Saudi and Iranian propagandists manipulate Wikipedia

A quarter of Arabic Wikipedia administrators turned out to be part of covert influence campaigns.

Wikipedia announced at the end of 2022 that it had banned 16 influential accounts “with close connections with external parties” related to the Middle East who “were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, declined to reveal more details due to security risks and “legal limitations.” However, a look at the list of banned editors strongly suggests that the “external parties” were trying to promote the interests of the Saudi and Iranian governments.

The banned editors’ connections caused “serious concern for the safety of our users,” the Wikimedia Foundation stated, implying that others who spoke out would be at risk of “retaliation.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran have been locked in a decades-long cold war. Along with aggressive propaganda against each other, the two rivals have engaged in violent proxy warfare.

While most of the Wikipedia manipulation took place on the Arabic and Persian versions of the encyclopedia, the banned users also edited the English version.

One of the banned users posted the first English-language entry about The Line, a plan to build a megacity in the Saudi desert. The Saudi government has attempted to stir up buzz about the project, but foreign experts have questioned its feasibility, and three Saudi citizens have been sentenced to death protesting against its construction.

The ban included seven of the 26 administrators on Arabic Wikipedia, as well as three regular users on Arabic Wikipedia, and six regular users on Persian Wikipedia.

Anyone can anonymously edit Wikipedia. Administrators, who have the ability to lock pages and ban other users, are chosen through a complicated election process. They are unpaid volunteers.

Many of the banned editors spent most of their time posting about innocuous topics like entertainment and classical history. That content helped build their credibility and hide their political agenda.

Arabic-language administrator Jar Allah was the most active editor out of the banned users. They wrote dozens of edits per day, mostly related to soccer and video games, making them the 282nd most active user on Arabic Wikipedia.

The account took a keen interest in supporting the Ahwazi nationalist cause, which believes that the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan is actually an occupied Arab territory. Iraq invaded the province in 1980, kicking off an eight-year war against Iran, and the Saudi government sponsors Ahwazi separatist rebels today.

Jar Allah also edited articles about the 2015 mass panic at the Hajj, which resulted in a stampede killing over two thousand pilgrims. The user removed mention of the fact that Saudi authorities were burying unidentified victims en masse.

The next most active editor, Sami Rahili, was also an administrator. They largely edited pages related to Saudi royals and businesses as well as Islamic historical figures. Rahili frequently used administrator privileges to undo “vandalism” of Saudi-related pages.

The most active banned Persian-language user, 4nn1l2, had a pro-government slant. The bias was subtle, as 4nn1l2 sometimes intervened against other pro-government users acting inappropriately. Most of 4nn1l2’s recent edits were about linguistics and Turkish culture.

In the comments of an article about Mahsa Jina Amini, whose suspicious death in police custody sparked Iran’s recent uprising, 4nn1l2 argued that the entry should be titled “death of Mahsa Amini” rather than “killing of Mahsa Amini” for reasons of neutrality.

They took the opportunity to claim that Persian-language media was “extremely” unprofessional, pointing to foreign-funded government-critical outlets like the BBC and Radio Liberty as examples.

The user also deleted mentions of the Kurdish population in eastern Iran. There is a long history of Kurdish nationalist opposition to the Iranian government, and Kurds have heavily participated in the recent uprising.

The bias of the next most active user, Shobhe, was much less subtle. Shobhe largely posted about Iranian military affairs and Islamic history.

In the comments of an entry about Kian Pirfalak, a nine year old boy shot dead at an Iranian police checkpoint, Shobhe complained that the lede cited opposition media and “ignored” the government’s side of the story. Shobhe claimed that the BBC and opposition news outlets “publish a lot of lies about Iranian politics.”

Shobhe also tried to delete an article about a Tehran youth protest group.

The fight over Wikipedia shows the asymmetry between the Saudi and Iranian soft power. While Iran’s propaganda campaigns mostly affect domestic audiences and the opposition in exile, Saudi Arabia has effective platforms for reaching audiences across the Middle East and entire world.

One of them, apparently, is the Free Encyclopedia.

Wikipedia’s key principles include protecting the anonymity of editors and “assuming good faith” from everyone involved. These policies have been criticized for allowing bad actors to run rampant.

Because the site is the first stop for many casual readers — and because it only takes a few dedicated editors to control a topic — there is a high payoff for Wikipedia manipulation. The website Wikipediocracy has unmasked several anonymous editors who used the site to promote their own interests and harass their enemies.

Naturally, political actors have taken advantage of that dynamic. Several dedicated pages exist to track government-affiliated users editing Wikipedia, with alerts every time an IP address affiliated with Russian intelligence headquarters or a U.S. congressional office tries to alter an article.

Israeli politicians and pro-Israel activists have openly encouraged their supporters to become Wikipedia editors. Under the leadership of Naftali Bennett, who later served as Israeli prime minister, the West Bank settler council held Wikipedia editing classes and offered a prize for “best Zionist editor.”

More broadly, anonymous online spaces have become fertile ground for covert influence operations. Emails recently obtained by The Intercept show that Twitter officials were helping the U.S. military promote Arabic-language propaganda, often hidden behind fake accounts.

It is not so surprising that Saudi and Iranian propagandists have taken their fight to Wikipedia. The real question seems to be which government-affiliated editing campaigns haven’t been uncovered yet.