Illustration: Isabella Carapella/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

Executives at the news company Axios were outwardly unperturbed when Jonathan Swan, one of the Politico-for-kids site’s star reporters, attractedwidespreadcondemnation last November for gloating about getting President Donald Trump to consider ending birthright citizenship. “Our profile is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we’re going to have more cool successes,” Axios editor-in-chief Nicholas Johnston told staff later. Executive editor Mike Allen acknowledged that Axios had, perhaps, erred ever so slightly, but seemed otherwise unconcerned with the criticism. “You can’t buy the amount of public exposure we got this past week for our journalism,” he wrote. That may be true. What you can buy, however, are the services of a verbose, relentless Wikipedia editor willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that that public exposure is as flattering as possible. So, Axios did. Axios may not have expressed its worries about its reputational problem publicly or even to its own staff, but the company did hire Ed Sussman, a former head of digital for Fast Company and Inc.com who’s now a paid Wikipedia editor at WhiteHatWiki.com, to do damage control. Axios had previously hired Sussman to beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign — if largely flattering — stats about Axios’ accomplishments) in February 2018. A week after Swan’s Trump interview aired, Sussman was hard at work on the reporter’s Wikipedia page, arguing that the entry was unfair to Swan and used “sensationalistic language” instead of the “dispassionate voice” Wikipedia requires. To correct the issue, he suggesteda total overhaul of the description. About a month later, Sussman proposed a list of extensive edits to Swan’s page. Some were clearly in service of his original argument about the Trump interview; others, such as his suggestion that Wikipedia editors add an “Awards and Honors” section, seemed focused on promoting Swan himself. He also asked editors to remove a sentence noting that Swan had once incorrectly reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned. Sussman then suggested the following paragraph be placed in its stead: On September 24, 2018, he was the first to report that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had verbally resigned and published the Rosenstein exit statement that the Justice Department sent to the White House. The story was later updated to clarify that is was uncertain if the White House had accepted the resignation, which it ultimately did not. Swan later said he had given the resignation story unwarranted certainty. Most of Sussman’s changes were approved. The vast majority of the people who propose and make changes to Wikipedia are volunteers. A few people, however, have figured out how to manipulate Wikipedia’s supposedly neutral system to turn a profit. That’s Sussman’s business. And in just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid him to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check. Wikipedia Editing For Fun And Profit! Wikipedia’s rules can feel dense and impenetrable and are phenomenally boring to talk about, but it helps to know a little about the site’s structure to understand exactly what Sussman does. So bear with me. One of Wikipedia’s more well-known rules is its prohibition on editing pages that you have any sort of direct connection to. This, along with the fact that it’s humiliating to get caught editing your own Wikipedia page, is usually enough of a deterrent to companies and public figures looking to inject a positive spin. But those looking to get around the site’s conflict of interest rules aren’t totally without options. Anyone, even someone financially tied to the subject in question, is allowed to merely suggest edits in the hopes that a less conflicted editor might come by, agree, and implement the changes for them. This is where a paid editor like Sussman comes in. On his website, Sussman identifies himself as “a journalist, lawyer, academic and technology entrepreneur” who “is often called upon in ‘crisis management’ situations where inaccurate or misleading information has been placed in a Wikipedia article, potentially creating severe business problems for its subject.” And because Sussman is open about what he’s doing, he’s forced to play by Wikipedia’s rules, which means disclosing his affiliation every time he suggests an edit on behalf of a client. One risk, he warns clients, is that “an experienced Wikipedia user might check the Talk page of the article” (the section attached to every article where editors discuss issues or concerns that come up) and discover that an editor with a conflict of interest had made his mark.

In just the past few years, companies including Axios, NBC, Nextdoor and Facebook’s PR firm have all paid Sussman to manipulate public perception using a tool most people would never think to check.

Sussman took exception to the section, explaining why in a punchy 700-word screed, which masochists can read here. Assuming you are unable to make it through that, though, Sussman’s argument is, essentially, that this allegation doesn’t deserve its own section, that the citation on the first sentence doesn’t support the sentence’s claim, and that the last sentence is unsourced. That first citation linked to Ronan Farrow’s October 2017 New Yorker story detailing the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which does indeed fail to mention Oppenheim or NBC. However, HuffPost reported later that month that Oppenheim had made the decision to kill Farrow’s story at NBC ― a fact Sussman conveniently omitted while picking and choosing from Wikipedia’s catalog of rules to build his case. After a bit of a back-and-forth between Sussman and an editor who goes by Jytdog, Jytdog appeared to become fed up with Sussman’s needling, writing that “the current content is fine. NBC news owns plenty of platforms to broadcast its PR about not getting this story. The article communicates that they had it and did not publish it.” The discussion of Sussman’s suggestions quickly becomes hard to follow —Oppenheim’s Talk page is currently about 12,000 words long. The actual entry is less than one-tenth of that. Ultimately, though, a comment period was opened to discuss the section, and despite Jytdog’s urgings, a majority of editors decided to leave the information off Oppenheim’s page. A bit of digging into the editors that voted to oppose the section, however, reveals a peculiar little pattern. Like Wikipedia’s subject pages, each editor also has his or her own general page, in addition to a corresponding Talk page. Looking through the Talkpagehistoriesof the editors who sided with Sussman reveals that Sussman directly petitioned a number of them to weigh in. Sussman engaged in this type of communication with editors on other topics in addition to the Weinstein matter on Oppenheim’s page, including the topic of Matt Lauer on that same page and changes to the NBC News page. When viewed in Wikipedia’s user logs, it looks like this: