A mystery Wikipedia editor quietly scrubbed a string of controversies from Michigan Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed's page in the months before Election Day — and the same editor has been busy polishing entries for American communist organizations. When anonymous ideologues can rewrite the record voters see, the encyclopedia anyone can edit becomes the encyclopedia anyone can deceive with.
The editor, who goes by "CopyleftEverything," made dozens of edits to pages on the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the American Communist Party, and the Revolutionary Communists of America, according to the New York Post. But the most consequential work was on El-Sayed's page, where the editor softened, deleted, and reworded unflattering but factual content ahead of Tuesday's vote.
Investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg, founder of the online-campaign-influence tracker NPOV, and researcher Yehuda Teitelbaum separately tracked the revisions and posted findings on X this week. The edits include a June 12 change from El-Sayed "has never been granted a medical license" to the softer phrasing that he "did not pursue a medical license." El-Sayed took heat during the campaign for calling himself a "doctor" — he holds a doctor of medicine degree from Columbia but never completed residency or obtained a medical license.
On Oct. 10, the editor stripped the word "controversial" from a description of Hasan Piker, the left-wing influencer who once said "America deserved" the September 11 attacks, in a sentence noting Piker appeared with El-Sayed at two primary night parties. On Oct. 12 and Oct. 31, entire paragraphs were deleted detailing how El-Sayed hired a Jewish community liaison officer amid tensions with Michigan's Jewish community over his criticism of the Israeli government, his opposition to military aid to Israel, and his statements about the March 12 Temple Israel vehicle-ramming terror attack in West Bloomfield. El-Sayed had apologized for saying "hurt people hurt people" — offering context that the synagogue attacker's relatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger called the findings "old-fashioned journalism" and said they amounted to "both appropriate and effective as a criticism of Wikipedia and how it works today." Teitelbaum told the Post the edits were troubling because Google and AI search systems rely on Wikipedia being objective and correct. "This was really an organized effort to change the narrative in this country and to portray narratives and certain ideas that are not honest," he said.
Now that El-Sayed is headed to the Senate, the contours of the record that was scrubbed are coming into sharper focus. He told STAT he intends to push back against the Trump administration's dismantling of DEI grant programs, saying, "The war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is about a vision of an America that doesn't include certain kinds of people." He also told MLive he was willing to work with Trump on "stopping these stupid tariffs with Canada," joining Democratic leadership's push to repeal trade measures the administration says protect American industry.
The platforms that shape what voters know are not neutral. They are edited — by people with names, agendas, and track records. The question is whether anyone with the power to set the rules is paying attention.
