MH17 Wikipedia page edited by Russian government
A Wikipedia entry relating to the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has reportedly been edited by the Russian government to remove accusations it supplied pro-Russian rebels with missiles to shoot down the aeroplane.
An automated Twitter bot, called RUGovEdits, which monitors edits made from Russian Government IP addresses and tweets them, spotted the changes to a Russian language version of the page, The Telegraph reports.
According to the bot, an internet user from the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), edited text to read: "The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers".
Just one hour earlier the page stated that MH17 had been shot down "by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation."
A tweet from the RUGovEdits account today read "Wikipedia article List of aircraft accidents in civil aviation has been edited by RTR [another name for VGTRK]".
Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied any responsibility for the attack, which saw all 298 people on-board the airliner killed when it was shot down near the Ukrainian/ Russian border on Thursday.
Graphic images and video footage published on Twitter within hours of the plane crashing led many professional journalists to call on those at the scene to refrain from posting such upsetting and insensitive content.