Iranian cyber army’ blamed as Wikipedia deletes atrocities
The Australian, January 8, 2024
Wikipedia entries have been changed to downgrade Iranian human rights atrocities and other abuses, The Times has learnt. The alterations raise concerns that the site is being used to ¬manipulate information about the hardline Islamic regime. Details have been changed to discredit dissident groups, and government publications have been presented as impartial sources on the free online encyclopedia.
In one case key details about mass executions by the regime were removed. The involvement of senior officials in the 1988 death commissions, in which thousands of political prisoners were killed, was also deleted. In a separate ruling, supporters of Vahid Beheshti, an Iranian human rights activist who went on hunger strike in the UK, were thwarted when they tried to set up a Wikipedia page…
Manipulation now appears to have been carried out on the ¬English-language Wikipedia. Many of the Iran edits concerned a page for the People’s Mujahidin of Iran, also known as the Mujahidin-e-Khalq, an exiled opposition group. Over the summer reports on human rights abuses by Iranian officials on the MEK’s page was deleted. The anonymous users who changed the content cited the need for “trimming”.
Last June details were removed from a section on the 1988 death commissions, including that many of the political prisoners were jailed for peaceful activities such as handing out leaflets. A reference to the executions being carried out by “several high-ranking members of Iran’s current government” was also deleted. A month earlier the same anonymous user removed references to the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania due to alleged involvement in a bomb plot against the MEK in 2018. In April 2022 a reference to about 3500 MEK prisoners being killed in the early 1980s in Iran was removed.
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