Google amplifies Wikipedia vandalism / Viral rumor rundown / Quick hits

Google amplifies Wikipedia vandalism

A subtle act of vandalism to the Wikipedia page for the California state Republican Party resulted in Google’s displaying “Nazism” as one of the party’s ideologies in its “knowledge panel” for the organization. (Knowledge panels are the basic information boxes prominently displayed at the top right of the first page of Google search results; information about organizations and businesses sometimes automatically comes from Wikipedia.)

The edit history of the California Republican Party Wikipedia page shows that the URL linked to the word “conservatism” in the Wikipedia “infobox” — a prominent panel of facts similar to Google’s knowledge panels — was changed on May 24 from Wikipedia’s “Conservatism in the United States” article to the “Nazism” article. This caused the Google knowledge panel for the party to automatically display “Nazism” as one of the party’s ideologies.

A screenshot of the archived revision page showing the May 24 vandalism that changed the target URL for "Conservatism" under the Ideology section of the Wikipedia infobox for the California Republican Party to the "Nazism" article.

The edit was not discovered until Vice News wrote about it on May 31 — and Google came under fire for pulling the detail into its knowledge panel.

The “Nazism” edit was made three weeks after Patrick Little, an openly anti-Semitic candidate for U.S. Senate, was kicked out of the state Republican convention on May 5.

Note: After the reference to Nazism was removed by editors on May 31, the edit history for the article shows it was added to — and removed from — the infobox again at least three additional times that same day, as was the word “Authoritarianism.” On June 1, Wikipedia editors banned the IP addresses involved in the vandalism and put a lock on the page, restricting edits to experienced Wikipedia editors.
Also note: Wikipedia vandalism has a long history and has generated a number of listicle pieces. There is also a Wikipedia page that lists the most vandalized pages on the site.
One last note: YouTube, which is owned by Google, also uses information from Wikipedia pages to warn users about conspiracy theories and sources of disinformation, such as state-sponsored “news” outlets. During an interview at South by Southwest in March, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced a plan to create “information cues” using Wikipedia for specific channels and videos.
Idea: Use this as an opportunity to help students understand how Wikipedia works, including how intentional misinformation can sometimes (usually temporarily) appear on the site and how to read and investigate edits to controversial pages.
- Related: Whether you use this example to spark student learning about Wikipedia or not, you should strongly consider reading about and contributing to Mike Caulfield’s Newspapers on Wikipedia project, an effort to create Wikipedia pages for legitimate local news sources.
Discuss: What does this manipulation (and the way Wikipedia edits work generally) mean about the site’s credibility? Is it unethical to “vandalize” a Wikipedia page? Can Wikipedia vandalism be funny or an effective means of commentary? Can Wikipedia vandalism have unintended consequences? What ideas do you have to help solve Wikipedia vandalism?
Related: On June 1, Vice News broke another story: Google’s knowledge panel for Trudy Wade, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, used a picture of her with the word “BIGOT” superimposed in large red letters; the image was picked up from a 2012 post on a local progressive blog.
- Discuss: Is this an inevitable byproduct of Google’s automated knowledge panels? Are these incidents evidence of carelessness or political bias on the part of Google? How do you know?

A screenshot showing the Google knowledge panel for a Republican state senator in North Carolina that included an old image from a progressive blog, labeling her as a bigot.

Viral rumor rundown

NO: Starbucks did not post signs saying that it was closing its stores on May 29 to “educate white people about their racism.” NO: Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson did not announce that “patrons of color will be allowed to move to the head of the line” in an attempt to “recognize our white privilege.” YES: Starbucks closed its company-owned stores in the United States during the afternoon of May 29 to “conduct racial-bias education geared toward preventing discrimination” in its stores after a store manager in Philadelphia called the police on two black men who were waiting to meet a friend. YES: Starbucks has been a frequent target of troll attacks that seek to misrepresent the company’s policies and exploit racial divisions.

Note: The fake sign (above) circulated in online political discussion forums such as 4chan’s Politically Incorrect message board and in the r/TheDonald community on Reddit.

Discuss: What other false information has circulated about Starbucks in recent months? Why do you think Starbucks has repeatedly been targeted by disinformation trolls this year? Were the rumors above believed by a significant number of people? How can we know?

Idea: In teams, have students explore the possible impact of the rumors described above. Is there any evidence that they were believed? (An archived version of that link is here if needed.) How widely do they seem to have been shared?

Idea 2: Challenge students to collect the recent viral rumors and fake posts that have circulated about Starbucks and create an awareness campaign to help warn others of this misinformation pattern.

NO: White Major League Baseball players in the 1950s did not kneel during the national anthem to protest lynching and Jim Crow laws.

Note: This rumor was created on BreakingNews247.net, a “prank news” generator site that makes it easy for users to create misinformation that looks like news. These types of user-generated “fake news” sites make it easy to create false stories — providing users with a template to complete with a headline, text and an image — and then serve ads against the traffic they generate. Some sites make it especially easy to post these creations to social media to “prank” your friends.
Misinformation pattern #1: Misinformation is almost impossible to control, regardless of the motivations of the person who creates and shares it. It frequently jumps from closed to open environments online and from one social network to another.
Misinformation pattern #2: Old pieces of misinformation recirculate when a new context emerges. This rumor was created in the fall of 2017 and was included in the Viral Rumor Rundown in the Nov. 13 issue of The Sift. It appeared again after NFL team owners approved a new national anthem policy on May 23.

NO: The leader of the Mormon church did not formally apologize for the church’s historic racism against its black members. YES: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned black people from full participation in the church until 1978, and in 2013 formally disavowed the racist theories supporting the ban. YES: A former Mormon created a counterfeit Mormon Newsroom website — at www.mormon-newsroom.org, which has a single hyphen added to the official URL, www.mormonnewsroom.org — as a parody intended to spark discussion about what an official church apology for its past racism would look like.

Note: See misinformation pattern #1 above.
Also note: The person who created the fake Mormon news site deliberately made it look authentic by copying the design of the real site and linking its tabs and other navigation back to that site. This meant that readers of the parody apology who clicked elsewhere on the fake site were directed back to the actual Mormon church site. There were a few signals that the fake site was inauthentic, including the subtle change in the URL and the disclaimer in the footer, calling the fake site the “official pasquinade newsroom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.”

A comparison of the authentic footer from the Mormon Newsroom website (top) and the footer from the fake "parody" site (below). Click the image to open a larger version in a new tab.

Idea: Use this viral rumor to open a “side door” into an exploration of the ways that hackers, propagandists and other malicious actors use subtle URL changes to trick people.
Related: “How A Hoax Made To Look Like A Guardian Article Made Its Way To Russian Media” (Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko, BuzzFeed News)

NO: Fox is not picking up the television show Roseanne after it was canceled by ABC last week due to a racist tweet by its star, Roseanne Barr. The claim originated with a satirical story published on Extra Newsfeed, a political commentary and satire site hosted by Medium.