Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-12-12/Disinformation report

The stories behind articles in The Signpost seldom end on the article's publication date. In this reporter's long running series about paid editors and other conflict of interest editors, court cases may drag or a new case may start. Government officials may step down and then be appointed to new positions. Expect the unexpected. This is particularly noticeable in the stories on the roughly twenty billionaires I've reported on; maybe less so for the politicians and government officials. This year, and especially this last month have had many unexpected events about the subjects of my reporting. Just this week a major article on an old Signpost subject was published.

Convicted sex offenders are a special group. Paid editing on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein was extensive and shocking, but there have been few developments in his case since the Signpost article was published seven months after his death.

Those edits apparently attributable to Ghislaine Maxwell, in contrast, were few, confused, and soon deleted, except for the photo she apparently sent us. Her court case was fairly quick, and her conviction was widely expected.

Peter Nygård's case, on the other hand, has had drawn-out legal proceedings and strong evidence of prior paid editing on Wikipedia.

The Finnish-born Canadian fashion designer had a net worth of about 900ドル million CAD in 2017. By 2020 the FBI had raided his New York office, his businesses were being sold to cover his debts, and he was being sued by at least 57 women who claimed that he raped or sexually abused them, many when they were minors. In December 2020 he was arrested in Canada on criminal charges, for extradition to the US. Later he was also charged in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg for similar alleged crimes.

In December 2023, after 36 months being held without bail, the 82-year-old Peter Nygård was convicted in Toronto on four charges of sex crimes, in the first of his four possible criminal trials. He was finally sentenced this September to eleven years in prison, but after deducting time already served, only seven more years might need to be served — on this conviction.

Epstein, Maxwell, and Nygård are the only sex offenders I've covered. While some other people who appear to have violated Wikipedia's rules have been convicted of crimes, please remember that any of those offenses are quite different from the ones described above. And please also remember that no investigation of paid editing conducted entirely on-Wiki can definitively prove an editor's employer. The editor may just be trying to embarrass the subject of his edits.

Greg Lindberg was convicted in May of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and is now awaiting sentencing. He bought several insurance companies, and was accused of draining 2ドル billion of their financial reserves into his own pockets, or of lending the money to other companies he owned. He was indicted in 2019, found guilty of trying to bribe North Carolina's insurance commissioner and reported to Federal prison on October 20, 2020, a month before the Signpost article about him.

The Signpost article showed that three apparent undeclared paid editors, plus one very aggressive declared paid editor, had edited the article about Greg Lindberg.

His sentence for bribery was 7 years and 3 months, and if nothing else had happened in the case, he could have been out of prison by 2028. Instead, he appealed his conviction and got a retrial. This May he was convicted again on the same charges, but has not been sentenced yet. In November, he pled guilty to other charges of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering, and left the court in FBI custody. The guilty plea could lead to an additional sentence of up to 15 years. Reportedly he spent 50ドル million on legal fees over seven years. While the ultimate damages caused by his fraud have yet to be fully assessed, one observer reports that he may be responsible for the largest insurance fraud in history.

Just this week Bloomberg reported on a non-business aspect of Lindberg's life in How a Billionaire's 'Baby Project' Ensnared Dozens of Women. Lindberg has a dozen children, including three with his former wife. They separated about 2019. The other nine children were born over about 5 years: mostly through the use of a large network of egg donors, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate mothers. He is the only caregiving parent for eight of the nine children. The 6,000 word Bloomberg article details major surprises every few paragraphs. While there are complaints from several of the egg donors and surrogates, most or all of the "Baby Project" may have been done legally, even though there are serious questions raised about the lack of regulation in the IVF industry. Other surprises are that Lindberg considers billionaires to be "a persecuted class", and that there apparently were large bachelor-style parties on his yacht Double Down documented on YouTube.

Whitaker was acting US Attorney General for three months during the later part of President Trump's first administration. The Signpost reported that he apparently created the articles Matthew Whitaker, about himself, and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa in 2006 (while he held that position), as well as adding his name to Iowa Hawkeyes football as a "notable player". He also worked with the fraudulent company World Patent Marketing, and incorrectly claimed to have received an Academic All-America award.

