this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires— Founded by Keir Starmer’s comms chief, Portland helps rich clients ‘protect their reputation’ – with a shady, off-the-books service (www.thebureauinvestigates.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by Beep@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 3 points 20 hours ago

there's always at least one guy who'd hyperfocus on monitoring something like this

That's the thing, there's only about 3000 billionaires worldwide, but 8 billion other people. Let's say out of those 8 billion, there are maybe 20 who really, really hate Bill Gates. All it takes to undermine all Bill Gates' attempts to launder his reputation is for a few of those 20 to keep an eye on his Wikipedia page in their spare time, and challenge any changes that try to whitewash his reputation.

Trickle down economics doesn't work well, but at least this causes a trickle down effect. Gates spends millions with PR firms to keep his reputation clean, including vandalizing Wikipedia. Those PR firm employees are unethical assholes, but they're not billionaires. Gates (indirectly) pays their wages. These PR firm assholes then spend Gates' money to buy BMWs and prostate massagers. That ends up trickling down to car mechanics and massager manufacturers.

So, every time you edit Wikipedia with unflattering but true information about billionaires and middle eastern oil states, you're causing some wealth to leak out of the billionaires' pockets as they fight to contain that information. And you can do this damage while just sitting on a toilet.