv thank you how are you 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 that I know has been totally hijacked.

Articles are not written. I am just telling you things I learned from you. And you sent us to 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 described. 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 can, 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. And I had this comments on X. People started posting more things about Wikipedia articles on Israel, on Jews, on Jewish history, on the 20th century.

triggered, I think, 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 that 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 in 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? That is a great question. And there's a long, complicated answer to it.

Also a very exciting and interesting one, because it's so the level of coordination 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 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 Waldgarten website that 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 in 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 you. But also, more importantly today, it comes through in the AIs, the LLMs. It's chat GPT, 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, 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 Jewish, and 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, I 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 and this kind of thing that says this user supports his bala, not hiding it. 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, etc. And we're talking at the tune of around 1 million edits to 10,000 articles combined. 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, of edit counts. These are phenomenally productive Wikipedia editors with, as you just said, 10,000 edits 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 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 of 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 a 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 fix this? And again, imagine we're not talking about this. Imagine we're talking about the Lab League theory for COVID. You know, imagine we're talking about, I don't know what, Trump arresting people or sending the National Guard to Portland. I'm just throwing random controversies.

But things that are controversial, that somebody might have a reason to go in and edit, is Wikipedia really totally undefended and in case? of defending itself? 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 they won't say that and Wikipedia will and the 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 bias gets blended out in the mass contributions from thousands of people. That was actually never true. Wikipedia is really good at telling a good story. It's probably one of its greatest strength.

It's always had a really good story to tell. It's why I took off so quickly early days of the Internet, the early 2000s. In reality, in practice, what you have are a tiny number of editors 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 who are spending hours on the site every single day. And that's not just a question of 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, you know what, this little fact I'm going to correct it is I know for, 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. It will be defeated by editors who have some other agenda, whatever that might be. 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 factor is multiplied by 10x. You have no chance unless you are part of an 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 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 figure. Two or three of the editors from the gang of 40 strongly disagreed. They did not want that photo of the grand mufti touring 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. 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 offices in a single hallway, could pull off? Yes.

It's that sensitive to dedicated editors with extreme know-how and understanding of sort of the parliamentary rules structure of Wikipedia and how that actually works. You're, I think, naturally going to have a bias against Israel and Wikipedia, because it leans left, it's very academic. It's what Larry Sanger, the co-founder Wikipedia, calls a GASP World View, which is global, academic, secular, and progressive,

and 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 essentially Zionism, race, and genetics, something along those lines. Its sole purpose is to sort of underhandedly equate Zionism 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 JITPT. 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, 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 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 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.

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 were racist. That is not an argument. That is not a thing. 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 Zionist because of the massive increase in pressure in 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 libeles 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 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 of some kind of a Zionist idea. And the most fundamental thing I still can't find in the article, the thing Herzl actually argued what happened, 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 manage to do that very thing, that very kind of manipulation and take over in a different political direction, or does it only ever work in one direction? 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 crowd-sourced 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 where they kind of tip their hand. You're saying 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. So that last part, That last part 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 Los Angeles, 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 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 Suniliki, 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, it'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 reframe Zionism in a way that it never actually tries against any other nationalism and people can look this up. 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 absolutely, I promise you will not find is what the same group of editors did after inserting that sentence in there is 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, 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, ARPTACATION 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 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. So they rule the Wikipedia article and crowdsourcing and what most people think, and what most people the article is about think about their own experience

are now totally irrelevant to the Wikipedia editing process. Do we know who they are? Exactly. We do know some of them. 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 identify them publicly. 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 the 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. 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 editor, that we're talking about, which came after 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 is 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 to 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 the information. 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. 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, 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 there's literally nothing Wikipedia can do.

I don't believe it for a second. A 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, their budget is...

Lots of people out there are sending $10 a month in. She earns $400,000 a year, the chief of product, the person responsible for them. Yeah, right about that. Their head of revenue is making about the same. Around 400, their executive directors above that. So they are spending close to... The number is massive. I think it's over 150 million on salaries.