He was unofficially nominated as the US Ambassador to NATO by Trump on November 20, 2024, despite a lack of foreign policy experience.

Back in July 2022, before Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the 2024 GOP US presidential nomination, User:Jhofferman, following Wikipedia's rules, declared that Vivek Ramaswamy paid him to edit the article about Ramaswamy. Mediaite later said that Jhofferman whitewashed the article about Ramaswamy, removing information about his participation in The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans and a COVID-19 response team.

The Signpost added that, against Wikipedia's rules, over a dozen sockpuppets had apparently edited the articles about Ramaswamy or his companies (Roivant Sciences and Axovant Sciences) without declaring their paid status.

Ramaswamy, along with Elon Musk, were nominated November 12, 2024 by President-elect Trump to lead a planned presidential advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency.

In January, the Signpost exposed the ugliest scam I've seen on Wikipedia. Several apparently-connected firms with names like "EliteWikiWriters" and "WikiModerators" would solicit small businesses, entrepreneurs, artists and authors, nonprofits, churches, and others promising to write Wikipedia articles for them. After collecting a few thousand dollars, they wouldn't bother to write the articles, or just abandoned whatever they had written. If the customers complained, the firm(s) would blame Wikipedia, and try to upsell the customers for a few thousand dollars more.

The "EliteWikiWriters" website was working at least through June 17, and now appears to be offline. The WikiModerators website, if it can be reached, looks like they are not doing business as usual. In November a possibly new firm, "Elite Wiki Writing", posted a press release that looks like the same old scam. Checking the new firm's website, the text looks very similar to EliteWikiWriters, even if most of the graphics and the formatting are different. In an online chat, one of their salespeople claimed that they have been in business for "seven years" and employ "30" Wikipedia administrators or editors. (The chat transcript is available to admins on request, as is an archive of the press release which contains a URL blacklisted on Wikipedia.)

On January 24, 2023, Adani was one of the richest people in the world — with a net worth of about 119ドル billion — when the bottom dropped out. Short-seller Hindenburg Research issued a report saying that his companies were conducting "one of, if not the most egregious example of corporate fraud in history". His net worth dropped by 67ドル billion (as of 2023年02月15日) by the time the Signpost was getting ready to publish the story of one of, if not the most obvious example, of paid editing on Wikipedia. An unregistered editor had made an extensive edit to the Adani Group article, leaving his name, and job title, in their edit comment:

as well as an IP address that was identified as coming from Adani Enterprises Limited. On top of this self-identified complete rewriting of the Adani Group article, more than 40 accounts later blocked as sockpuppets, unidentified paid editors (UPE) or CheckUser-blocked editors, created or rewrote nine articles related to Adani, combining their edits on the articles.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, does it? On November 20, 2024 Gautam Adani and seven others were indicted for securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy in the US and Adani and his nephew were also charged in a civil case by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The alleged fraud involved lying to US investors while offering to sell bonds of the company Adani Green Energy. The alleged lie was denying that the firm paid, or had promised to pay, bribes (about 265ドル million worth) to Indian government officials. Gautam Adani is in India and is not expected to be arrested.

A week after the indictment was announced, AFP reported that the Adani Group had lost 55ドル billion in market value.

Did Adani continue to manipulate Wikipedia content after the Signpost article? At the Adani Group article one aggressively pro-Adani editor, User:Sambyal was blocked for "persistent removal of content; [I] suspect this may be professional reputation management". The same editor also edited articles on several other large Indian companies. User:Maduant made nine edits including two large pro-Adani deletions and was blocked for undisclosed paid editing. A few other editors were later blocked as sockpuppets but they made few edits and it is difficult to say if they were pro-Adani.

At Adani Green Energy, Maduant twice deleted sections about the Hindenburg report. At Adani Enterprises, their seven edits were more factual, but still pro-Adani. So yes, there appears to have been an effort to continue manipulating Wikipedia content, but it is not so obvious as it was before the Signpost article.

