An investigation ordered by the nonprofit behind Wikipedia has revealed a massive disinformation effort on one or more of the online encyclopedia’s non-English versions, highlighting how far-right politics uses deception to create a toxic online ecosystem, with the targets usually topics such as World War II and the Holocaust.
The Wikimedia Foundation commissioned the study of Croatian Wikipedia after years of claims that this version of the encyclopedia had been taken over by extreme nationalists. The local community had long complained and even taken action against editors it said were using scare tactics to bully and silence peaceful contributors.
The findings of the disinformation researchers – or “external evaluators” – were published by the Wikimedia Foundation online last month. They reveal an “organized effort” by a cohort of Croat editors to “systematically produce and edit articles” as part of a political agenda that was described as “nationalistic,” “ultra-conservative” and aligned with the “Croatian radical right.”
According to the summary of the study, “A group of Croatian language Wikipedia (Hr.WP) admins held undue de-facto control over the project at least from 2011 to 2020. During that time, the group intentionally distorted the content presented in Croatian language Wikipedia articles in a way that matched the narratives of political organizations and groups that can broadly be defined as the Croatian radical right.”
By pushing out “overt historical revisionism,” the summary adds, “the content became so pervasive and remained online for so long that it created a web of deception to influence the reader’s moral or value judgment in a way that corresponded to the group’s ideological views.”
The study compares content from Croatian Wikipedia to that in other languages such as English, French, Serbian, Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian. (Wikipedia has versions in Serbian, Croatian and Serbo-Croatian.) Samantha Lien, senior communications manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, says “comparable” findings were also made about content in Serbian.
Visitors commemorating the massacre of Croatian pro-Nazis by victorious communists at the end of World War II, in southern Austria five years ago.
Darko Bandic/AP
Together, the findings indicate that the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s has been recreated online with a similar fragmentation existing on Wikipedia. Alongside the Serbo-Croatian version, smaller national Wikipedias use the local version of the language.
The new report is the largest Wikimedia Foundation-supported investigation into disinformation on Wikipedia. It comes after a year when the encyclopedia – long criticized for its inaccuracies – was praised for doing a better job fending off coronavirus disinformation than social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
In fact, Wikipedia (which marked its 20th anniversary in January) and its crowdsourced editorial model emerged from the Trump era as the “good cop of the internet,” as The Washington Post dubbed the site that it lambasted a decade earlier as unreliable and a symbol of the erosion of expertise and facts online.
The findings are important not just in terms of undoing the damage by the far-right group on Croatian Wikipedia – to that end, the Wikimedia Foundation has already announced a wider reform for the Croatian community and banned the group’s ringleader. The Croatian controversy also has wider political significance: It shows how far-right nationalism is based on historical revisionism and how a small and focused group can take control of an entire Wikipedia version for that purpose.
It reveals how the attempt to rewrite World War II and distort the historical record of the Holocaust play a key role in populist politics online today.
The Croatian-language page about Ustasha in the Croatian version of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia
Hitler did what?!
The latest investigation came after years of complaints, rumors and even reports taking issue with Croatian Wikipedia. The new findings and summary of past claims are jarring.
Among the revisionism in Croatian was the claim that Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland not as part of a plan to enslave Eastern Europe but as retribution for a “genocide” by ethnic Poles against Germans.
It also recasts in a neutral if not positive light a number of articles on the Ustasha regime, the Croatian fascists who led a puppet state of Nazi Germany. The Ustasha movement embraced Nazi ideology even before it took power during the war, during which fascist Croatia killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and anti-fascist Croats.
On Wikipedia, the Ustasha’s record was reworked according to the ultranationalist narrative. In one case, the Jasenovac concentration camp was redefined as a mere labor camp, even though the Ustasha murdered tens of thousands there and it was one of the 10 largest camps operating in Europe during the war.
There are countless other examples, but these findings and their sheer scale (hundreds if not thousands of articles) align with past reports on Wikipedia and historical revisionism in post-communist states.