So the idea that they're understaffed is not the case. They're getting tons of money from donations. They run their own private LLC. It's a wholly owned LLC for-profit enterprise company. They sell their data to big tech companies. Nobody 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 this? It'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 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 is 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 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. Wales 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 committee, sort of sent 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 I have never seen a successful conservative 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, I don't know if she would actually 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,

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. So the system itself, the actual crowdsource system doesn't function. It's easily taken over. And the organization that should be preserving the crowd source 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 a foul of its worldview, but when it doesn't run a foul 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. Yeah, and it's the super outlet because what it does is they're able to selectively... They're training all the AIs. And 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 and admissible to be cited as a source and what's not.

And when you look at the list, you're like, okay, we have, until recently Jacobin, the far left socialist website was a green-co. 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? There is no good surface-level explanation for that. Even China Daily, which is a out-and-out, state-owned and operated propaganda organ for the Chinese government, is yellow-coded. So 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. 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 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. 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 is there to be done? Is there anything to be done? 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. It's often except in Wikipedia's favor because again, they had this amazing story that's 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 U.S. is particularly important. And we're finally there. Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, published a source. 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 it's like this pretense of consensus. That's not a real consensus.

The fact that we don't know who are 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 the issue. It is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. There are editors.

I can, I mean, 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 views can't enter because of hierarchies of editorship, and the people at the top are not known to Wikipedia? Yeah, and it's actually even more serious than that,

because there are certain select users on the site that are called check users who have the ability to track IP addresses to, it's extremely sensitive. 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 website on Wikipedia.org, they will be able to track your IP address and ban you if they so decide.

We don't know who those people are, and there's not that many of them. There's probably Larry Sanker calls it the Power 62. So there's 62 ultra-powerful users, and this includes the Czech users, the arbitration committee, and one other class of 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 can be saved, I don't know. And we might be moving fast enough technologically. Now we have Elon Musk releasing his competition, his competitor's site, Grogapedia, which is AI-driven, AI-driven encyclopedia. And that might make an 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 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-2010s, was. It was not a trillion-dollar company. It was a company that was still rising, could not support this kind of effort. So you had this mutualism. And 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 knowledge cartel fairly easily captured by small commando units. Yeah. which also because of it, its structure made it, I think, the biggest backdoor into the information ecosystem by far. It's the easiest to exploit vulnerability with by far the biggest effect on what we call the downstream effects, the side where the information appears. Ashley, what is Reddit?

Reddit is a community structured. You have these, 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 sometimes very big communities, 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 talk to each other. So unlike X, formerly Twitter, where it's just this open system. them and 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 the next because of this, which is that it doesn't have this kind of algorithm that surfaces more engaged or engaged. engaging content. Rather, people have upvoting and downvoting. So if you like a piece of content, you like a post, you upvote it. And if you don't, you download 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 into 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 mostly and sentences and the posts are longer. That makes the data very valuable for AI's. 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 is free to sell its data to virtually everybody, which is pretty much what it does. So 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 4,000 people

upvote a trick with, I don't know what, some home improvement on the 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 got 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 and that has systematically used Reddit to send armies of users to different places to achieve the kind of crowdsource of 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? 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 their own tools, their own time. This was like not not something that anyone proud of 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 base camped out of one of the communities called our Palestine. R is first RR is for Reddit and slash is for Palestine. 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 been just 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, the Houthis, Sizbala, literally dozens of other Islamic terror groups. 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, yeah. This is like as officials 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 cams. It's sort of headquartered out of the R. Palestine group. But they then spread it across Reddit. They spread it into X, into Discord, into Instagram, on community notes. Basically into 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 post antisemitic content. They are extremely active. And again, a lot of these people appear to be dedicated, as in this is what they do with most of their day. A lot of this cannot be done with an hour here. 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 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.

