A new investigative report from NPOV and Ashley Rindsberg, published on Substack, reveals shocking details of a seemingly coordinated campaign, going back to 2021, to hijack and deface the Wikipedia page for the Hindu American Foundation.
The smear campaign has ensured that the WIkipedia page for the oldest non-profit organization for Hindus living in the US represents solely the viewpoints of its detractors, with any changes to HAF’s Wikipedia page that present any counter narrative actively suppressed. What’s more, the dominant editors of HAF’s Wikipedia page have themselves either created the Wikipedia pages of organizations and individuals critical of HAF, or in the past have worked with these organizations.
HAF Senior Director of Communications Mat McDermott observed:
“For many years we at HAF have noticed the growing hijacking and defacing of our Wikipedia page, the distortion of our advocacy record and policy stances by clearly ideologically motivated editors operating under the guise of objectivity. However, when we learned the details of the NPOV report, the way in which a handful of editors operated together to present a blatantly one-side negative portrayal of us, we were truly shocked. It was far far worse than we ever imagined.”
NPOV describes what’s happened:
“Wikipedia’s HAF narrative, and the details that flesh it out, have been constructed by four Wikipedia editors whose editing history raises important questions about their links to the ideological network that opposes HAF and its mission. Together, these four users are responsible for 80% of the text currently on the HAF page. […] The effort to reshape the narrative about HAF began in early 2021. It was then that a small cluster of highly active Wikipedia editors began constructing an interconnected ecosystem of pages surrounding HAF, its critics, and the organizations aligned against it. These users include TrangaBellam, Kautilya3, Llightex, and Shahinshah121. Another user, Vanamonde93, one of the most powerful administrators on the site, frequently intervened in ways that appear to support the core cluster.”
HAF Executive Director Suhag Shukla commented:
“Vanamond is emblematic of all the problems with Wikipedia. No one person should have that much power, and certainly not behind a code name. When you have editors with a direct conflict of interest to edit one entry in one way and another in an opposing way, presenting such biased presentations, your system is broken.”
What’s more, many of the most leading individuals and organizations working in opposition to HAF figure prominently in the efforts to wage information warfare against HAF.
One of the dominant editors of HAF’s Wikipedia page also created and curated the page for HAF critic Professor Audrey Trushcke, presenting her work, and another group she’s involved with, solely in a positive light and HAF’s in a negative one. Another editor presenting HAF’s work in negative one-side manner is also responsible for a sizeable part of the edits on the Wikipedia page for the Indian American Muslim Council, presenting it positively. Finally, another dominant adversarial editor of HAF’s Wikipedia page, who disclosed “past work” with Hindus for Human Rights, both created the Wikipedia page for HfHR as an organization, and for its co-founder Sunita Vishwanath.
The specific edits made by each of these adversarial editors are detailed, sometimes minute-by-minute, in the full NPOV report.
Watch HAF’s response to the report
As for the impact of these efforts to smear HAF’s reputation, NPOV concludes:
“For a single institution facing this kind of de facto ideological coordination, the damage can be devastating. Wikipedia’s abuse monitoring and remediation systems are highly problematic. In the best case, abuse is caught and coordination identified. But even when individual editors are censured, their edits, often amounting to years worth of activity (as it is in this case) remain on the affected pages. The damage is done. More than that, as the pages continue to surface on Google and get fed into AI systems, it continues to be done.”
