Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/Disinformation report

George Anthony Devolder Santos was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from New York's 3rd district last November and he now has many problems. He lies. A lot. The Associated Press writes that Santos "admitted that … he lied". The New York Times quotes Santos's fellow Nassau County Republicans calling him a "liar" and a "serial liar". The usual qualifiers like "accused", "apparent", "alleged" or "seems" have not been added.

The Guardian calls him a "serial liar", as does Vanity Fair which also adds in "pathological liar." The Washington Post varies this menu with "serial fabulist" and "pathological liar".

New York Magazine, The Washington Post, and several other publications are keeping complete lists of his lies. But it's hard for them to keep up. It seems like there's a new lie, or at least an unusual purported fact about Santos, that is revealed every day.

If you have been following the Santos saga in the press, you may want to skip to the next paragraph since the following lies have been widely published and documented. Santos did not attend a fancy prep school. He did not graduate from Baruch University or star on its volleyball team, or get two knee replacements because of his sacrifices for the sport. He did not earn an MBA degree from New York University. He did not work at either Goldman Sachs or Citigroup. He is not Jewish – and, despite his claim, not even Jew-ish, nor Ukrainian. His mother was not one of the first successful female financial executives in New York. She didn't have an office at the World Trade Center and didn't die on 9/11/2001, nor years later from the effects of that tragedy. He doesn't have a real estate portfolio, unless you count the apartments that he left without paying his rent. His family was not rich, it's unclear where the $700,000 he lent to his congressional campaign came from. He did work for a firm that has been accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of being a Ponzi scheme.

But there are too many well-documented lies to continue.

His problems include the federal, state, and local prosecutors who have said they are investigating him, although they haven't issued indictments. He will also be investigated by the House Ethics Committee. A Newsday poll this week shows that 78% of his constituents believe that he should resign from Congress, so his political career is likely almost over.

But perhaps his main problem is that he has been identified too many times in the reliable press as a liar. Publications, reliable or otherwise, may now have little or no fear of a libel suit from Santos. We might expect even more news reports of his lying to continue.

In an environment where the news media is swarming around Santos, Wikipedians need to be careful in evaluating the report that Santos edited Wikipedia and claimed that he was a drag queen and had appeared in several Disney television shows, including in "Hanna Montana" [sic].

A user page
The most serious report was that Santos, using the name User:Anthonydevolder, performed two edits to his Wikipedia userpage in 2011, making bizarre claims amid a host of misspellings and grammatical errors. "Anthony" and "Devolder" are Santos's two middle names. He appears to have preferred using these names, rather than "George Santos", at different times or for different audiences.

User:Anthonydevolder did make two edits on April 29, 2011, about three months before Santos's 23rd birthday. See Special:Permalink/426494196. The user only edited their user page, and did not edit any article pages. On April 30, 2011, the user did attempt to create an article on Anthony Devolder, but was foiled by automatic edit filters. The attempted edit triggered three edit filters: a new article without references, vandalism in all caps, and users creating autobiographies. The attempted article creation would have been identical to the user page he created.

The user page was rarely viewed, with only 2 pageviews between July 2015 – when this data was first collected – through January 19, 2023. Similarly, his user talk page was never edited or viewed before January 20, 2023.

So, did George Santos write these words? We should remember that a Wikipedia editor's identity can never be completely determined simply by the public record of their edits. Somebody else may be impersonating a well-known person in order to embarrass them, a tactic known as a Joe job.

Who might want to embarrass Santos (or Devolder as he was better known then)? Everybody has some enemies, but Santos's were likely to have been limited at this time, as he spent much of 2008 to 2011 in Brazil. Still, he may have had enemies in his neighborhood or at his job. An impersonator would have to have known a lot about Santos – his birthday, his purported career as a drag queen, and his dreams of becoming a film star. Santos would have known all this information, but it is impossible to rule out that there may have been a Joe jobber.

The George Santos article
The Wikipedia article about Santos was created as a draft on November 4, 2020 – the day after the 2020 Congressional election that Santos lost to Tom Suozzi. There were only two references given in the article: one to a local Long Island newspaper, and the other to a Greek-American newspaper. The article was not very long, and didn't even mention that Santos lost the election.

The article remained a draft through its first 11 edits, until November 9, 2022 – the day after the 2022 election which Santos won – though his victory was not noted in the article. Only one new reference had been added to the article since it had been created. By the end of the day, 14 more edits had been made, and there were a total of 5 references. Bogus information about Santos's education had by then been included.

On November 11 User:Devmaster88 made their only two edits to Wikipedia: both of them to the Santos article, changing the subject's name from "George Anthony Devolder Santos" to "George Devolder-Santos".

User:Devmaster88 was later blocked as a likely sockpuppet of User:Georgedevolder22, whose Wikipedia career consisted entirely of seven edits to the Santos article on November 17 and November 19, mostly changing the subject's name from "George Anthony Devolder Santos" to "George Santos".

Does the name User:Georgedevolder22, and these editors' interests, indicate that Santos himself was the editor? It's possible, but it's also possible that one of Santos's enemies was trying to embarrass him.

Feel free to give your opinion in the comments section below.