Saudi Government Narrative Control Efforts Now Include The Jailing Of Wikipedia Administrators
There are plenty of governments operating on platforms of pure evil, but the Saudi government is one the few that continues to be given a pass by other governments who fear alienating a source of oil located in the Mideast.
North Korea may be evil but it's limited by its lack of a functioning economy. Sooner or later, the nation led by North Korean equivalent of a trust fund kid will be reduced to doing nothing more than talking, which is the most economical of antagonistic rhetoric options.
The Saudi government - headed by kings and princes - will never have money problems. And that makes this government far more disturbing when it chooses to indulge itself. This is the government that recently imprisoned a US citizen for 16 years over critical tweets. This is the same government that outlawed satire in 2018, instituting five-year prison sentences for those mocking" the government and its favored religion.
This is the same government that killed and dismembered a Washington Post journalist (and legal US resident) and got away with it because no one in the international community with the power to stand up against the Saudi government chose to do so.
The DOJ recently indicted two former Twitter employees for acting on behalf of the Saudi government to spy on Twitter users the Saudi government hoped to silence, if not imprison. So, it's clear the Saudi government's efforts to silence critics and control the narrative have extraterritorial reach.
But it's still doing what it can on the home front, where it's not subject to laws that haven't been written to favor the Saudi government. The latest news on the government's efforts to control the narrative brings Wikipedia into the picture, showing the Saudi government - as powerful as it is - still fears the history it is constantly rewriting will be undercut by people concerned with compiling facts.
Saudi Arabia has infiltrated Wikipedia and jailed two administrators in a bid to control content on the website, weeks after a former Twitter worker was jailed in the US for spying for the Saudis.
One administrator was jailed for 32 years, and another was sentenced to eight years, the activists said.
An investigation by parent body Wikimedia found the Saudi government had penetrated Wikipedia's senior ranks in the region, with Saudi citizens acting or forced to act as agents, two rights groups said.
The investigation referred to in this Guardian report was performed by DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now). The first notable aspect of this investigation is the fact that these arrests did not occur recently.
According to sources with knowledge of the matter who spoke to DAWN and SMEX, in September 2020, the Saudi government arrested two high-ranking Wikipedia administrators in Saudi Arabia, Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani on the same day, charging them with swaying public opinion" and violating public morals." The Specialized Criminal Court, the country's counter-terrorism court used to prosecute political detainees, sentenced them in the summer of 2020 to five and eight years in Al-Haer prison in Riyadh, respectively.
For two years, these obviously politically motivated arrests flew under the radar. The fact that bullshit laws crafted solely for the government to wield against critics is the unsurprising part. But things did get worse far more recently for one of the Wikipedia administrators arrested and charged by the Saudi government:
The Specialized Criminal Court increased Mr. Khalid's sentence to 32 years in September 2022 for the same charges in what appears to be part of a broader campaign to impose harsh additional sentences against political detainees.
That's insane. Khalid's sentence was originally five years. Even at that length it was unjust and clear abuse of the government's power. After serving nearly half his original sentence, the government decided to take away his freedom for another 27 years.
Wikipedia can't save the editors the Saudi government has jailed. But it can help prevent the Saudi government from sock-puppeting its way into an alternative set of facts.
On December 6, 2022, Wikimedia announced that it had banned 16 users for conflict of interest editing" following an internal investigation it had commenced in January 2022. Sources with knowledge of Wikimedia's operations revealed to DAWN and SMEX that the ban was against 16 Saudi users, Wikimedia's highest ranked editorial team in the region, following its discovery that they were serving as agents for the Saudi government to promote positive content about the government and delete content critical of the government, including information about political prisoners in the country.
DAWN says the publication of the list of excised Saudi administrators is a good start. But it feels the Foundation should do more. While increased vigilance in response to proven infiltration is essential, the Foundation should do more to prevent it from happening in the future, including monitoring administrators based in other countries with long histories of human rights abuses to ensure articles and edits originating from those countries aren't just government propaganda.
But no matter what Wikipedia does in response to this situation, the Saudi government has already proven its point. And its willingness to jail people for decades simply because they tried to publish facts will serve as a strong deterrent to Saudi residents who think they can still pursue the truth.