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On January 14, the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) exposed a wide-ranging black-hat image-laundering scheme that implicated government and philanthropic leaders. Among the culprits, who included the Qatari government, were the Gates Foundation and its signature Green Revolution agriculture initiative, the Nairobi-based AGRA. The Guardian covered the story but barely mentioned the Gates and AGRA connections.
Journalist Claire Wilmot found that these influential institutions had hired Portland Communications, a UK-based public relations firm founded by Tim Allan, until recently the communications director for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to surreptitiously edit Wikipedia web pages about its clients to enhance their presentation and remove potentially embarrassing or damaging content. This was in direct violation of the ubiquitous public encyclopaedia’s terms-of-use, which encourages public contributions to its web pages but prohibits interested parties, and their paid consultants, from editing articles about themselves.
According to TBIJ, Gates and AGRA both contracted Portland Communications, which hired a consultant to use multiple fake “sock-puppet” email accounts to evade Wikipedia’s security measures. TBIJ, which interviewed former Portland employees involved in the schemes and identified one fraudulent network of accounts, pinpointed specific edits to the Wikipedia page for AGRA that sought to expunge information critical of the controversial initiative.
In one edit, the hired consultant eliminated an existing section on “evaluations”, which included some published critiques from organizations such as the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and the Oakland Institute. He also removed the reference to my 2020 Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University assessment demonstrating that AGRA was failing to meet its own goals to double productivity and incomes for 30 million small-farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020. On the Wikipedia page, the contractor instead changed AGRA’s goals deadline to 2021 to show that time hadn’t run out on meeting them, substituted less ambitious goals, and removed a section on “evaluations”.
I was not surprised. I had undertaken the assessment because I could find no publicly available evaluation of this billion-dollar initiative to “catalyze a productivity revolution” in Africa with the promotion of commercial seeds and fertilizers. This was not the first time AGRA had tried to impugn my work and that of other critics. When my study first came out, AGRA contacted Tufts University in an attempt to question the integrity of my work. To their credit, University officials reviewed the study and determined it to be rigorously designed, objectively conducted, and transparently reported. They also conveyed to AGRA that the University is committed to the principles of academic freedom to engage in, appropriately interpret, and openly disseminate the results of research, including those that may be controversial, without fear of censorship, discipline, or intimidation. (The exchange is summarized here.)
With the rise of internet search engines driven by artificial intelligence, Wikipedia’s objective summary pages are a primary source for AI’s own summaries, which now often appear at the top of search results. Powerful governments, corporations, and individuals have taken notice, leading to PR schemes such as that of Portland Communications to remove critical material.
To Wikipedia’s credit, AGRA’s edited page was reverted after TBIJ exposed the violations of its terms of use. But this one secret network is likely only the tip of a large iceberg of efforts to put a chill into public criticisms of the powerful.
“Gates and AGRA have once again shown that they are more concerned with their images than they are with recognizing the failures of their Green Revolution policies and changing course to support agroecology,” said AFSA coordinator Million Belay.
Wiki-laundering
The TBIJ investigation, published under the headline “London PR Firm Rewrites Wikipedia for Governments and Billionaires”, was triggered by suspicious editing on some of the site’s pages. In its 25-year history, Wikipedia has become an unrivalled online encyclopaedia, arguably the largest information repository in the world with an improved reputation for reliable and verifiable content. Curated and maintained largely by an impressive collection of volunteer editors, Wikipedia invites public contributions to its pages and documents all editorial changes in a transparent manner readily available to the public. To ensure objective and unbiased content, its terms of use prohibit editing by interested parties or their paid consultants.
In an investigation that took a year-and-a-half, TBIJ found a pattern of “shady, paid-for edits” in recent years by Web3, a consulting firm hired by Portland Communications. Using so-called sock-puppet email accounts, paid PR professionals were found to have worked for the Qatari government to remove Wikipedia mentions of widespread human rights abuses in construction in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup. The same network hid evidence of a terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen. It intervened in Wikipedia to support one side in the struggle for power in post-Gaddafi Libya.
But according to journalist Claire Wilmot, the Web3 edits to AGRA’s Wikipedia page were among the most clear-cut attempts to expunge critical content and reputable sources. Web3 got to work when AGRA failed to meet the objectives it set for itself in 2020 and public criticism began to dominate news coverage. It remains unclear whether the contractor, identified as Radek Kotlarek, was acting on behalf of AGRA or of the Gates Foundation. Both had retained Portland’s services according to public records. Portland had been caught by Wikipedia several years earlier engaging in similar activities for its clients.
