Two Saudi administrators of the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia have been sentenced to 8 and 32 years in prison, Middle East human rights organizations say DAWN and SMEX, Thursday, January 5. The two men, Osama Khalid and Ziyad Al-Sofiani, were, according to them, convicted on political grounds by an anti-terrorism court after their arrest in 2020 for “violation of public morals”.
According to DAWN and SMEX, these convictions are part of a broader attempt to control Wikipedia in Saudi Arabia. In early December, the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds online encyclopedia projects worldwide, announced the suspension of sixteen users “who engaged in publishing despite a conflict of interest in the Near and Middle East”. An internal investigation “confirmed that a number of users with close ties to third parties were editing the encyclopedia in a coordinated fashion to advance the goals of those third parties”.
Deleting reviews
The Wikimedia Foundation does not name any country or actor, but according to DAWN and SMEX, the accounts banned “were those of sixteen Saudi users, including some of the encyclopedia’s most senior editorial staff in Saudi Arabia, who worked on behalf of the Saudi government by promoting favorable content and suppressing criticism of the government”.
In December, Ahmad Abouammo, a former employee of Twitter in the United States, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for espionage. He was suspected of having, for remuneration, provided confidential information to the country’s intelligence services, coming from the Twitter accounts of opponents and critics of the Saudi government.