u/InvestigatorSoft5764

David Revoy— Pepper & Carrot, Mini Fantasy Theater #53, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 4.0 International.

Blood on the Ball.

> As millions tune into the NBA playoffs, a coalition of human rights organizations and Sudanese activists today launched a campaign urging the National Basketball Association to suspend its commercial brand sponsorship deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until the UAE ends its military support for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia accused by the United Nations and others of atrocities and acts bearing “the hallmarks of genocide” in Sudan.

Press Release.

Crimes Against Hugh's Manatees.

Cat And Girl comics, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

> One lucrative account for Terakeet, according to four former employees, has been the United Arab Emirates and its ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba. Much of Terakeet’s work, which according to Foreign Agents Registration Act records began in July 2019 and continues to this day, focuses on optimizing Google searches in an effort to promote tourism in the U.A.E. But Mr. al-Otaiba, a well-known figure in Washington social circles, was concerned in 2017 about a story published in The Intercept that reported he once had ties to sex workers and traffickers. (Mr. al-Otaiba declined to comment, beyond confirming that Terakeet has done work for the U.A.E.) A small team at Terakeet set to work to push the damaging story off the first page of Google search results.

> The account’s manager, Kenneth Schiefer, relocated from Syracuse to Washington for more than a year to work in person with the ambassador at the U.A.E. embassy without leaving a digital trail of emails and text messages between the two of them.

> Terakeet’s team first established a personal web page for Mr. al-Otaiba. The firm then used an anonymous editor handle called VentureKit to create a fraudulent, sock puppet account, Quorum816, to add positive information about Mr. al-Otaiba on his Wikipedia page in 2020, according to two individuals with knowledge of the events. (In August 2021, Wikipedia reversed the edits made by Quorum816 and suspended the account as well as VentureKit.)

> Terakeet’s content writers also wrote several profiles of Mr. al-Otaiba that emphasized his leadership abilities. They took care to avoid duplication, since Google only posts what it deems to be “differentiated content.” The team then supplied the profiles to institutions with which the ambassador had affiliations — including the Milken Institute, the Special Olympics and Harvard’s Kennedy School — as well as to a digital directory called The Marque, which charges up to four thousand dollars a year to post an individual’s profile page.

> The profiles contained links to favorable U.A.E.-related blogs written by Terakeet staffers, with the effect of giving the profiles added authority and pushing them up the Google search pipeline.

> For these efforts, the United Arab Emirates paid Terakeet more than $6 million from 2020 through 2022. By 2023, the mission had been accomplished. The Intercept story had sunk to page 2 in the Google search results. Today for most users, it languishes on page 5.

Source: New York Times Investigation.

Poorly Drawn Lines.