The fake accounts whitewashing oligarchs’ Wikipedia pages

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Is Oleg Deripaska an oligarch or a business magnate? Was Alisher Usmanov ever convicted of a crime?

A recent investigation by Wikipedia’s community-run newspaper suggests that a number of oligarchs linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin hired PR firms that, among their “reputation management” services, whitewashed their clients’ Wikipedia articles, thus deciding the questions above.

The investigation was led by a Wikipedia user called Smallbones, who’s the editor in chief and main reporter for The Signpost, the open encyclopedia’s community newspaper. Smallbones found that scores of fake accounts linked to international PR firms were editing articles directly linked to the oligarchs they were representing.

The investigation is based on past reporting and an analysis of the edits by fake accounts banned from the site over the years.

Though it’s impossible to directly link many of the edits with the firms that worked with the oligarchs, the investigation found circumstantial evidence that “a network of sockpuppets were used to edit many articles about oligarchs.”

On Wikipedia, sock puppets are fake accounts operated by one person; a sock farm is a collection of fake accounts working together. The Signpost found a “pattern of editing” involving no less than “50 now-blocked sockpuppets or paid editors” working via such farms.

Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska attending an economic forum in Saint Petersburg last June.
EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA/REUTERS

On Deripaska’s article, for example, a fake user linked to a “sock farm” rewrote large swaths of the article, in one case changing “oligarch” to “business magnate.” In another case, a banned editor called Earflaps rewrote key parts of the Wikipedia article for Mikhail Fridman, also deleting a reference to the so-called Donald Trump-Russia dossier, whose allegations touch on bank owners including the Israeli-Russian oligarch, who is Jewish and Ukrainian-born.

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“Many of these articles had all the hallmarks of conflict-of-interest editing: The subject is highly controversial, but the controversies are obfuscated. They are lost in the body of the article among extensive details, trivia and poorly sourced puffery,” an anonymous editor who spoke to The Signpost said.

“This may include detailed coverage of every single philanthropic endeavor the subject has ever been involved in. The same pattern can be seen in articles related to political and economic elites in kleptocracies and autocracies in general.”

The investigation, which was based on an analysis of known accounts linked to PR firms, found that many additional fake users were editing the pages linked to Roman Abramovich, Andrei Skoch, Deripaska, Fridman and German Khan.

While the investigation fell short of linking these fake users and the farms they were part of to specific PR firms, Smallbones notes that “there is little doubt, however, that Alisher Usmanov hired the PR firm RLM Finsbury, who then edited his Wikipedia article.

“Finsbury admitted as much in 2012. The evidence on Arkadiy Abramovich and Alexander Nesis is almost as strong. [PR firm] Bell Pottinger admitted that they edited the Wikipedia articles of their clients, though they did not mention the specific clients. Wikipedia’s [users] were then able to identify the Bell Pottinger paid accounts, including one which edited the Arkadiy Abramovich article and another which edited the Alexander Nesis article.”

In 2012, British media outlets revealed that Usmanov, an Uzbekistan-born Russian national who made his fortune in mining and steel and is considered one of the oligarchs closest to Putin, hired RLM Finsbury ahead of a London IPO of one of his companies, Russian cellular provider MegaFon. According to the investigation, over 15 banned accounts edited his Wikipedia article after that, and deleted, for example, a reference to the oligarch’s criminal record in Russia.

Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov attending an economic conference in Moscow, in 2017.
Sergei Karpukhin/REUTERS

The firm admitted to editing Usmanov’s article but said it did so on its own accord, not at its client’s request. In the years since, additional accounts linked to this network of RLM Finsbury users have been found to have edited other articles about oligarchs. One example is Skoch; media reports have said the PR firm tried to have images of his yacht removed from another website.

Many of these accounts were busy not just editing content but also taking part in debates between editors with the goal of skewing coverage.

Accounts linked to Bell Pottinger, another PR firm that has been revealed to have provided for-profit Wikipedia editing services, have also been found to have edited the article on Nesis, with one also editing the article for a firm he owns.

The article for Roman Abramovich’s son Arkadiy was also edited by an account that was blocked after it was discovered to be editing on behalf of Bell Pottinger.

On Roman Abramovich’s article, which was actually found to be well detailed and balanced, “over 50 now-blocked sockpuppets” were discovered to be active over the years, including Earflaps, “who edited articles on other oligarchs and on financial articles.”

He did this as part of a sock farm that also included a blocked user who in the past was found to have “engaged in broad disruption of the English Wikipedia, and promoted the Russian airline industry.”

Smallbones told Haaretz that it’s clear that “there’s some sort of network here. … [The accounts] overlap so much and edit the same articles about the same people. There’s no way there’s not some connection. Now what the connection is, I can’t really say.”

Roman Abramovich attending a soccer match in Sweden last year.
Martin Meissner/AP

Shady market

Wikipedia is one of the 10 most popular websites in the world. A Wikipedia article is a status symbol, and entries from the open site receive top billing on Google searches.

But unlike all other websites in the top 10, Wikipedia doesn’t collect data on its users, be they readers just passing through or the most dedicated editors spending hours a day editing the encyclopedia’s articles. This makes Wikipedia unique. It’s run by a nonprofit group and is based on donations, so it remains free and devoid of ads.

But this also means that Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation that oversees it and even the community maintaining its millions of articles can’t easily spot inauthentic behavior. On Twitter and Facebook, technology can easily be deployed to spot at least bots and nefarious activity.