How many people? Sorry, including one of them. including one of them who is let's say the top I would say one of the top boosters of Hamas online today is called Zay Squirrel on X

mostly. So how many people ZeiI? ZEI Squirrel, yeah. How many people are we talking about what does this look like? On Wikipedia you have 44 maybe hundreds of supporters.

What does it look like on Reddit? I would say it's around dozens of core group members including a lot of moderators. So the moderators of communities are probably number of the dozens. And what they've done is they haven't stayed within their own, like, pro-Palestin or anti-Israel communities as moderators, because it 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 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. 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, you know, cagey about it.

Wikipedia has completely and utterly collapsed in 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, you know, 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 of supporters. Only a few of them are, you know, fanatically activist, but only a few people ever are fanatically activist on any topic, even on my side of issues, on any other side of issues.

Can this be organic activism? And that's the shape of it in Reddit. And, you know, bad on my side for not having these dedicated fanatical activists to push back and build their own campaigns. Is that how do I know in Reddit that it's like the Wikipedia manipulation and not just organic? 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'd mentioned between the Wikipedia stuff and anti-Israel prohama stuff and Reddit. A lot of it happened in a place called tech for Palestine, which is this group of people who are doing activism and advocacy for the Palestinian cause. And again, there was, there, it's on, it's across channels, but primarily it was on discord. They run it on discord.

Right. This was in a Wikipedia article from, from back then. Yeah. 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've really, because they value Reddit so much. It's not that they came to from the point of view saying, we need to tear this down. For them, these guys have been 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 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 described as a digital ghetto. I should say that's kind of Reddit solution to everything. In other words, there was, and you hinted it 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 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, 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 created very separate and disembarked. distinct rules for conservative groups. And so inasmuch as Reddit, the organization has gotten involved. And again, 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 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, you know, either you are a platform or you will, will not, 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 walled garden.

It's not a walled garden. It's, what is it? How would you describe it? It's curated, essentially. It's an echo chamber. It's a carefully 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. So it's true way beyond the Israel question. Yes. The problem with that analysis is that you may, Reddit may just not like Israel, which is fine as a culture that just may just have that bias. No problem. Like you can, if you're on the platform 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 These are U.S. 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 2020 election.

I would have to go back and check. they ban fat shaming communities. They ban anti-trans communities. There was one instance where 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, Hamas, Hezbollah. And you specifically show there, Hezbollah and terror groups from Iraq. And 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. as AIs are learning about the world and how to teach everybody everywhere who now turns to AI for everything. By the way, chat GPT has replaced Google for me. I'm typing about 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. I go to chat GPT, you have to make sure to say,

send me the link because chat GPT all 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 just a better Google. And that's now being trained on those Reddit for 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. Right. Yeah. And it's, um, it's one to one. You can, we, we've tested this. We've looked it's in some of my reporting where you can ask a question about, let's say, 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 too, but the key point is that it pulls directly from those posts into your chat GPT. And a lot of times you just, you know, it may cite a source and 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? my 3,000 word articles about the, you're not. You're just going to believe it. And that's the core issue here is that there is no filter mechanism for what's coming through from Reddit or from Wikipedia because they are open-ended. They are not backstopped in that way and the information is not secured. And propagandists know this. 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. There's a wonderful video put out by a YouTube channel called Kerskazacht, which in some European language means something. I apologize.

It's an English language channel. I don't know 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 my kids love watching it. I show my kids these videos.

And this video is about 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 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, 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 7. And you deal with digital reporting from, you know, 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 or 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. Yeah, that's, I think, where we are, where this is all headed. And it is, 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 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 all directions in all formats all the time. And as you said, it's in our hands. It's everywhere we go. We take our propaganda with us. So what do we do about this? I mean, 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. Chat Chachypt in the LLMs are a wonder. It'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 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 geopolitical level. It's not just in the social and cultural level. It's, as you said, it could be as simple

is mis-educating 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. Ashley Rinsberg, thank you so much for joining me. You made me very, very pessimistic and worried.

which is how you know it's good journalism. Thank you, Javvy.