User:WhinyTheYounger/EG COI

For related discussion on the COI noticeboard, please refer here.

Issues related to ad-like material and general tone have been noted for many years on articles of the Eurasia Group (EG) and its founder, Ian Bremmer. After investigation, I believe there is sufficient evidence to say that employees of EG and/or Bremmer have been manipulating articles through clearly coordinated, undisclosed paid editing efforts stretching back several years to promote the company. For all, to varying degrees, the overarching issues are the deployment of WP:SPAs for:

1. extreme overuse of external links to the EG website, against of WP:EL#ADV guidelines;

2. Overuse of material directly from EG or its affiliates in an attempt to portray the group and its leadership, particularly Bremmer, as cutting edge experts, in violation of WP:SPIP;

3. Most obviously and seriously, violations of WP:PAID policy.

The following is a list of the editors who I believe have such undisclosed paid edits and/or conflicts of interest, in ascending order of date:

Spiogarb (Contributions), 55 edits from 2005 to 2008, 14 of which were made on EG's page in the span of a few days in September 2005. Issues: WP:EL#ADV
- Most notably, the user added a list of apparently every employee who worked at the firm at the time in this edit, including gratuitous links to the EG website. You will notice one of these analysts is "Sebastian Spio-Garbrah", whose surname appears to be the basis of the username. No COI/paid editing arrangement was disclosed, however. Other edits, like this one, continued to make sure detail biographies for every single member of the company's leadership were linked to from the article.
- Interestingly, this user's other major focus of editing was Ekwow Spio-Garbrah; I am not an expert on Ghanaian surnames, but this would also appear to be a potential relative/COI issue. That is not relevant for now, though.
JaneEG (Contributions), 25 edits in 2010, all exclusively focused on Ian Bremmer, his book, or adding citations and laudatory references to Bremmer in articles like State capitalism. I'm guessing EG might stand for Eurasia Group. Some edits of note:
- Created the page for one of Bremmer's books less than a week after it had been published, apparently citing articles about Bremmer's views with tangential mention of the book or the book's website. Extremely dubious it met notability standards at that point, at least such that it deserved to be mentioned outside Bremmer's page.
- Started adding gratuitous reference to the book and Bremmer before publication in State capitalism
Masard23 (Contributions, XTools), 38 edits from September 2011 to September 2013, all about Ian Bremmer, his books (The End of the Free Market, Every Nation for Itself, and The J Curve (book)), and a concept called G-Zero world expounded on in one of those books.
- Created the page for Every Nation for Itself before the book was published, and with reference to only one book review (cf. two required for WP:NBOOK, as I understand) and EG's website. Made numerous subsequent edits, often just adding links to each and every reference to the book in media, as is the case in this edit, and in what seems to be a regular habit of EG editors
Creidy91 (Contributions, XTools), 27 edits from April 2015 to March 2016, all exclusively about Ian Bremmer and/or EG. Interestingly, all edits fall within what would be a 9-5 weekday work week in the East Coast (where EG headquarters is based).
- Created the Weaponization of finance article—a term coined by Bremmer, and which seems to largely be confined to his work— and never edited anything that did not make reference to Bremmer. The first version of the page (Special:Diff/659508586) cites 13 sources: 6 by Bremmer, with the remainders one of two articles about Bremmer's views in "weaponized finance" or original research mimicking the arguments made in Bremer's white paper.
- Created page for Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World, a book of Bremmer's, within days of its publishing (May 5, 2015 for creation, book published according to current version of the article in May 2015). Only cited sources from Bremmer. (original: Special:Diff/660951010)
- User made numerous additional edits to EG and Bremmer's pages and inserted references to Bremmer and his book/s as was done in this edit of Superpower
- User was warned on their talk page of COI issues within two months of their first edits but kept editing for ten months thereafter without any disclosures or alterations in their editing behavior.
Ngedana (Contributions, Ngedana), 12 edits from July to October 2019, all on the Ian Bremmer page. Made edits like this that added large volume of content apparently designed to highlight Bremmer's experience and expertise in minute detail, often relying heavily on sources affiliated with EG.
Brianharper89 (Contributions, XTools) 12 edits, 3 from 2016 about an unrelated topic, and 9 from July 2019 to January 2020 about Bremmer/EG, the last of which triggered a COI discussion warning on their talk page.
- Large, promotional edits to EG page (e.g. Special:Diff/910558567) and Bremmer's page (Special:Diff/929252031).
Shenning18 (Contributions), 3 edits between September 2019 and March 2020, all about EG or Bremmer and using largely EG sources in a promotional manner.
Five additional apparent SPAs: Jbrenner99 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), Hsieh@eurasiagroup.net (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), Beckdourny (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), Batavia98 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), Wikibookreview (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)

I will avoid outing, but I will add that many of the users appear to use real names, and it is not at all difficult to connect those names with employees current and former of Eurasia Group.

Additionally, a number of NYC-area IP addresses have been regularly filling in unsourced, ad-like or otherwise frivolous content about EG and Bremmer since 2005. Not all of their edits are necessarily problematic per se, but given the context, it seems disturbing.

Special:Contributions/67.86.120.150 has the most edits to the Ian Bremmer page by far, although they were excessively adulatory and the original text is mostly gone.
- It did significant editing outside articles specifically related to EG and Bremmer from September 2005 to July 2007. A large number looked like this one to Bremmer's book The J Curve: adding any and all online references to the work in question shortly after their publication.
- Created the article for Bremmer (original, no sources) and his company (original, no sources).
- At one point, the account appears to have tried to delete an AfD discussion before closure, see this edit and the ones preceding it
Special:Contributions/67.250.41.182, 10 edits from 2009 to 2013, 9 relating to EG/Bremmer.
- Adding EG employee to list of political scientists
- Adding irrelevant external links (Here, links to EG's Facebook page)
Special:Contributions/69.86.1.174 changed redirect page to article about concept "invented" by Bremmer in this 2011 edit.
Special:Contributions/96.231.126.126 (likely a dynamic IP) made extensive promotional edits like this one to the EG page. It made 27 edits, all to either the EG or Ian Bremmer page, and all on the same day in July 2010.

Other IP accounts WP:SPAs with nearly exclusive focus on EG-related pages (usually to add links to essays published by Bremmer, but also occasionally to copy edit, or remove citation needed templates in at least one case.)

I am not sure what to do with all of this information—I've only been on Wikipedia since late 2019—but it seems apparent to me that people from EG will continue to manipulate Wikipedia articles about their employer unless something is done. I am of course going to start taking a closer look at the pages going forward, but I fear that might not be enough. I've emailed the paid-en-disclose email account today (6/14/2020) with the evidence that shows a lot of these users are direct employees of the company, and have been undoing a lot of the stuff added by these accounts in the mean time, but this is gonna keep happening in the long run it looks like, which is concerning.