Wikipedia Infiltration By Saudi Agents: NGO Report

The government of Saudi Arabia is said to have managed Wikipedia administrators as agents to control content on the platform. This emerges from a recent report by NGOS SMEX and Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
The Saudi government is said to have infiltrated Wikipedia. -CC-BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.smex and Dawn, the Saudi government accuse the Wikipedia platform in a joint report with the help of administrators. In this way, Riad tried to manipulate content on politically imprisoned people in Saudi Arabia. Dawn is based in Washington, D.C. And was founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which was murdered in 2018. The Lebanese NGO SMEX is committed to digital rights in the Arab world.

In their report, the organizations referred to “interviews with company -related sources” and to discussions with two detained former administrators. The two admins had already sentenced Saudi dishes to several years in prison at the end of 2020. According to the court, they would have published government -critical information on the state pursuit of regime regional: inside. The administrators were convicted of 32 and 8 years.

Platform Reference For “Interest Conflicts”

The allegations to the Saudi government are linking to an investigation by the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation is the owner of the Wikipedia Internet portal. According to Wikimedia, the occasion of the investigation was “alleged conflicts of interest […] in the Mena region”. After completing the examination, 16 Wikipedia users were expelled to the platform for life due to “interest conflicts”. As a reason, Wikimedia stated that they had cultivated “close connections to external parties” and pursued the goal of supporting their interests in Wikipedia.

Media Reports

According to media reports, the Wikimedia Foundation contradicts the claim that Wikipedia has been explicitly infiltrated by the Saudi government. This cannot be checked, since the foundation has not yet published the detailed results of its investigation. Smex and Dawn demand this in their joint statement.
The contributions on Wikipedia are created and edited by volunteers. The editor: Inside, the Wikimedia Foundation is not employed, but usually work on a voluntary basis. Administrator: In contrast to you, you can block more rights compared to you: Among other things, author: inside or certain articles for further processing.

The Saudi government has probably not only targeted Wikipedia. It was only last December that a former Twitter manager in the United States was sentenced to three and a half years in prison. On behalf of Riad’s data, he is said to have spied on the data from Riad’s data: on the inside.

This article is originally published on bachhausen.de