Republicans Move Forward With Plot to Doxx Wikipedians Who Post Thought Crimes

The Heritage Foundation proposed doxxing Wikipedians who post thought crimes and it appears Republicans are moving forward with this plot.

We’ve got a pretty good sense of a number of things Republicans either love or hate these days in practice. Republicans absolutely love effectively declaring martial law as they take over more city streets, they love big government and forcefully taking over corporations, they love issuing death threats to Americans, they hate the free market, and they hate free speech and the independence of the press. In short, they want to control every aspect of your personal life and take away your freedoms.

Today, naturally, is no different. Republicans are moving forward with efforts to doxx Wikipedians for the crime of posting things they personally do not like. Now, if this sounds familiar, well, it probably should as this is not exactly a new thing. Back in February, we reported on the Heritage Foundation plotting to doxx Wikipedians for the crime of posting thought crimes. It was part of the much broader and scarier plot they helped craft known as Project 2025 – the project that the mainstream media desperately tried to sweep under the rug and pretend that the last US election was normal political discourse. For Wikipedians, the plan was more or less to target Wikipedians who post or make edits that they personally don’t like. In short, they want to target those who post thought crimes.

While this plot was seemingly put in the backburner, it seems that things have moved forward since then. House Republicans are moving forward with an effort to target Wikipedia by sending a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation saying that they are investigating instances of “bias” and “foreign interference”. As a result, they are demanding the identities of those editors. From TechDirt:

Government Doxxing With Official Letterhead

The letter’s requests read like a fishing expedition designed by people who fundamentally misunderstand both Wikipedia and the Constitution. They want:

• Records of all editor conduct disputes and disciplinary actions
• “Identifying and unique characteristics” of editor accounts, including IP addresses and activity logs
• Internal communications about “coordination by nation state actors”
• Analysis of “patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel”

Let’s translate that bureaucratic language. When they say “identifying and unique characteristics” and “IP addresses,” what they really mean is: they want to doxx Wikipedia editors. They’re demanding that Wikimedia turn over personal information about volunteer contributors so Congress can identify and potentially target people whose edits they don’t like.

That’s not oversight. That’s government-sponsored doxxing with official letterhead.

This isn’t oversight—it’s an attempt to intimidate volunteer editors and chill speech by threatening to expose their identities to government scrutiny. The fact that they’re specifically targeting coverage of Israel-Palestine issues makes the political motivation embarrassingly obvious.

Mike Masnick went on to point out that this is an effort to work the referees of facts and to shape speech online. Indeed, Masnick is absolutely correct for those points and the above points. This is another effort by government to shape discourse online and to control speech online. If you say something the far right doesn’t like, now you have reason to worry that your personal information is going to fall into the hands of government who will, in turn, use that for the purposes of political reprisals. This is literally the exact opposite of a free society and more in line with totalitarianism.

We did look for any response from the Wikimedia Foundation, but didn’t find it as of this writing, but in all likelihood, they probably will resist such an order. After all, Wikipedia did try to sue the UK government over the Online Safety Act’s requirement to identify its users, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the efforts to protect Wikipedia editors carries over to this as well. In fact, I’d argue that it would be uncharacteristic of them to just hand all personal information over to the government like the Republicans are demanding.

At any rate, these are scary times and this only further highlights our point that government is increasingly seeking to control online speech more and more for their own personal gain.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.