Months after a Twitter employee was jailed for his role in spying for Saudi Arabia, it has emerged that the country managed to infiltrate Wikipedia too. The Saudi government reportedly succeeded in infiltrating Wikipedia’s senior ranks in the region.
The shocking revelation was made by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a US-based human rights group founded by slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and SMEX, a group promoting digital rights in the Arab world.
A joint statement by the organisations said the Saudi Arabian government recruited Saudi citizens who acted as or were forced to act as agents for the country in its bid to control the content on the website.
However, Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, became suspicious of the efforts to control its content, following which it launched an investigation. This revealed that the Saudi government had penetrated Wikipedia’s highest ranks in the region.
As per the probe, Wikimedia was "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."
This comes as Wikimedia last month announced global bans for 16 users who were reportedly "engaging in conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects in the Mena [Middle East and North Africa] region."
According to DAWN, these 16 included Wikimedia's highest-ranked editorial team in the region and they were serving as agents for the Saudi government to promote positive content about the government and delete content critical of the government, including about the crackdown on political prisoners in the country.
"The Saudi government's infiltration of Wikipedia with government agents acting as independent editors, and imprisonment of non-compliant editors, demonstrates not only its persistent use of spies inside international organisations but the dangers of attempting to produce independent content in the country," said Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN's Executive Director. "It's wildly irresponsible for international organisations and businesses to assume their affiliates can ever operate independently of, or safely from, Saudi government control."
Besides infiltration, Saudi Arabia also cracked down on two admins of the company for contributing information deemed to be critical about the persecution of political activists inside the country, DAWN and SMEX said in the statement.
The imprisoned men have been identified as 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. While one was jailed for 32 years, another was sentenced to eight years in prison.
"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."
Neither the Saudi government nor representatives from Wikimedia have commented on the same.
