Report: Hunter Biden Hired PR Firms to Airbrush Wikipedia

A report by independent journalist Lee Fang shows that Hunter Biden used specialist PR firms to edit Wikipedia to improve his image, using anonymous accounts to make the edits appear organic.

The President’s son hired FTI consulting, a major PR consulting firm that also worked for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy giant tied to the Biden family.

Via Lee Fang:

Hunter, the emails show, sought to delete a line explaining that the National Endowment for Democracy, which he previously worked with, had ties to the CIA. He also pushed to include more official titles from his various NGO board memberships.

On May 28, 2014, an account called “AmeliaChevalier” edited Hunter’s Wikipedia to delete any reference to “disgraced financier Allen Stanford.” Over the next few weeks, more anonymous Wikipedia accounts began rapidly editing Hunter’s page, records show. Archives of Wikipedia show that a month after engaging with FTI, Hunter’s Wikipedia page had dramatically changed, with negative references scrubbed, and lengthy passages added to discuss his volunteer work, service in government, and appointments to various boards and political committees.

One of the more prolific and anonymous Wikipedia accounts making edits to Hunter’s page was a user called “Earflaps,” which made a number of edits, including the deletion of criticism of Hunter’s work for Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm. That account was later identified as a “sock puppet,” a term of art used for the illicit pay-for-play editing by fake accounts, to airbrush negative information off of Wikipedia. An investigation found that Earflaps was one of nearly a dozen fake accounts tied to PR firms hired to carefully manage the image of Russian businessmen.

Paid Wikipedia editing is a common practice on the website, which has become controlled by a cabal of left-leaning editors. As Breitbart News reported in 2020, paid Wikipedia editors scrubbed the page of Jeffrey Zients, an advisor to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.