Who’s been editing the Ripple CEO’s Wikipedia page?

Ripple is a cutting-edge Silicon Valley tech start-up with ambitions to one day be “to payments as Amazon was to books”.

Its cutting-edge technology is supposed to allow financial institutions “to send money across borders, instantly, reliably and for fractions of a penny”, by the power of its immutable digital dream-ledger (aka blockchain, but for banker bros).

In all honestly, it isn’t making much progress on that front. Spanish bank Santander, a Ripple investor and what the company calls “one of our largest and most important customers”, recently chose not to use Ripple’s XRP currency for its new international payment network. But you might at least think Ripple’s CEO would know a thing or two about technology. And also immutability.

It turns out, though, that blockchain is not the only game in town when it comes to immutable ledgers. On Wikipedia anyone can edit a page, but the site keeps a record of these changes for all to see. It’s a bit like, um, a shared digital ledger.

The difference with the Wikipedia ledger is that all these entries and edits are stored on a regular database, rather than a distributed one like a blockchain. As founder Jimmy Wales has pointed out, it turns out that’s perfectly sufficient!

What is like the original bitcoin blockchain, however, is that the Wikipedia ledger is pseudonymous, meaning that you can’t see the full details of the person who has made changes to any given entry. If they’re not using a pseudonym, you can see their IP address.

With that in mind, it’s come to FT Alphaville’s attention recently that some Wikipedia users — two in particular — have been repeatedly editing Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s Wikipedia page to remove some less positive aspects of the entry. Specifically, these two users have been removing text under the “Controversies” section of the page, and one of them in fact removed the whole section entirely, before it was reinstated by a different Wikipedia editor.

The Controversies section includes the fact that Garlinghouse had claimed multiple times that the published error rate for SWIFT messaging was at least six per cent (a claim that has been proven to be false in a great piece by Martin Walker published by the London School of Economics Business Review); the fact that he’d been personally named in a group of class actions against Ripple that claim the company has breached various securities laws; and the fact he’d admitted that, without sales of the XRP cryptocurrency, Ripple would be lossmaking (which was revealed by none other than, um, FT Alphaville.)

Crypto propaganda wars

So there’s been something of an “edit war” on the page, with multiple removals and reinstatements of text since May. And we know this because via the magic of Wikipedia’s non-blockchain-flavoured digital ledger, we can see all the edits that have been made to the page by either a user or an IP address. (You can see the full edit history here if you’re interested, as you can do on any Wikipedia entry by clicking “View history”.)

One of the users, who can only be identified by their IP address, appears to have edited another Wikipedia page before editing Garlinghouse’s one. It was the page of a woman named Cheryl Helmer, a Republican politician and a member of the Kansas House of Representatives. Funnily enough, this user actually added a “Controversy” section to Helmer’s entry, under which it was written that she’d “attracted national attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when she requested that Kansas Governor (of the opposing party) produce information on the Governor’s hairstyling”.

It turned out that the Democratic senator’s husband had been cutting her hair, hence Helmer’s demands being pretty controversial! We tried to find evidence of the “national attention” this controversy had provoked, but even the citation in the Wikipedia entry itself referenced an article in the Leavenworth Times, a local Kansas paper, and the only other place we found it was in the Kansas City Star.

But is there any connection to Garlinghouse? While we don’t want to speculate, we would point out that he’s from Kansas and is a repeat donor to the Democrats. We’d also highlight that the IP address shows the editing user was based in Menlo Park, which is a small city in the Bay Area (where many start-ups, such as Robinhood, are located). Some of Garlinghouse’s political donations are sent from a Menlo Park address. Ahem.

What about the other user? They were signed in as “Pizzamyheart” and, before touching up the Garlinghouse page, had edited Wesleyan University’s entry, alongside a few other pages. Ripple’s executive communications manager, it turns out, is a recent graduate of Wesleyan. Crypto journalist Mitchell Moos tweeted the company last week to ask them about this link, but doesn’t seem to have got a response:

We haven’t had a response back from Ripple on this either. But since asking the company about the edits on Friday, and then again over the weekend, “Pizzamyheart” disappeared as a user on Wikipedia. Strange.

We called up David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and a Wikipedia editor and administrator, who was one of the people who had been reinstating the removed Garlinghouse text. He told us:

It’s not clear precisely who did this but, if it looks like corporate whitewashing and quacks like corporate whitewashing, then we’ll treat it as such.