Whitewashing is the act of minimizing or covering up vices, crimes or scandals, or of exonerating the guilty by means of a perfunctory investigation or biased presentation of data with the intention to improve someone's reputation.
[1][3] In 1800, in the United States, the word was used in a political context, when a Philadelphia Aurora editorial said that "if you do not whitewash President Adams speedily, the Democrats, like swarms of flies, will bespatter him all over, and make you both as speckled as a dirty wall, and as black as the devil.
[citation needed] In the study of reputation systems by means of algorithmic game theory, whitewashing refers to the abandonment of a tarnished identity and creation of a blank one,[6]: 682 which is more widely known in internet slang as sockpuppeting.
According to the Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk director for the International Federation for Human Rights, Ilya Nuzov, Russia is trying to whitewash the country's repressive Stalinist past.
Russian literary critic and culturologist Nikolai Podosokorsky [ru; hy] noted that "the whitewashing of domestic ghouls only indicates that the current rulers feel a spiritual kinship with them.