For example, I previously reported on the longest hoax on Wikipedia, part of a major Polish disinformation effort on the encyclopedia. In that case, too, the far-right hoax was based around a wartime concentration camp: the thoroughly debunked claim that during World War II the Nazis operated an extermination camp in Warsaw for the mass murder not of Jews but of ethnic Poles.
Despite the lack of a historical record, Wikipedia contributors affiliated with the right-wing Polish narrative pushed out the falsehood that the Nazi gas chambers in the Polish capital were used to murder 200,000 ethnic Poles. The number 200,000 was based on a single eyewitness quoted by an amateur far-right historian.
The cover of the report “The Case of Croatian Wikipedia.”
Wikipedia
Despite historical evidence showing there was no gas chamber in Warsaw, the false claim and death toll appeared as facts on English Wikipedia for almost 15 years. This false information spread to dozens of other articles and over a dozen languages.
In Croatian Wikipedia, a similar dynamic played out: The article for the Jasenovac concentration camp and others related to it not just rewrote history but disparaged academics who researched Croatian war crimes in the 20th century. This is almost identical to events in the Polish case. There, the article for the Jedwabne pogrom in 1941 was frequently edited, rewritten and distorted to minimize violence by Poles against Jews.
The article for the Polish historian investigating the Jedwabne massacre, Jan Tomasz Gross, was also targeted and his reputation tarnished. Articles about other historians researching Polish crimes against local Jews, like Jan Grabowski, were also reworked. Both historians have been prosecuted for their research by proxies of the Polish government, indicating an alignment between the targets of populist regimes and their ideological bedfellows on Wikipedia.
As with the Polish case, the Croatian camp was only one facet in a much wider disinformation effort: historical revisionism in the service of present-day populists. And that effort is at least implicitly endorsed by local politicians.
In both the Polish and Croatian cases, the nationalist narrative was enforced by portraying the two nations only as victims of the Nazis – not as possible collaborators – on top of a reworking of Wikipedia articles to fit contemporary political needs. In Poland, this historical revisionism is actually a policy of the ruling Law and Justice Party, which has attempted to ban research into Polish crimes and whose platform includes a section on countering what it calls Poland’s “pedagogy of shame” regarding the war.
In the Croatian case, this political logic is applied to more contemporary history: Many of the rewritten articles had to do with war crime trials for acts committed during the 1990s and the collapse of Yugoslavia. Many of the entries found to be biased were those focusing on the EU and its relationship with Croatia.
Moreover, fringe websites and those affiliated with the far right were used as a source to whitewash Croatian war criminals, disparage the EU as strong-arming Croatia, and tarnish liberal forces in the country, advancing an illiberal agenda.
Croatia’s political leaders leaving a ceremony that paid tribute to the tens of thousands of victims who died in the Jasenovac concentration camp during World War II.
DENIS LOVROVIC / AFP
Hostile takeover, silencing critics
The Croatian case is also interesting because it shows how the organized campaign is linked to the real world. The findings suggest that ideological groups working within Wikipedia are part of wider attempts by far-right activists to assert their control over the public narrative.
The Wikimedia Foundation report describes the takeover of Croatian Wikipedia as a form of “project capture” – an “organized effort that resulted in taking complete control over content and community dynamics.”
“It appears that this group consisted of real-life friends, ideological sympathizers and political allies,” the report says. “Many articles created and edited by the members of this group present the views that match political and socio-cultural positions advocated by a loosely connected group of Croatian radical right political parties and ultra-conservative populist movements.”
The group also used its “positions of power” on Croatian Wikipedia “to attract new like-minded contributors, silence and ban dissenters, manipulate community elections and subvert Wikipedia’s and the broader movement’s native conflict resolution mechanisms.”
This isn’t the first time such things have happened. Though many still deny its existence, WikiLeaks once revealed a dump of emails called the Eastern European Mailing List. The EEML, as it is known within Wikipedia, is one of the worst scandals to shake the global project. Groups of editors from Eastern Europe worked together to skew content across the encyclopedia. The emails even revealed a conspiracy between editors to help each other on adjacent topics, which often focused on World War II.
