Politico

10/02/2025

Following their success in bringing Meta and Alphabet to heel for allegedly censoring right-leaning viewpoints, conservatives have been amping up their pressure campaign against Wikipedia.

The drumbeat got louder this year. Ed Martin, then D.C.’s interim U.S. attorney appointed by Trump, sent a letter in April that claimed Wikipedia was disseminating “propaganda” and threatened to rescind the tax-exempt status of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts the site. The GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee also launched an investigation in August into potential manipulation of Wikipedia articles.

Now Wikipedia’s estranged co-founder, Larry Sanger, has triggered a fresh chorus of Republican calls for reform, with a comprehensive proposal to overhaul the platform and make it more open to conservatives, fringe views and religious beliefs — and appearing on no less than Tucker Carlson’s show to promote it.

His plea is catching on among right-leaning figures in Washington and elsewhere, including White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Sen. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk, who responded by declaring that xAI is building a Wikipedia competitor called Grokipedia.

Will it work? Though the powerful social-media companies have folded their tents under political pressure, Wikipedia poses a different problem for critics: It’s a comparatively decentralized holdout from the earliest days of the communitarian web, and its content is controlled and moderated not by a CEO, or employees who can easily be fired, but by thousands of volunteer editors making content decisions by consensus.

The argument is shaping up to be an important test of how far the conservatives can take their online culture wars.