Saudi Arabia infiltrated Wikipedia by recruiting the organisation’s highest-ranked administrators in the country as government agents, in a bid to control content on the website, activists said Thursday, citing the investigation.

Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, terminated all of its administrators in Saudi Arabia in December after an internal investigation.

“Wikimedia’s investigation revealed that the Saudi government had infiltrated the highest ranks in Wikipedia’s team in the region,” Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) and Beirut-based SMEX said in a joint statement on Thursday.

DAWN, a Washington-headquartered human rights group founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and SMEX, a group promoting digital rights in the Arab world, documented Wikipedia’s infiltration by the Saudi government based on interviews with sources close to the company, “whistleblowers” and the imprisoned administrators.

In September 2020, the Saudi government arrested Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani, two high-ranking volunteer administrators at Wikipedia with privileged access to the website, including the ability to edit fully protected pages. The men were handed down jail sentences of 32 years, and eight years, respectively.

The arrests were part of a “crackdown” on Wikipedia administrators in the country,” DAWN and SMEX said. The men were prosecuted because they had contributed information deemed to be critical about the persecution of political activists inside the country, the activists said, citing unnamed sources.

“It’s despicable but entirely predictable that the Saudi government has prosecuted Saudis merely for posting content about the government’s human rights abuses,” said Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s advocacy director. “But Wikimedia also needs to take responsibility for the fact that its authorized editors are today languishing in prison for work they did on Wikipedia pages.”

Infiltration

In January 2022, Wikimedia became suspicious of efforts to exert control over content and launched an investigation. Last month, it announced global bans for 16 users “who were engaging in conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.”

In a statement, Wikimedia said they “were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties,” but didn’t disclose the exact location or identity of the banned users.

Sources with knowledge of Wikimedia’s operations revealed to DAWN and SMEX that the ban was against 16 Saudi users – Wikimedia’s highest-ranked editorial team in the region – following its discovery that they were serving as agents for the Saudi government to promote positive content about the government and delete content critical of the government, including information about political prisoners in the country.

There was no immediate comment from the Saudi government or from Wikimedia.

The revelation comes after a San Francisco court sentenced Ahmad Abouammo, a dual US-Lebanese citizen who oversaw Twitter’s media partnerships in the Mena region, to three and a half years in prison after being convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia.

Source: Middle East Eye