London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia to burnish Qatar’s image

Wikipedia is such a cesspool of far-left, pro-jihad propaganda that it is quite likely that other pages have been revised at the behest of well-heeled, malign actors as well.

“London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires,” by Claire Wilmot, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 14, 2026:

Twenty-five years after it was founded, Wikipedia stands as an unrivalled achievement. Not only is it the single largest collection of information in human history, it has also built a stellar reputation for reliability in a digital world awash with lies and deception.

For this reason, new AI tools have begun to carry the site’s contents far and wide. Chatbots and AI-generated search summaries – which are rapidly transforming the way people get their information – both use Wikipedia as a key source.

Now, we can reveal Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this “wikilaundering” are some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.

The firm in question is Portland Communications, whose founder Tim Allan is now the director of communications for Keir Starmer. And it has been busted once already for this practice, which is in breach of the British PR professionals’ code of conduct.

But after the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: “No one said, ‘We should stop doing this.’ The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught.”

Portland’s subcontractors have polished the public image of Qatar by burying references to critical reporting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, according to the firm’s insiders. They have also obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya’s post-Gaddafi government over the other.

Often, however, their changes were more subtle: burying bad press under descriptions of a client’s philanthropic work or swapping out critical news references with something more positive…

In December 2010, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar became the centre of huge international attention when it was chosen as the shock host for the 2022 World Cup. Almost immediately, the country’s human rights record began to draw intense scrutiny. And as stadium construction projects got underway, reports began to emerge detailing the deaths of migrant workers.

With its reputation in the spotlight, Qatar turned to Portland. In 2013, the firm was handed a lucrative contract with the country, its remit covering “government affairs through to nation branding”.

According to six former Portland employees involved in some of this work between 2013 and 2024, Wikipedia edits were a common request from the Qataris. They said Portland hired subcontractors to target pages detailing Qatar’s human rights record, particularly around stadium-building, with pages of prominent politicians also targeted.

TBIJ’s analysis confirms several networks of accounts editing pages to raise the prominence of positive coverage of Qatar, as well as hedging negative press or burying it under more favourable material. Many of these changes – some of which Wikipedia editors flagged as suspicious in separate investigations – were performed by accounts outside of the Web3 network.

Wikipedia reaches into AI and distributes information throughout the internet

Stephen Harrison, journalist
Other edits by the Web3 network focussed on the country’s business interests, including the removal of references to a case in which two Qatari billionaires were sued in the British high court for allegedly channelling funds to Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian terrorist group. The case appears to have collapsed in July 2024 after claimants withdrew some claims (lawyers told the Guardian that their clients had been intimidated by Qatari state operatives). But in October 2019, Web3’s network erased all mentions of the case from the page of the men’s business.

Three Wikipedia editors told us that in general, if a case is subject to media coverage as this one was, it should not be deleted….