The Wikipedia page for Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has called the Israel Defense Forces a “Nazi army” and Orthodox Jews “inbred,” has received more than 327,000 views in the past 30 days.
At the top of the page, it states that he has “regularly spoken about the Gaza war, advocating for Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli government.” Readers must scroll down quite a bit to learn that he has praised Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization.
Despite an editor recommending it, the page does not note that the U.S. Department of the Treasury reportedly subpoenaed the streamer, who has 2.8 million followers on Twitch and has hosted multiple Democratic politicians on his show, regarding a recent trip to Cuba.
An editor stated in the page’s “talk” section that the crowdsourced encyclopedia should wait for more details to come out before including that detail.
Toby Dershowitz, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that “a look under the hood shows that anonymous editors hold sway over how figures like Hasan Piker are publicly portrayed.”
“Through structural changes to text, strategic placement of controversies and calls for ‘balance,’ they soften the public image of extremists,” she said, “even when the factual record is so one-sided that balance for its own sake is unwarranted.”
‘Bias within the Wikipedia community’
Piker’s entry has one paragraph, out of some 3,000 words, that addresses allegations of Jew-hatred directly.
The paragraph notes that Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) accused him of antisemitism, and Piker denied it. The entry also states that he called Orthodox Jews in Israel “inbred” and that he later regretted saying it.
It cites reporting from The New Yorker, which reported that “when Piker is criticized by the right, it’s usually for soft-pedaling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis,” and from Vox stating that Piker has “lack of issue” with Hezbollah, which is also a U.S.-designated terror group.
Editors opposed a suggestion that the entry should mention Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) introducing a resolution in April decrying Piker and Candace Owens, another antisemitic podcaster. Editors stated that it was too soon to determine if the resolution would have any real impact on Piker.
On May 8, an editor removed a sentence from the entry about Piker interviewing a Yemeni influencer, who was on a ship that the Houthis seized in January 2024.
The influencer, who calls himself the “pirate king,” has defended the Houthis, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
“Wikipedia claims to present a neutral point of view on factual information, but this page shows yet again an apparent bias within the Wikipedia community against Jews and Israel in how it underemphasizes or fails to cite the extreme and antisemitic positions of Piker,” Daniel Kelley, senior director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society, told JNS.
The ADL, which Wikipedia considers a “generally unreliable” source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compiled a list of Piker’s remarks that it says show his support for terrorism and his antisemitic ideas.
Some but not all of the remarks are covered in the Wikipedia entry, including his view that Hamas is “1,000 times” better than the Israeli government, that Hezbollah’s is his “favorite flag” and that he supports “every type of armed resistance against both the settlers and also the Israeli occupying force in the West Bank.”
He also compared Zionists to Nazis and engaged in Oct. 7 rape denial, according to the ADL. Neither of those things is mentioned in Piker’s Wikipedia entry.
Kurt Schwartz, CEO of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, told JNS that “when editors conceal Piker’s indifference to and even denial of Hamas’s sexual assault, for example, these amount to errors of omission.”
They are “errors meant to distort understanding and rewrite history in a Pravda-like manner,” Schwartz said. (The latter was a Soviet official publication.)
Dershowitz told JNS that “from Piker’s justification of the deadly attacks on America on 9/11 to his comments that ‘it doesn’t matter if rape happened on Oct. 7,’ the public record merits the full ground truth, however that tips the scale.”
