Trolls Are Currently Trying to Deface Kamala Harris’ Wikipedia Page With Slurs and Other False Info
Courtest: Wikipedia
Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who was tapped by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, to be his running mate Tuesday afternoon is now experiencing the worst of the Internet: online trolls are currently attacking her digital profile and the target for their rage appears to be Harris’ Wikipedia page.
Following Biden’s announcement, Harris’ Wiki page was quickly found to be laced with slurs, including her name being changed to “C*ntala Harris.”
A producer at CBS News, Camilla Schick, took note of the change.
Kamala Harris has been @JoeBiden‘s VP pick for less than an hour when someone changed her name on @Wikipedia‘s page about her to an expletive. Kudos to Wikipedia for taking it down fast + migrating the original contents to a new page. Uphill battles ahead. https://t.co/W4hj7WpxJW pic.twitter.com/F6ueqvZGkp
— Camilla Schick (@CamJourno) August 11, 2020
She added, “kudos to Wikipedia for taking it down fast and migrating the original contents to a new page.”
The entire page now looks to be back to normal.
Yet, the the archive of page edits shows that trolls are still attempting to pollute her page with falsehoods — to no prevail.
During the course of writing this article, Mediaite observed users such as “Godzilla4471” made numerous attempts to make alter the page (see a screenshot of the Harris page’s revision history below), including trying to change Harris’ father to, alternately, President Donald Trump and a velociraptor.
In early July, The Intercept reported there has been an ongoing battle among the site’s volunteer editors about what to include about Harris’ record on the Wiki page.
At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris’s “tough-on-crime” record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning.