That’s close to impossible on Wikipedia, one reason being that you don’t even need an email to create an account. Thus you can hide your IP address, making identification very hard to do.

Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman, co-founder of Alfa-Group, in Moscow in 2019.
POOL/REUTERS

The site’s crowdsourcing ethos is built around tension; on one side, lowering barriers of participation and keeping Wikipedia “open,” on the other, making sure its articles are accurate and factual. Over the years, as Wikipedia rose to prominence, a shady market of for-profit editing emerged.

On Wikipedia, anyone can edit and donate their time and knowledge, but doing so for a price is frowned on. In fact, over the years a number of for-profit editing schemes has been revealed.

One recent example is Ronen Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein. He revealed that the Israeli business intelligence firm Black Cube was hired by the later-convicted sexual predator and the editing of Wikipedia articles was among damage control operations run on his behalf.

There have also been cases of Russian state agents editing their own articles. For example, Maria Butina, now a Russian lawmaker who in the past was identified as a Russian foreign agent active in the United States, was caught by editors editing her own article in a story first reported by The Daily Beast in 2018.

Cases like these show that Wikipedia is on Russia’s radar. “The fact that we’ve seen so few cases of states like Russia editing Wikipedia doesn’t mean it’s not happening – quite the opposite. It just means we’re not finding it,” a Wikipedia editor who is active in this space and requested anonymity says.

After the first cases of paid editing were discovered – most famously the case of WikiPR, a firm that offered such services, and Gibraltarpedia, where Gibraltar’s tourism board tried to edit articles to attract tourists – the issue of for-profit editing was regulated.

William Beutler, the most prominent of Wikipedia’s paid editors, spearheaded the regulation of for-profit editing. In 2012 he worked with members of the Wikipedia community and with representatives of the PR industry and helped craft a policy under which paid editors would disclose that they were working for a client and weren’t regular volunteer editors.

He has since taken a much more conservative stance and now supports not allowing paid editors to edit directly, instead suggesting wording and paragraphs to their clients’ articles that volunteer editors can then choose to incorporate or not.

Beutler is considered an ethical for-profit editor; he’s what’s termed a “white hat” editor who plays by the rules, unlike so-called black hat editors working under the radar and avoiding detection. His commitment has made him the most respected of such editors on Wikipedia, usually stigmatized by other volunteers for doing for-profit work. For him, disclosure is key, and he’s still concerned that there’s a black market of Wikipedia editing.

“No one has any idea, really,” he says when asked how big that market is. “It’s big enough to have a few different classes of participants, from big PR firms that might make some edits for clients but don’t really know what they’re doing, to sophisticated digital agencies that may or may not follow the conflict-of-interest rules, to individual consultants.

“A small number of them do perfectly fine and above-board work, but one has to think they’re vastly outnumbered by the wannabes on Fiverr or Upwork doing low-quality, undisclosed editing work.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivering a speech during a ceremony at the Kremlin in Moscow last month.
MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS

Conflicted knowledge

Israel, too, has a for-profit editing scene; at least 100 such editors are registered on the site. In recent weeks, one of the most prolific editors, Oved Cohen, who edits as WikiMentor, has been in the center of a storm after he promoted his services in an interview with Israeli television.

“There’s a stigma on paid editing, but it’s based on some conspiracy theory according to which paid editing is bad editing,” he told Haaretz. “The fear is that people with money will influence the content of Wikipedia and will taint it because they have a vested interest. This is a real concern, but there are regulations to address exactly that issue.”

David Shay, the most veteran of Israel’s volunteer Wikipedia editors, agrees. “There’s definitely a concern and it’s justified, as these are articles or edits that would not have been done without someone paying for them,” he says.

“This actually creates a lot of work for the volunteers, as many times these articles need to be deleted, and then we volunteers waste time debating them or rewriting them to bring them up to par.”

Despite his conservative position, Beutler has long argued that the stigma on paid editing has actually created a gap on Wikipedia. He argues that the encyclopedia is actually missing information about for-profit entities, and by not allowing firms working on others’ behalf to edit, the public ends up paying a price.

“Everyone who edits Wikipedia has a potential conflict of interest with one topic or another, whether it’s a paid or unpaid interest,” he says. “Everyone has their own affiliations, from their place of work to a passionate cause, or their hometown sports team.”

A source in the PR world confirms that a shadow war is playing out on Wikipedia between editors seeking to weed out for-profit editing and PR firms working for their clients.

“Our clients want us to provide Wikipedia services too, but there’s some deterrence from the community. Wikipedia is very hard and beyond a few minor edits here and there, we who really do not promise anything more. I would never, for example, commit to creating a new article for a client. It simply would not work.

Shay says the real threat is not for-profit editors but rather what he calls ideological editors. Israel, for example, has a number of disclosed paid editors working not for companies but for ideology-focused groups or nongovernmental organizations. For example, the Kohelet Forum, a right-wing group pushing American-style judicial conservatism in Israel, has its own paid editor, as does a prominent yeshiva and even the Israeli equivalent of the ACLU.

“The ideological ones are the most dangerous because they come with the clear intention of changing the narrative of an article,” Shay says. Another Hebrew Wikipedia editor adds: “The potential damage is huge.”

Shay says it’s hard to weed them out and he doesn’t enjoy spending time on Wikipedia as a detective. But Smallbones and others do, and they’re certain that lots of undercover activity is still afflicting Wikipedia. Still, he’s confident that “we’ve got a system now where we can really find paid editors.”