Conservative Israeli think tank uses fake accounts to skew Wikipedia
CEO of Kohelet Policy Forum Meir Rubin-Neria. Photo by Emil Salman/Haaretz
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
The Kohelet Policy Forum, the conservative Israeli think tank that has provided the ideological backing for the Israeli government’s attempt to overhaul the country’s judiciary, has long employed writers to edit Wikipedia entries on its behalf, disclosing their activity in accordance with the community-run encyclopdia’s policies.
But over the weekend it was revealed that a Kohelet researcher operated at least five fake accounts on Hebrew Wikipedia to covertly influence the open encyclopedia. The incident is considered a severe breach of the rules set by the Wikipedia community and is already leading to calls to ban the conservative group for what some are labelling a dangerous attempt to skew Israeli public opinion in the group’s favor.
While Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteers, paid editing is permitted under certain conditions. The think tank was among the the first to register an official “paid editor” who was active in Hebrew, as Haaretz reported in 2018, editing articles on the its behalf and using the open encyclopedia to advance its conservative worldview online.
The Kohelet Policy Forum’s activity on Hebrew Wikipedia was always done in accordance with the online encyclopedia’s rules – which require publishing a “paid-contribution disclosure.” Over the years, Kohelet has employed five editors for a fee and has disclosed that.
The list of articles that Kohelet’s first paid editor worked on appeared at the time as if they were lifted straight out of the agenda of Israel’s then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. They included the Hebrew version of articles about legislation that would permit the Knesset to override court rulings, judicial activism and changing Israel’s system of government. That editor is no longer active with Kohelet, but four other users have been recognized as paid editors for Kohelet: Forum Kohelet, F. Kohelet, Adam S. and EnoshAn (all active almost exclusively in Hebrew).
There are two other active editors for the Kohelet Policy Forum: Sb236, whose real name is not known, and Kohelet executive director Meir Rubin-Neria. Rubin-Neria has edited under his own name on Wikipedia since 2008 and has been involved in entries in Hebrew relating to himself and his grandfather as well as to Kohelet. He has also edited entries on the New Israel Fund and legal realism. The two are not designated as editors receiving a fee, but in light of the fact that they are salaried employees of the organization, they are also required to disclose the affiliation.
Each Wikipedia community sets its own rules. According to Hebrew Wikipedia’s rules, a “paid editor” is someone who receives a direct payment for editing Wikipedia articles on someone else’s behalf. The rule was set to prevent workers at public relations firms from editing their clients’ articles.
But when it comes to an editor employed by an organization or company that does not deal explicitly in public relations, the quesiton of what consites a conflict of interest becomes more complex. In fact, there isn’t complete consensus on this issue and whether the writer of this article, for example, is barred from editing Wikipedia’s entry on Haaretz, who is his employer. Nevertheless, it has become customary for these companies to disclose any conflicts of interest involved in their writing, which has been the practice.
Recently, however, amid rising political tension in Israel brought on by the judicial overhaul, active Hebrew-language Wikipedia editors have expressed suspicions that someone has been secretly working on Kohelet’s behalf to edit entries related to the organization. A number of suspicious accounts were created around the same time and were frequently involved in editing Hebrew Wikipedia entries for the Kohelet Policy Forum and about former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is a vocal opponent of the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul.
For example, using one false account, a deletion was made to the article about Kohelet that cited critical news coverage from Haaretz’s business daily, TheMarker. In other cases, the different fake accounts backed each other in various editorial debates, using a tag-team method to push their agenda.
In the Hebrew Wikipedia article about the Israel Democracy Institute, a pro-democracy think tank that is critical of Kohelet, one of the fake users added that it was a “left-wing organization” and deleted a sentence stating that one of the institute’s goals is to act “to strengthen Israel’s still-emerging democratic institutions.”
Sock puppets
Since they were created in May, the fake accounts have also been used in editing the Hebrew Wikipedia entries on a number of key issues now at the heart of the public debate: the grounds of reasonableness, conservatism, libertarianism, the Israel Democracy Institute, postmodernism and lobbying (which the Kohelet Policy Forum does at the Knesset).