As always, please leave any comments in the section below. If you have any tips about newsworthy people using paid editors on Wikipedia, please email me here. And have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Amazing work you have done - thank you! - kosboot (talk) 15:58, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

@Kosboot: - Thank you! A kind word goes a long way in keeping this series going. I'd been planning on doing an update on old stories for a while. Lots of little stuff comes up and I think that I should let readers know that the articles I've written are going out of date. This last month jolted me out of my hesitancy, starting with Lindberg's plea to new charges, and the jolts just continued, until last week with the Bloomberg article about Lindberg I just felt "oh, no, not another one!"

I am getting concerned that we are not enforcing our policy WP:PAID strictly enough and that these types of stories will just keep continuing until everybody is just so sick of reading about them that we'll start doing something about stopping them before they really get going. Perhaps, I'll just have to take a different tack. Thanks again. Smallbones _(smalltalk) 17:33, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

I generally don't work on political articles or "attention-getting" articles where one would be able to detect sockpuppets. I do work a lot on music projects where occasionally a person will edit their own article or have someone do it for them. But I am never able to pick up on these, even though I can easily recognize content that is questionable. Not to add more to your plate, but perhaps at the end of the series, you can create "how to recognize paid editing/sockpuppets" kind of article (unless it's already written). - kosboot (talk) 20:53, 13 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

Hey @Kosboot:, I think you've asked the most important question, roughly "What can an ordinary editor do about the problem of paid editing?" But there are variants on that question that came to mind when I first read your note above, which I'll address after some simple answers.

• User:Bri (IIRC) has an operational answer, or a how-to manual somewhere but I can't find it right now. He should be able to find it, or tell me that I'm misremembering.

Perhaps WP:Identifying PR is what you were thinking of? - Bri

Thanks, that's it - Sb

• See WP:REPORTPAID for the very short answer

1. At first I took your question to be "How do I really know that the people involved above are involved in paid editing?" A journalist should be able to answer that question off the top of his or her head. "What's the simple evidence behind your story (that wasn't actually in the story)?" Off the top of my head, I answered to myself, "Look for the A-holes. You gotta admit that's a pretty good collection of A-holes in this article!" But that's not really correct. Not all jerks are paid editors, and not all paid editors are jerks. Even in the collection above I think there are at least two who are not jerks, but might have just got carried away by a difficult situation. Involved with paid (or at least COI) editing - yes, jerks - maybe not. Please see my talk page for something related.
2. Maybe you were asking "How do I, Kosboot, know when I run into a paid editor or sockpuppet?" That's actually 2 questions and as you suggest the answers may differ by what part of Wikipedia you edit. My short answer is, is somebody pushing an extreme view that you know is not quite right, but won't give an inch in discussion? Yeah, there are lots of editors who come close to that, but eventually most will at least discuss the issue reasonably. Many paid editors can't or won't do this, because if they do, they won't get paid. Another question you should answer is "Does this sound like an advert?" I think most people know when somebody is trying to sell them something, starting with 5 year-olds or even younger. Just use your common sense here. A related question is why ad writers keep on writing in this special language. Possible answer - they can see it when others write it, but their bosses or the subject insist - that's why they hired he ad writers - not to include objective info. Other questions to ask Cui bono? or Follow the money, and is it just a fan? That last one can be difficult in politics and popular culture, but is not at all difficult if somebody is advertising a new type of mouse trap. More in a bit. Smallbones _(smalltalk) 17:03, 14 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

3) How did I (Smallbones) find a lot of this info? Where to start? In the article, I included this link [1] (make sure to scroll all the way down). You gotta admit that list of blocked socks is a good place to start an article like this. It may not help you in your particular problem - it just says where the sock puppet investigators and checkusers have found a lot of socks. For your purposes, you might want to know what to do before anybody else has started an investigation. For my purposes, it needs to be checked, e.g. which side are the socks on, did they accidentally leave some other evidence. But for either use, it's not a bad place to start, just takes a minute in many cases to run, but a couple hours to check.

4) What are the checkusers and Sock Puppet investigators looking for? How do ordinary editors convince them? I consider a lot of this just to be "mistakes" (broadly defined) that paid editors make. Sooner or later everybody makes a few mistakes. To learn what others take to SPI, you might follow the WP:COIN noticeboard for awhile.