A day after a horrific plane crash in eastern Ukraine claimed the lives of nearly 300 people, speculation about who is to blame for shooting down the aircraft is in full swing. Leaders of Ukraine, Russia, and even the separatists in Donetsk have all placed responsibility on each other. In Kyiv, President Poroshenko blamed rebels in the east and criticized Russia for destabilizing the border. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin claimed that Kyiv is accountable for anything that happens in Ukraine. Donetsk’s putative leader denies any role in the attack on Malaysian Flight MH17, saying it must have been the Ukrainian Air Force.
Unsurprisingly, the blame game is now playing out on Wikipedia, where editors battle to record the polemics that best reflect their side of the story. Earlier this morning, the Russian-language Wikipedia entry for commercial aviation accidents hosted one such skirmish, when someone with an IP address based in Kyiv edited the MH17 record to say that the plane was shot down “by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation.” Less than an hour later, someone with a Moscow IP address replaced this text with the sentence, “The plane was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers.”
Thanks to a Twitter bot that tracks anonymous Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses used by the Russian government, we know that the second edit to the MH17 article came from a computer at VGTRK, the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company.
Статья в Википедии Список авиационных катастроф в гражданской авиации была отредактирована ВГТРК http://t.co/peZ60q07Fj
— Госправки (@RuGovEdits) July 18, 2014
A Wikipedia article about commercial aviation catastrophes was edited by VGTRK.
VGTRK is the home of Dmitri Kiselyov, who is known informally as the Kremlin’s chief propagandist. Kiselyov is notorious for his strong criticisms of the governments in Kyiv and Washington. During the Crimean crisis, Kiselyov once boasted on television that Russia remains “the only country in the world capable of turning the USA into radioactive dust.” In June, two VGTRK journalists were killed near Luhansk after coming under mortar fire while embedded with local rebels. Nadiya Savchenko, the helicopter pilot whom separatists captured in Ukraine and transferred to Voronezh earlier this month, now sits in a Russian detention center, accused of participating in the attack that killed the VGTRK reporters.
The Twitter account that discovered VGTRK’s Internet activity, @RuGovEdits, is modeled on another bot, @CongressEdits, which tracks Wikipedia edits made from IP addresses in the US Congress. The code for CongressEdits, created by programmer Ed Summers, is open-source software and can be configured easily to watch for anonymous edits from any IP ranges.
67 comments
This guy has Hitler’s play book and is running it. If I Was Poland and eastern Europe I would be worried.
“This guy” tried to play the 1936 – Spain scenario in Ukraine, but the plan failed. Now he’s trying just to annoy Ukrainians blaming them for the shot plane.
It seems that when a big power gives a little power weaponry, it usually has technicians that either operate or give full training to the recipients. The evidence has been spirited back into Russia ( the missile launcher ) and now we are to believe some drunken off-duty miners did this. This is has ” Vlad the Impaler’s ” Putin fingerprints all over this thing. He is a thief ( claiming ‘ moral compensation ‘ when Germany asked for the pilfered works of art from WWII to be returned ) without even a hint of the moral compensation for the years of brutality, thuggery and thievery perpetrated on Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria…not to mention the hell it helped create in ‘ client-state wars ‘ in Asia and Africa…he is a bully for forcing Boris Yeltsin out of power…he is a dictator for changing political laws of his country to allow him to be, in essence, dictator for life. Simply put…he is a criminal and probably the single most dangerous human being alive.
Jews joining ISIS
http://russianfreedomforum.lefora.com/topic/18812274/French-Jews-playing-ends-middle-joining-ISIS#.VD6W28ktplM