Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Next issue/Disinformation report
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Sex, money and power revisited
The stories behind articles in The Signpost seldom end on the article’s publication date. In this reporter’s long running series about paid editors and other conflict of interest editors court cases may drag or a new case may start. Government officials may be appointed to new positions. The unexpected should be expected. This is particularly noticeable in the stories on the roughly twenty billionaires I’ve reported on; maybe less so for the politicians and government officials. This year, and especially this last month have had many unexpected events about the subjects of my reporting. Even this week a major article on the subject of an old Signpost story was published.
Sex offenders
editConvicted sex offenders are a special group. Jeffery Epstein's paid edits were extensive and shocking, but there have been few developments in his case since the Signpost article was published seven months after his death.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s apparent edits, in contrast, were few, confused, and soon deleted, except for the photo she apparently sent us. Her court case was fairly quick and her conviction was widely expected.
The Finnish-born Canadian fashion designer had a net worth of about C$900 million in 2017. By 2020 the FBI had raided his New York office, his businesses were being sold to cover his debts, and he was being sued by at least 57 women who claimed that he raped or sexually abused them, many of them when they were minors. In December 2020 he was arrested in Canada on criminal charges for extradition to the US. Later he was also charged in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg for similar alleged crimes.
In December 2023, after 36 months being held without bail, the 82 year old Peter Nygard was convicted in Toronto on four charges of sex crimes in the first of his four possible criminal trials. He was finally sentenced this September to eleven years in prison, but after deducting time already served, only seven more years might need to be served - on this conviction.
Epstein, Maxwell, and Nygard are the only sex offenders I've covered. While other people who appear to have violated Wikipedia's rules have been convicted of crimes, please remember that any of those offenses are quite different from the ones described above. And please also remember that no investigation of paid editing conducted entirely on-Wiki can definitively prove an editor's employer. The editor may just be trying to embarrass the subject of his edits.
Back to prison
edit
Another criminal, Greg Lindberg, was convicted in May and is now awaiting sentencing. He bought several insurance companies and was accused of draining $2 billion of the companies’ reserves into his own pockets or of lending the money to other companies he owned. He was indicted in 2019, found guilty of trying to bribe North Carolina’s insurance commissioner and reported to Federal prison on October 20, 2020, a month before the Signpost article about him.
The Signpost article showed that three apparent undeclared paid editors, plus one very aggressive declared paid editor had edited the article about Greg Lindberg.
His sentence for bribery was for 7 years and 3 months, and if nothing else had happened in the case, he could have been out of prison by 2028. Instead he appealed his conviction and got a retrial. This May he was convicted again on the same charges, but has not been sentenced yet. In November he pled guilty to other charges of conspiracy to defraud and money laundering, and left the court in custody. The guilty plea could lead to an additional sentence of up to 15 years. Reportedly he spent $50 million on legal fees over seven years. While the ultimate damages caused by his fraud have yet to be fully assessed, one observer reports that he may be responsible for the largest insurance fraud in history.
Just this week Bloomberg reported on a non-business aspect of Lindberg’s life in How a Billionaire’s ‘Baby Project’ Ensnared Dozens of Women. Lindberg has a dozen children, three of whom were with his former wife. They separated about 2019. The other nine children were born over about 5 years mostly through the use of a large network of egg donors, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate mothers. He is the only caregiving parent for eight of the nine. The 6,000 word Bloomberg article details major surprises every few paragraphs. Among them are that Lindberg considers billionaires to be "a persecuted class", and that there were large bachelor-style parties on his yacht Double Down documented on YouTube. (For a possible example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2IHmbpxqWQ)
Back to work
editMatthew Whitaker
editWhitaker was acting US Attorney General for three months during the later part of President Trump’s first administration. The Signpost reported that he apparently created the articles Matthew Whitaker about himself and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa in 2006 while he held that position, and added his name to Iowa Hawkeyes football as a "notable player". He also worked with the fraudulent company World Patent Marketing and incorrectly claimed to have received the Academic All-America award.
He was unofficially nominated as the US Ambassador to NATO by Trump on November 20, 2024 despite his lack of foreign policy experience.
Vivek Ramaswamy
editBack in July 2022, before Ramaswamy declared his candidacy for the 2024 GOP US presidential nomination, User:Jhofferman, following Wikipedia’s rules, declared that Vivek Ramaswamy paid him to edit the article about Ramaswamy. Mediaite later reported that Jhofferman whitewashed the article about Ramaswamy, removing information about his participation in The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans and a Covid-19 Response Team.
The Signpost added that, against Wikipedia's rules, over a dozen sockpuppets had edited the articles about Ramaswamy or his companies Roivant Sciences and Axovant Sciences without declaring their paid status.
Ramaswamy, along with Elon Musk, were nominated November 12, 2024 by President-elect Trump to lead a planned presidential advisory commission called the Department of Government Efficiency
Same old scam
editIn January the Signpost exposed the ugliest scam I've seen on Wikipedia. Several apparently connected firms with names like EliteWikiWriters and WikiModerators would solicit small businesses, entrepreneurs, artists and authors, nonprofits, and churches, promising to write Wikipedia articles for them. After collecting a few thousand dollars the firms wouldn't bother to write the articles, or just abandon them if they had written anything. If the customers complained, the firms would blame Wikipedia and try to upsell the customers for a few thousand dollars more.
I’ve checked these firms’ websites several times since. It looks like they are still doing business as usual. In November a new firm, Elite Wiki Writing, posted a press release that looks like the same old scam. Checking the new firm's website, the text looks very similar, even if most of the graphics and the formatting have changed.
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