The investigation by UK-based investigative media outlet Neutral Point of View (NPOV), published on Tuesday, said the effort aimed to control how Iranian events were recorded on Wikipedia.
"This is what authoritarian information warfare looks like in 2026," NPOV said.
"The Islamic Republic isn’t just killing protesters. It’s erasing the evidence that they existed at all, it added.
Wikipedia edits and Iran’s rights record
NPOV said Wikipedia entries had been edited over a period years to sanitize Iran’s human rights record. The report cited a 2024 Times investigation that detailed key information about the 1988 mass executions were removed, including references to women and children killed extrajudicially and the involvement of senior officials in the death commissions.
Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 life sentence in Sweden for war crimes had disappeared from Wikipedia, it added. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania over their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents were also removed.
AI and downstream platforms
NPOV said the impact extended beyond Wikipedia because major platforms drew from Wikipedia content. The report said that when users queried AI systems such as ChatGPT about Iranian leaders or events, the systems often drew from Wikipedia articles that NPOV described as compromised.
NPOV said the narrative did not remain on Wikipedia and instead propagated into downstream products and services trained on or influenced by Wikipedia content, shaping what users saw across the broader information ecosystem.
Editing tactics and coordination
NPOV said the operation exploited Wikipedia’s consensus model through tactics including what it called “abrasive deletion,” in which small edits gradually eroded sections before larger removals were justified as trimming or the removal of trivial material.
The report said editors used “source reliability” disputes as another mechanism. On the “2017–2018 Iranian protests” page, NPOV said editor Mhhossein deleted paragraphs describing conditions inside Iran after the protests ended, citing disputes over whether dissident outlet Iran News Wire was reliable.
NPOV said coordinated groups acted as voting blocs on article Talk Pages, while “authorship dominance” allowed a small number of editors to maintain control over most of an article’s text by reverting challenges.
The report said a Wikipedia arbitration case documented editors citing state-linked outlets including irdiplomacy.ir. It also said the so-called “Gang of 40” controlled more than 90% of dozens of articles.
Key editors named in the report
NPOV said two editors exemplified the campaign.
It said Mhhossein had acted as a gatekeeper on historical coverage, citing his editing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's page and other Iran-related topics. NPOV said Mhhossein edited 2,228 pages over more than 11,000 edits.
NPOV said Iskandar323 continued editing sensitive Iran-related atrocity content, including the 1988 mass executions, as recently as Jan. 18. The report said Wikipedia was running a site-ban process against him following years of systematic narrative manipulation, and it detailed his editing history across thousands of pages.
Live battleground: 2025–2026 protest page
NPOV said Wikipedia’s “2025–2026 Iranian protests” article had drawn on more than 400 sources and remained relatively distributed at the time of writing. However, it said the Talk Page showed pressure in real time, including disputes over language and whether opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi should be included.
NPOV highlighted a newly created account, SwedishDutch, which disputed casualty figures and challenged the reliability of outlets including The Sunday Times and Iran International, before the account was deleted hours later.