The centerpiece of the Eastern European Mailing List was a project that attempted to get members of the group (or fake accounts linked to them and set up for disinformation purposes, so-called sock puppets) elected to key positions in Wikipedia’s community-run apparatus.
One of those named in the project spoke to me a few months ago and denied that the plan was anything more than musing. But the findings regarding Croatian Wikipedia show how similar if not identical methods were used as recently as 2020 to take full control over the encyclopedia in that language.
For example, Lien of the Wikimedia Foundation told Haaretz about the research: “We have seen some common trends in behavior from problematic users on the Croatian Wikipedia – for example, using sock-puppeting to introduce bias in articles or influence active discussions.”
The scale and longevity of disinformation on Croatian Wikipedia is what led the Wikimedia Foundation’s researchers to describe the effort as a “campaign.” According to the report, the ability of a small group to take control of an entire language in Wikipedia wasn’t unique to Croatia or even the Balkans or Eastern Europe.
“A possible way to implement a disinformation campaign would be for an organized group of user accounts to take over the entire language project by banning dissenters and ‘installing’ ideologically aligned user accounts in roles essential to self-governance processes,” the report says.
The threat this poses is in no way limited to Wikipedia and could easily spread, the authors warn.
“But for this effort to have any influence on a wider society reliant on the Wikipedia language project, it has to impact content in a substantial number of articles and for an extended period of time,” the report says. “Those who visit and read Wikipedia would have to be exposed to disinformation and bias while being assured by the Wikipedia community’s decades-long built reputation that they are reading neutral, fact-based information – and to keep doing so for a long period of time.”
This was indeed the case in Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia, but it is very likely happening in other languages as well.
A Wikipedia page on the difference between the versions of the page “Jasenovac Myth and Historical Revisionism.”
Wikipedia
Digital history
The threat posed by these historical disinformation efforts grows as Wikipedia’s standing continues to rise. While the encyclopedia is said to reflect social biases – for example, Hebrew Wikipedia is very much Israeli Wikipedia due to its reliance on Israeli media sources – it can also play a role in skewing the public’s perception of the past and present.
“I believe online Holocaust history offers risks alongside opportunities,” Prof. Havi Dreifuss, a history professor at Tel Aviv University and the head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at Yad Vashem, said last year. “Part of the threat is the ability to distort knowledge in a way that could seem credible as well as its simple publication online.”
Prof. Shira Klein, a professor of Jewish history at Chapman University in California, said at the time that Wikipedia plays a key role in bridging between the public and academic knowledge.
“Barely anyone outside of academia opens a peer-reviewed book or encyclopedia anymore,” she said. “Holocaust history is overwhelmingly online, and that has democratized the retelling of the past in odd ways.”
The price of that democratization has often been distortion of the Holocaust, she added. “Outright denial is fairly rare. From what I’ve seen, distortion is a lot more common. Distortion comes in all shapes and sizes,” she explained.
A Croatian Wikipedia page on the Crna Legija (Black Legion), the Ushtasha’s militia.
Wikipedia
“Sometimes it’s innocent errors. … Other times it’s about playing the blame game, like claiming Germans bear all the responsibility for persecution while other nationals – Poles, Croats, Italians, French, you name it – were helpless onlookers.”
As media researcher Aya Yadlin-Segal told me about the threat posed by revisionism online, “What was once a question of a sensitive balance between online and offline remembrance has now become a fight for maintaining a collective memory.”
The Wikimedia Foundation, usually reluctant to draw attention to such cases, seems more than aware of the problem. The foundation’s Lien says “we know that disinformation campaigns are becoming more difficult to identify across the internet, and the tools that can help spread disinformation are only becoming more sophisticated.
“We are investing in our movement’s capacity to identify and respond to all kinds of information operations, including those led by government actors, to ensure the accuracy of the information shared on our platforms.”
With Wikipedia such a go-to – with some even suggesting that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should embrace its model – the addressing of such structural issues may be key not just to fighting disinformation but to preserving the historical record on World War II and the Holocaust.
According to Lien, “It’s not a perfect system – it is messy, open and collaborative, just like Wikipedia. But for our movement, it’s the best way we know how to build solutions that stick.”
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