14 DAY TRIAL // If the situation wasn’t ugly enough with the MH17 Malaysian Airlines flight that was taken down in Eastern Ukraine, there’s now an online battle on the Wikipedia entry.
The Russian government is reportedly removing sections in which it is accused of providing the Ukrainians with the missiles that were used to take down the airliner, effectively putting part of the blame on Kremlin.
A Twitter bot spotted, over the weekend, some edits made to the online encyclopedia from a Russian government IP address, namely from the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. The edits were made in large to the Russian language version of the page.
Originally, the post read that the plane had been shot down by “terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received form the Russian Federation.”
The modification made by the Russian-owned media company is quite massive. The aforementioned phrase turned into “The plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers.”
The text isn’t exactly a lie at the core, but it is basically a crude summary of a complex situation that has led to the deaths of nearly 300 people.
There is evidence that the missile was shot from Ukraine’s territory, but the technology necessary for this is believed to have come from Russia. The latter have denied any responsibility for the crash that killed 298 people.
The evidence about Russia’s efforts to edit the material on Wikipedia comes from the site’s very own logs, where the username and IP address is stored for everyone who makes a change on an entry, complete with the chances they’ve made.
There are bots out there, including on Twitter that keep track of these changes and alert when modifications have been made. @RUGoveEdits, in particular, keeps an eye on Wikipedia edits coming from IP addresses associated with the Russian government and other state structures.
Thankfully, it doesn’t seem like the Russians were brave enough to change the English version of the Wikipedia article too. Given the extensive coverage of the topic on International news outlets, they would probably have a low impact and would get changed back in an instant.
In Russia, however, the government seems to want to control what the people see and believe. On top of the changes on the Wikipedia entry, it looks like Russia Today, one of the main news outlets in the country, has been blaming Ukraine for the incident and did not talk about Kremlin’s implications at all.
In fact, one journalist decided to quit her job and tell the world everything that was wrong with how Russia Today covers the story and how strong the government’s influence is.