163 Global News Post 1
Nicole Sanchez
Saudi Arabia News Post: Saudi Arabia Government Agents Infiltrate Wikipedia by SMEX
[Wikimedia Foundation. (n.d.). Wikipedia Logo. File:Wikipedia-logo-v2-en.svg. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10309782]
The article talks about Saudi Arabia using government agents to act as supposed independent editors for Wikipedia as a way to monitor and control the information being put online about Saudi Arabia’s government. As a response, Wikipedia conducted an internal investigation and removed all administrators from Saudi Arabia. The article also focuses on Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani, who were sentenced to 5-8 years in prison for speaking ill against the Saudi Arabian government on online platforms. Khalid was actually sentenced to a total of 32 years for the same charges but the Specialized Criminal Court in Saudi Arabia has been giving out harsh sentencing as a sort of movement against those who speak out about governmental abuse on the internet.
The article uses interviews with people who work closely with Wikipedia and administrators that were imprisoned as evidence to support their claims of Saudi Arabia’s control of media distribution. This article was published by DAWN, a nonprofit that supports democracy and human rights in the Middle East, and SMEX, a Lebanese NGO that focuses on media accessibility in Arab-speaking nations. Therefore, the perspectives mentioned are those educated about the censorship problems in Saudi Arabia and have experience reporting and dealing with them. However, since it is a subject both organizations are passionate about they include a personal opinion section at the end of the article informing the reader of what Wikimedia and Saudi Arabia should do to deal with this issue. The article was offered in English, Arabic, Malagasy, Russian, and Spanish but the original article was written in English therefore, meant for Western audiences.
