New Delhi: Saudi Arabia has jailed two high-ranking administrators of Wikipedia and infiltrated the website aiming to gain control of content on the website, activists said on Thursday. The revelation comes after a former Twitter worker was jailed for ‘spying’ for the Saudis, reported news agency AFP. One of the administrators was jailed for 32 years while another was sentenced to eight years, the activists said. One of them is Osama Khalid and the other is Ziyad al-Sofiani, revealed the activists.
An investigation by parent body Wikimedia discovered the Saudi government had got hold of Wikipedia’s senior ranks in the region with Saudi citizens acting or forced to act as agents, two rights groups said.
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“The 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 as quoted in the report.
Washington-headquartered DAWN, founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was killed, and SMEX, which promotes digital rights in the Arab world, cited “whistleblowers and trusted sources” while sharing the details.
Wikimedia is engaged in putting free educational content online through initiatives like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and Wiktionary.
The statement comes after Wikimedia last month 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”.
Based on its investigation that started last January, 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”.
Wikimedia was referring to Saudis acting under the influence of the Saudi government, DAWN and SMEX said, citing their sources.
What Did The Investigation Reveal?
Two high-ranking ‘admins’, also known as volunteer administrators with privileged access to Wikipedia that allowed the ability to edit fully protected pages, have been imprisoned since they got arrested on the same day in September 2020, the two bodies added.
The activists’ bodies claimed that the arrests appeared to be part of a ‘crackdown on Wikipedia admins in the country’.
Abdullah Alaoudh, DAWN’s director of research for the Gulf, said Khalid was jailed for 32 years and Sofiani received an eight-year sentence.
“The arrests of Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on one hand, and the infiltration of Wikipedia on the other hand, show a horrifying aspect of how the Saudi government wants to control the narrative and Wikipedia,” Alaoudh told AFP.
Earlier, former Twitter worker Ahmad Abouammo was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison by a San Francisco court for crimes including being an illegal agent of a foreign government.
Abouammo and fellow Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah, who is wanted by the FBI, were accused of being enlisted by Saudi officials between late 2014 and early the following year to get private information on accounts that were critical of the Saudi regime.