Twitterbots revealed the Russian government has been editing the Wikipedia page dedicated to civil aviation crashes, specifically entries surrounding the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash, rewriting portions that highlight Russian involvement.

These twitterbots, automated online monitors who tweet every time Wikipedia pages are edited by government Internet Protocol addresses, were only launched earlier this month. However, their combing of these sites has already shown some interesting changes being made to the online encyclopedia.

The twitter account @RuGovEdits went live July 13. The twitterbot posted that an Internet user from the government-run All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, VGTRK, changed the cause of the MH17 crash, tweeting "A Wikipedia article about commercial aviation catastrophes was edited by RTR [another name for VGTRK]."

The Wikipedia page was edited it to read "the plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers." This entry replaced the previous explanation posted only an hour before from an IP address in Kiev that the plane was shot down by "terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation."

All edits are permanently stored and logged along with the editor's IP address, making it possible to track the editing changes as well as who is doing the editing. There are twitter bots dedicated to watching other governments' online activity on Wikipedia, including @congress-edits, which shares any changes U.S. congressional IP addresses make to these webpages' information.

Although the evidence appears to support pro-Russian forces in the Ukraine shot down the aircraft, Russia has denied any involvement in the attack that left 298 people dead. While these minute changes of online information may seem trivial, the framing of information online seems to reveal further debate over who is responsible for Thursday's Malaysia Airlines crash.