Two contributors to the online encyclopedia were sentenced to long prison sentences while NGOs denounce an infiltration by the power of the local version of Wikipedia.
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Two Saudi administrators of the collaborative Wikipedia encyclopedia were sentenced to 8 -year and 32 -year -old sentences, announced human rights organizations in the Middle East Dawn and Smex , Thursday January 5. The two men, Osama Khalid and Ziyad al-Sofiani, were condemned for political reasons by an anti-terrorist jurisdiction after their arrest, in 2020, for “violation of public morality”.
According to Dawn and Smex, these convictions are part of a wider attempt at Wikipedia in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of December, the Wikiméia Foundation, which finances the projects of the online encyclopedia worldwide, announced The suspension of sixteen users ” which were delivered to editions despite a conflict of interest to the near and Middle East “. An internal survey “confirmed that a certain number of users with close links with third -party players published the encyclopedia in a coordinated manner to advance the goals of these third parties”.
Deletion of Critics
The Wikimedia Foundation does not cite any country or actor, but according to Dawn and Smex, the banned accounts “were those of sixteen Saudi users, some of the highest editorial officials of the encyclopedia in Saudi Arabia, who worked on behalf of of the Saudi government by promoting favorable content and deleting criticism from the government “.
In December, Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee in the United States, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for spying. He was suspected of having, against remuneration, provided confidential information to the country’s intelligence services, coming from the Twitter accounts of opponents and criticisms of the Saudi government.