TBIJ posted screenshots of two of those edits, which Wikipedia allows all users to view by clicking on the “view history” button for a log of all changes to the page. In one, “Abelina Müller”, a documented Web3 sock-puppet account, eliminated the “Goals” section, folding it into a misspelled “Stretegy” section and revising the end date for achieving its goals from 2020 to 2021.
My 2020 research had just shown that AGRA was failing to meet any of its primary goals, which had a 2020 deadline. Around the same time, AGRA took down from its own web page a clear statement of those goals, which were more ambitious than the ones reported by AGRA’s hired PR editor on its Wikipedia page.
More glaring still, a Web3 sock-puppet editor employing the username “Sw33t3stCl3mentin3” entirely eliminated the “Evaluation” section of AGRA’s Wikipedia page, which included a reference to the data from my Tufts study on AGRA’s “failure on its own terms”. It was replaced with a “Publications” section listing only AGRA-produced reports.
“The removal of well-sourced information on AGRA’s page was among the most egregious examples of Wiki-laundering that we saw,” Wilmot told me. “It had the effect of misrepresenting AGRA’s achievements and erasing legitimate, research-based criticism of its program.”
Wilmot received no response from the Gates Foundation regarding the TBIJ findings. An AGRA communications official responded that it was not aware of any edits to the organization’s Wikipedia page by Portland Communications and it had no knowledge of Web3. It claimed all edits were made by AGRA’s communications staff in order to keep the page up to date. As Wilmot reminded me, the Web3 edits were clearly documented, and in any case AGRA’s paid communications staff would also have violated Wikipedia’s terms of use as interested parties editing their own content rather than providing new information for Wikipedia editors to consider including.
Wilmot told me that TBIJ’s investigation was limited in that it focused on one sock-puppet network, Web3, working on multiple accounts. She reported the inappropriate Wikipedia edits they could confirm, and she said they had not found any significant Web3 Wiki-laundering on pages associated with Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, or any of its other signature projects. But she warned that she had likely uncovered only the tip of an iceberg of similar attempts by the powerful to sanitize their public images.
I may have found another. In a July 2021 edit to the AGRA page, an editor not identified as part of Web3’s sock-puppet accounts but identified not by a username but only an IP address deleted a long section of “Critiques”. It includes references to a wide range of sources criticizing AGRA for supporting genetically modified crops; increasing dependence on chemical inputs; favouring export crops over local food crops; and, the influence of Gates Foundation over AGRA programmes. It replaced the criticisms with a straight-up defence of AGRA’s formal policy of not supporting the introduction of GM crops. All the other criticisms were gone. To the credit of Wikipedia’s editors, who had become suspicious of such self-interested promotional content, the edit was reverted the same day, according to time stamps on the changes.
“I think Wikipedia editors deserve a huge amount of credit for keeping the site largely free of paid influence,” Wilmot told me. “They took our findings and integrated them into the relevant pages quite quickly, and on the AGRA page, they made sure that the research that was removed was put back up.”
The page is now in need of further updates, which I expect will take place with input from editors who do not have conflicts of interest. For a brief time, a banner at the top of the page even warned of the suspicious content added to the page. The article now simply flags a key section as out of date, and in Wikipedia’s own “content assessment” ratings, the AGRA page falls near the bottom, a sad commentary for a highly publicized billion-dollar programme that has been in operation for twenty years.
AGRA officials responded to my request for comment with vague answers similar to those given to Wilmot. They disavowed any knowledge of Portland edits, saying that “any authorized updates to Wikipedia profiles on AGRA were intended to be handled by our internal communications team”. (They failed to note that edits by paid staff on an organization’s own pages would also have violated Wikipedia policies.) They all-but-implied that the Portland and Web3 consultants may have edited AGRA’s page as part of their contract with the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation said no. “The Gates Foundation was not involved in any effort to edit Wikipedia pages related to AGRA,” the media relations office wrote in an email.
That leaves neither AGRA nor the Gates Foundation taking any responsibility for the inappropriate edits uncovered by TBIJ.