One of the sock puppet accounts was also used to edit the English-language Wikipedia article on the Kohelet Policy Forum, which is a violation of Wikipedia’s conflict of interest rules in English. And the accounts were used to edit Hebrew articles on the following entries: (legal) standing, democracy, protest against Israel’s current government, trickle-down economics, neoliberalism, social democracy, journalist, communism, legal adviser, strike, subsidies, civil discourse, and Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky.
A comprehensive examination of all the editing carried out through these accounts shows that the account that edited Kohelet’s English-language Wikipedia entry was used nearly every day of the week, and during nearly the entire day, including during normal working hours.
As the accounts were discovered, Kohelet stated that it had carried out its own internal investigation and confirmed that one of its researchers had carried out actions on Wikipedia “at his own initiative, in violation of the rules of the community and of the Kohelet Forum’s policy.” Following the examination, all five fake accounts were blocked and a procedure was initiated that would permit the editors to undo the edits.
The gravest offense
It’s either difficult or impossible to gauge the damage caused by fake edits on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s content is shaped by a large community of participants and it’s nearly impossible to identify the impact of a single editor or a number of editors when it comes to developing content or the editorial discussions that guide it. Since the discussion regarding the fake accounts, the Wikipedia article on the Kohelet Policy Forum has had over 25,000 views.
Wikipedia’s content also appears on a large number of other sites, including Google, which gives the encyclopedia’s entries preference in searches. Apple’s virtual personal assistant, Siri, also relies on Wikipedia and language models including ChatGPT train on it, giving its content and its wording a disproportionately important role online.
Following the discovery of the five fake accounts, many editors demanded that Wikipedia block all of Kohelet’s active accounts, or at least impose sanctions for the violation of community rules. “The wild and loud network of sock puppets used Wikipedia to defend the Kohelet Forum’s good name on their own article and from the Kohelet Forum’s computers. This is a smoking gun. [They] should be blocked,” one editor wrote, adding that he was doubtful that even this would stop the organization’s attempts to meddle in Wikipedia.
On the other hand, there are those who argue that Kohelet was cooperative, carried out its own investigation and admitted wrongdoing by its worker. There is therefore no reason to impose sanctions of any kind against an organization that has so far abided by Wikipedia’s rules, they say.
In its response for this article, the Kohelet Policy Forum said: “After we received a complaint about an alleged violation of Wikipedia’s community rules, the Forum’s executive director conducted an immediate internal investigation. From the investigation it was found that a Kohelet staff research had, at his own initiative and without informing anyone else, opened several user [names] at Wikipedia and in his free time conducted edits and participated in various votes.
“The complete findings were immediately reported to those leading the effort to deal with the incident on behalf of Wikipedia. We always exercise care to note every Wikipedia edit for a fee on our behalf with full transparency, in compliance with all community rules. This is a serious incident that was not carried out on the Kohelet Forum’s behalf in any way.
“We have taken full responsibility for it and have done everything that we could to ensure that it is not repeated, in part by reminding the entire staff of the rules and making our own permanent rules stricter regarding private conduct in the digital sphere that could be interpreted as if it had a connection to the Forum,” the response read.
Despite Kohelet’s cooperation, an editor who demanded additional investigation into the accounts wrote: “They’re trying (rather successfully) to save their skin and save face… At minimum they should announce the dismissal of the worker and make a groveling apology. After all, it’s hard to imagine that such obsessive activity, some of it from the forum’s offices, was carried out in secret by this unknown ‘good Samaritan’ allegedly acting on his own accord without it being discovered.”
“Editing for a fee and sock puppets are two separate issues that have converged here into the issue of a single person who is overly eager to see his organization succeed,” said David Shay, perhaps the most veteran Hebrew Wikipedia editor.
“Most of the paid Wikipedia writers know the rules and don’t create sock puppets, which is perhaps the most serious transgression they could do. A few such cases that were uncovered in the past led to lifetime bans for those behind the bogus accounts,” he said.
“It seems to me that the current case is the most serious of them all, because of its use to skew entries that are at the heart of public discourse. Granted, the Kohelet Forum has distanced itself from the worker, but it’s still a stain on the forum. I am not aware of steps that the forum has taken against the worker, and it seems to me that simply dismissing him, and disclosing his name, would prove the Forum’s innocence.”
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