Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-08-14/Special report - Wikipedia

Nano Nuclear Energy is in the business of designing very small nuclear power generators. Though they don’t yet have any operating generators, their intention is to make them small enough to carry around on or tow behind a large truck, or even have them power ships while loaded on the ship’s deck. Technically, reactors of this size might be better described as "microreactors" rather than "nanoreactors". You can see an animation of their vision on YouTube.

According to Hunterbrook Media, a newspaper associated with a short seller named Hunterbrook Capital, NNE has "no revenue, products, or patents for its core technology". But it does have a plan to produce its small nuclear generators starting in 2030-2031, a timeline that an expert asked by Hunterbrook Media called "frankly laughable". Hunterbrook also raises questions about management quality, slow applications for regulatory approvals, and the need to raise "hundreds of millions of dollars for research and development" before the product can go to market.

Similar facts and questions were raised by a story in May from Fast Company without raising the possibility that NNE could become the target of short sellers. NNE stock was listed on NASDAQ with a market capitalization of about $600 million before the Hunterbrook report. This year its auditor has been fined $2 million by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) for failure to maintain auditing quality control standards. NNE, to say the least, is an unusual company.

Hunterbrook

Hunterbrook Media published its story about NNE at 9:45 am Friday, July 19, 2024 and announced that Hunterbrook Capital, technically a hedge fund, had sold short NNE’s stock, betting that the price would fall. NNE’s stock price fell 7.43% before noon, but finished the day up 1.05% at $19.30. As of the publication date of The Signpost (August 14), the price has fairly steadily declined since July 19 to $7.70.

Neither NNE nor Hunterbrook have responded to inquiries from The Signpost made soon after the Hunterbrook report. NNE has responded to the Hunterbrook story by means of a August 13 press release, titled "NANO Nuclear Energy Fights Back Against Short Sellers" which included a letter from their lawyers. Taken together, these documents essentially deny all of Hunterbrook's claims and threaten to sue them for defamation.

It seems that one of these companies must be stretching the truth here. How can we find out which one?

The New Yorker published a 3,300 word article in May about Hunterbrook. They call Hunterbrook Media and Hunterbrook Capital "conjoined twins", though it's clear that Hunterbrook Capital is the owner of the joint business. Because Hunterbrook Capital is registered with the SEC as a hedge fund, Hunterbrook Media cannot use any non-public information in its stories without risking being considered an insider trader. They use only well documented publicly available information in their stories, and publish them openly on their website with no ads or paywall. Hunterbrook Capital has pre-publication access to the material, and can trade, long or short, based on that information.

On the face of it Hunterbrook is an unusual company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are trying to fool anybody. I should note that I’ve cited Hindenburg Research, another short seller, in a Signpost article and found their information was reliable. Nevertheless, that doesn't necessarily mean that Hunterbrook's information will be correct. Readers should be aware that short selling, the practice of betting that a stock's price will go down, is a controversial business and that many short sellers have been accused of exaggerating their reports in order to drive the stock price down further.

Paid editing on Wikipedia?

One method of seeing how forthright and transparent businesses are is to check the Wikipedia articles about them. Are the articles peppered with edits from blocked sock puppets or apparent undeclared paid editors? Wikipedia retains almost every edit, so edits to an article by blocked or banned editors are fairly easily-checked. At the same time, no investigation solely using Wikipedia's database can be absolutely certain of an editor's identity. They may be impersonating someone to cause them embarrassment, a practice known as Joe jobbing. Ultimately, we rely on the judgement of administrators and checkusers who officially decide whether to block sock puppets, and on participants at Articles for Deletion, who sometimes decide whether an article has been improperly created.

There’s not much to say about Hunterbrook using this method, since I couldn't find any Wikipedia articles about the company, or its owners or employees.

NNE also is lacking in Wikipedia articles in the usual places. They’ve almost all been deleted. But there is a record of three separate deletion discussions. The first two were for the company, Nano Nuclear Energy (both resulting in deletion). The second nominator said there were "some articles about the broader technology mention the company in passing, but no real coverage of the company itself". A reviewer, noting the lack of independent sources, kindly wrote TOO SOON. There is a surviving article on the Spanish Wikipedia, as well as an archived copy of an English Wikipedia article from May 4, 2024, so readers can judge for themselves whether the company was notable. Using Google Translate, the Spanish article looks nearly identical to the archived English article.

Three socks and a sock farm

The third AfD discussion was about NNE's founder and president Jay Jiang Yu. An AfD reviewer wrote that the article was "paid-editing sock drivel". The closer agreed, with most of the other reviewers finding no reliable sources, thus !voting to delete. Two sock puppets, "EliteBrandRealm" and "Eugenio Montilla" both voted to keep on February 18, 2024 and were both indefinitely blocked the same day. Eugenio Montilla was blocked as a sock of the master Claudio Antonio Ruiz. EliteBrandRealm was investigated as part of the Claudio Antonio Ruiz sockfarm, but ultimately blocked separately. There were about 45 blocked socks operating on several Wikipedia language versions involved in the investigation of the Claudio Antonio Ruiz sockfarm.

At Wikimedia Commons, Leolaria1997 made 15 of their 17 edits on NNE logos, but was not blocked there. They were blocked on the English language Wikipedia for advertising on Wikipedia, including creating the article Nano Nuclear Energy, Inc. (notice the "Inc."), as well as editing the article of a plastic surgeon who specialized in the "Brazilian butt lift".

Claudio Antonio Ruiz also uploaded another NNE logo to Commons and made edits to the article of the same plastic surgeon, but their blocks were not directly linked.

One other connection to NNE was an autobiography submitted in 2015 to Articles for Creation by User:Dr. Carlos O. Maidana. This editor was warned about the autobiography violating Wikipedia rules. All three of his edits have now been deleted. Dr. Carlos O. Maidana is listed as "Head of Thermal Hydraulics and Space Program" by NNE. He has worked at the Idaho National Laboratory in related areas, and it is not clear whether he worked for NNE in 2015. This may just be a case of a person who was unfamiliar with Wikipedia rules making a flawed contribution in good faith.

No evidence has been found about Hunterbrook editing Wikipedia. But the evidence on NNE, gathered mostly in the AfD discussions and sock puppet investigations looks solid for the purposes of Wikipedia. The article named "Nano Nuclear Energy" was deleted twice, for lack of notability. Another article named "Nano Nuclear Energy, Inc." was created by a user blocked for advertising on Wikipedia and the article was quickly deleted. Though blocked separately, this editor had some connections with the undeclared paid editor Claudio Antonio Ruiz, who is listed as the master of a large sock farm.

The article on NNE's founder and president Jay Jiang Yu was edited by undeclared paid editors who were part of the same sock farm. The AfD reviewers and sock puppet investigators should be congratulated for their speed and accuracy. It appears that the paid editing was started late last year and ended by May.

The Signpost makes no representation about who might have made any paid edits, nor about who might have paid for them. We only state that there is some evidence consistent with paid editing on articles related to NNE.