As a journalist who has documented the corrosive effects of propaganda for over ten years, I have witnessed firsthand how disinformation can reshape political landscapes and societal norms. This experience makes me profoundly alarmed by a new form of information warfare being deployed by terrorist organizations and rogue nations—a tactic that could ultimately prove more perilous than any previous method.
The Digital Battleground: Wikipedia Under Siege
The target of these malicious actors is a resource millions depend on daily: Wikipedia. This ubiquitous online encyclopedia is being systematically exploited by some of the world's most dangerous governments and extremist ideologues. Their objective is to reframe violent agendas as benign and portray their leaders as noble resistance figures rather than perpetrators of mass murder.
AI's Unwitting Complicity
Perhaps most dangerously, the world's leading artificial intelligence platforms—including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—heavily rely on Wikipedia to train their large language models. These AI systems are rapidly becoming the most influential media sources of our digital era, yet they are being fed poisoned information.
To demonstrate this phenomenon in action, I asked ChatGPT to create a hypothetical multiple-choice question for American middle school students about Hezbollah. The AI described Hezbollah as "a Lebanese political party" rather than referencing its decades-long campaign of violence that includes bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings. ChatGPT cited only one source: Wikipedia.
Pattern of Propaganda
The Hezbollah example is not an isolated incident. When queried about Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Abu al-Walid al-Dahdouh—killed by Israel in 2006—ChatGPT described him as a "prominent commander" responsible for military operations. It failed to mention his leadership of a terror network that orchestrated deadly suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
Similarly, entries about former Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, who oversaw three decades of state-sanctioned terror and repression, and former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7th attacks against Israel, both rely heavily on Wikipedia as their primary source.
The Information Laundering Process
ChatGPT's dependence on Wikipedia is particularly problematic because Wikipedia articles frequently incorporate information provided by the very terrorist groups and governments they describe. This creates what might be termed "information laundering": militant organizations exploit Wikipedia's editorial vulnerabilities to insert sanitized narratives into a trusted knowledge platform, which then gets redistributed through search engines and AI systems.
The consequences are subtle yet powerful. Students learn from Wikipedia, journalists quote it, and policymakers reference it. Most alarmingly, AI systems repeat these narratives endlessly. By the time information reaches the public, the original propaganda sources have disappeared from view.
Selective Inclusion and Omission
Terror groups shape Wikipedia entries through both inclusion and exclusion. The Wikipedia article on Islamic Jihad commander al-Walid describes him as "one of the most prominent commanders of al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement in the Gaza Strip during the Intifada." This language closely mirrors Palestinian Islamic Jihad's own propaganda.
Three of the four sources cited in al-Walid's Wikipedia entry come directly from Palestinian Islamic Jihad websites. The entry includes a section titled "Role in the Resistance" that adopts militant terminology framing attacks on civilians as legitimate political tactics. Conspicuously absent is any mention of attacks like the 1989 Israeli bus bombing that killed 14 people, or Islamic Jihad's formal designation as a terrorist organization.
Systemic Exploitation Across Platforms
Without adequate gatekeeping, terror groups replicate this pattern across hundreds of Wikipedia articles. Entries for Hamas commanders Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar rely heavily on sourcing from the Palestinian Information Center, a known Hamas-affiliated propaganda operation that has described October 7th as restoring "legitimacy to the Palestinian cause."
My research has uncovered more than 29,000 instances of Wikipedia citing Iranian state media outlets, with Tasnim News—an affiliate of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—being particularly favored. Media tied to Iran's proxy organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah, appear as sources over 8,400 times. Outlets linked to the Muslim Brotherhood show up nearly 1,000 times, while Al-Qaeda-affiliated media, including Shada News Agency and Radio Furqaan, appear over 100 times.
Historical Record at Risk
A Wikipedia article on the 2025 Shabelle offensive in Somalia—a brutal campaign led by Al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab—cites Radio Furqaan (al-Shabaab's official media arm) nearly 50 times and includes over a dozen citations from Shahada News Agency, another jihadist propaganda outlet. Effectively, Al-Qaeda's own media outlets are shaping the historical record of the conflict as it will be preserved on Wikipedia.
The Evolution of Disinformation
When I began covering propaganda operations, concerns centered on infiltration of radio, film, and television. In today's digital age, disinformation has become more insidious precisely because it often doesn't appear as disinformation—even to trained observers. Sometimes, propaganda and information warfare now arrive disguised as a Wikipedia citation.
The implications are profound: as AI systems increasingly mediate our access to information, their training on manipulated Wikipedia content means they may unknowingly become vectors for terrorist propaganda, presenting distorted narratives as objective facts to students, researchers, and decision-makers worldwide.
