How, and Why, Is Saudi Arabia Infiltrating Wikipedia?

In a joint statement, the Washington-based organization Democracy Now for the Arab World (DAWN) and Beirut-based SMEX have directly accused Saudi Arabia of hacking the popular digital encyclopedia Wikipedia and recruiting Saudi citizens and moderators within the encyclopedia to serve the Saudi government's agenda.

They added that Wikipedia's parent company, Wikimedia, terminated all its officials in the kingdom last December after an internal investigation.

The accusation comes less than a month after a former Twitter employee was sentenced to prison for "spying" for the kingdom, and nearly a year after a Wikimedia investigation in January 2022, after raising suspicions about attempts to control content, which concluded that 16 users "who were involved in modifying conflicts of interest in Wikipedia projects in the Middle East and North Africa" were universally banned, most of them Saudis.

It seems that the content provided by the encyclopedia through its global platform raises the ire and concern of some, as Saudi Arabia was not the only country that resents what is raised on the platform.

The accusations, despite the attempt of the parent company, Wikimedia, to minimize their impact and deny some of what was stated in them, claiming that "there are fundamental errors in the statement received from DAWN/SMEX," raised many questions about the reasons for Saudi concern about the encyclopedia and its goals by recruiting agents inside it.

They confirmed the kingdom's continuation of its policy since 2015 regarding targeting all opposition tweets and trying to obliterate the facts that are exposed from near or far to violations practiced by Riyadh.

They also showed the control scheme on cyberspace and controlling its content in a way that serves the Saudi agenda and beautifies its distorted image globally due to its shameful human rights record.

 

Hacking and Imprisonment

The human rights group DAWN, founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed at his country's consulate in Istanbul in 2018, and SMEX, a group that promotes digital rights in the Arab world, based their accusations of documenting the hacking of Wikipedia by the Saudi government on personal interviews they conducted with sources close to the encyclopedia (Whistleblowers) and imprisoned officials.

Osama Khaled and Ziad al-Sufyani, high-ranking volunteer Wikipedia officials with great privileges to edit fully protected pages and access all caches and details of the encyclopedia in a manner that is not allowed to the public, were arrested by the government of the Kingdom in September 2020 and sentenced to prison terms (32 years for Osama and 8 years for Ziad).

The directors of the two rights organizations and a number of activists pointed out that the arrests of Wikipedia officials in Saudi Arabia two years ago were part of a public campaign targeting the encyclopedia's administrators in the kingdom, while quoting their own sources that the officials were prosecuted "because they contributed information deemed critical of the persecution of political activists inside the country."

"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."

On the other hand, a few hours after these accusations were made, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, came out denying these reports, saying in a statement late on Thursday, January 5, 2023: "There are fundamental errors in the statement received from DAWN/SMEX," stressing that "our investigation did not conclude that the Saudi government (hacked) Wikipedia and affected users."

In January 2022, the parent organization itself conducted an internal investigation following mounting voices suggesting that efforts were being made to control content on the platform, concluding that 16 users involved in modifying conflicts of interest on Wikipedia projects in the MENA region had been banned.

The statement issued by the organization explicitly said that it "was able to confirm that a number of users with close ties to external parties are modifying the platform in a coordinated manner to promote the goal of those parties."

But it did not disclose at the time the identity of those parties and the nationalities of the users, which raised renewed doubts among some.

The DAWN and SMEX investigations concluded that the banned persons are Saudis and were part of the editorial team of the highest-rated encyclopedia in the region and that the decision came after discovering their work to serve the Saudi agenda by positively promoting the government, the authority, and the crown prince.

They also worked on removing any critical or offensive content on the kingdom, including all information about prisoners of conscience, including politicians, intellectuals, media professionals, clerics, and activists.

These charges came about a month after the San Francisco court sentenced Lebanese–American citizen Ahmed Abu Ammo to three and a half years in prison, in mid-December 2022, after convicting him of 6 criminal charges, including acting as an agent of the kingdom, attempting to conceal payments he received from an official linked to the royal family, and selling information related to a Twitter user in exchange for expensive money and an hour about seven years ago, through his work as a supervisor of Twitter's media partnerships in the MENA region.

Wikipedia (founded on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the Nupedia Project written by expert editors) was not the vast space that allows everyone to publish their content without censorship or scrutiny that has been a concern for states and governments for the first 15 years of its existence.

But more recently, in the seven years since 2015-2022, it has become a threat as it has become one of the world's most numerous and largest digital platforms. Is it worth the fuss?

It is estimated that Wikipedia has become a strong competitor to the most famous and widespread global digital platforms and one of the huge information vessels with a strong influence and effective presence.

In terms of numbers, the number of users of the platform is 32.5 million users, and it has more than 5.56 million articles in various fields, while 600 articles are added to it daily, in 280 international languages.

The number of reviews of published articles exceeds 18 billion attempts per month (about three topics per month per person on the planet), and it has more than 141,000 active editorial members, representing only half a percent of its total editors.