Congress is now investigating Wikipedia.
More precisely, according to a letter dated August 27, 2025 and sent by Rep James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) to the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maryana Iskander, the cybersecurity subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has launched an investigation into Wikipedia.
Having recently given comments to one media outlet, I thought I would reproduce them here for the use of Congress and the public.
I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia. Last February, I asked President Trump and Elon Musk (when he headed DOGE) to make it a policy that neither federal worker hours nor federal moneys may be used to edit Wikipedia or pay for Wikipedia editing. Musk retweeted the post, which received 35 million views. There is clearly massive support for this sort of investigation.
I would urge Congress not to neglect a problem I have had to deal with often over the years. I regularly hear from famous people who sought to correct their Wikipedia articles, but had great difficulty in doing so. Not a few have sought to sue for defamation by Wikipedia. The problem is that Wikipedia authors are generally anonymous, and the Wikimedia Foundation enjoys Section 230 immunity from such lawsuits. Nor, in general, does the WMF have to reveal the identity of the authors. Who then is the plaintiff supposed to sue? At present, Wikipedia is a veritable engine of defamation.