A history of AGRA cover-ups
The revelations of “Wiki-laundering” – and the evasion of responsibility for it – only add to AGRA’s tarnished record of avoiding accountability for its own shortcomings. For my 2020 assessment, AGRA officials did not provide promised data on its progress, then responded to my assessment not with data that contradicted my findings but by removing their goals entirely from their web page. They also contacted the Office of Research Integrity at Tufts University implying that my research was flawed and unethical.
AGRA and Gates Foundation officials have also evaded repeated requests by African organizations for accountability and changes to their policies.
In 2020, three non-governmental leaders from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) wrote to AGRA with a concrete set of questions asking the organisation to demonstrate that it was helping, not harming, African small-scale farmers. They received a polite and long-winded reply with little data. When the leaders asked again for evidence of AGRA’s effectiveness, officials failed to provide any.
In 2021, AFSA issued a formal call on AGRA’s donors to redirect funding to more effective agroecological programmes. African faith leaders sent an open letter to the Gates Foundation demanding it pull back from its support for Green Revolution programmes. They received few replies and no satisfaction. Farmer and civil society representatives have never been welcomed at AGRA’s annual Green Revolution Forum events.
After removing its goals from its web site in 2020, AGRA published then removed a set of country “outcome monitoring reports” that revealed weak progress towards those goals and woeful internal monitoring and evaluation methods for tracking progress. It was only after the transparency organization U.S. Right to Know gained access to the expunged reports through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that AGRA restored them to its web page. (I reported on them here.)
In 2022, consulting firm Mathematica published a donor-funded evaluation of the programme which confirmed weak progress on productivity and food security. As the evaluators concluded, “These findings suggest that AGRA did not meet its headline goal of increased incomes and food security for 9 million smallholders, despite reaching over 10 million smallholders through its systems development work.” AGRA offered a tepid official response promising to respond to recommendations for improvement. Most donors largely accepted these vague promises of change. The Gates Foundation quickly pledged US$200 million towards a new half-billion-dollar five-year AGRA strategy that addressed few of the failures identified in the evaluation. (The critical Mathematica evaluation was not mentioned on AGRA’s Wikipedia page.)
AGRA offered the ultimate cover-up at its own Green Revolution Forum in September 2022. It announced a “rebranding” to change its name to simply the acronym AGRA, removing with no explanation the words “green revolution” from AGRA’s name. The food sovereignty alliance denounced the move as “cosmetic” and “an admission of failure”, while faith leaders demanded, “not a rebranding of AGRA, but an end to funding for harmful green revolution programs”. As I observed at the time, without the Green Revolution, AGRA literally stands for nothing.
Since then, AGRA has continued to promote industrial agriculture by working behind the scenes to write or influence national and regional policies. AFSA documented AGRA’s often surreptitious promotion of pro-Green Revolution policies in Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, and Mali, denouncing the organization’s “undue influence” in the region. “AGRA’s fingerprints are all over Africa’s agricultural policies,” said AFSA General Coordinator Million Belay. “They represent an attack on African food sovereignty.”
No accountability for Wikipedia violations
TBIJ’s revelations about the attempts by the Gates Foundation and AGRA to burnish AGRA’s image shine a spotlight on the lengths the powerful will go to in order to protect their reputations, even if that undermines a trusted public encyclopaedia.
“Wikipedia is one of the last major sources of information on the internet that has standards around reliable sourcing,” said Wilmot. “It is also free from the influence of advertisements. And, because of its open licensing, it is among the top two sources of training data for AI’s large language models (LLMs). What’s on Wikipedia is getting more reach than ever, so efforts to protect the integrity of information on the platform are also more important than ever. PR companies in particular should be held accountable for facilitating influence operations targeting the platform, which we need to think of as a kind of informational commons, a collective public good in an increasingly polluted online environment.”
So should philanthropies and their signature projects also be accountable. Such behaviour threatens not just independent media but academic integrity. As Kirby Johnson, Tufts University Director of Research Ethics, told me, academic researchers should not be subject to attempts of any kind to limit public access to the information they have objectively generated.
African farm and community leaders have had enough. Last year a network of faith leaders issued a public letter to the Gates Foundation demanding reparations for the damage caused to African communities by AGRA’s Green Revolution programmes.
“Everybody needs to be accountable for their actions,” says Gabriel Manyangadze of the Southern Africa Faith Communities Environment Institute. “As people of faith we continue to urge the Gates Foundation to make good the damage caused by its massive support for the discredited Green Revolution. They are morally liable and they must pay.”
