CPAC subjected to smear campaign from Wikipedia and Google over ‘Nazi’ stage layout

Controversy sections are “discouraged” on Wikipedia, usually. On CPAC’s page they became an excuse for partisan bickering.

Over at Breitbart, their resident Wikipedia expert published a story detailing a tumultuous episode, energized by social media outrage.

For a period of roughly five days, conspiracy theorists on the left asserted the CPAC stage design was a Nazi dog whistle. It was around this time that the Wikipedia page for CPAC juggled back and forth. Vandalism describing the event as a conference where “Neo Nazis, KKK members, rapists, and insurrectionalists” gathered was added and deleted and added in part again.

Google comes into the picture because the platform uses Wikipedia in sidebar searches. So for a time the inaccurate description that “CPAC is hosted by Donald J Trump, where all participants are required to worship him over god, which includes kneeling down before a golden statue of him” was visible.

The situation was seemingly egregious enough that a Reuters fact-check had to excuse Google from blame.

On March 3rd people were made more directly aware that the company responsible for building the CPAC stage was Design Foundry. A company with a large history of working with left-wing organizations. Who also had no idea that their CPAC design resembled some kind of Nazi rune.

This is how the CPAC stage entered the picture on the Wikipedia article. It and the golden Trump statue were added to the controversy section, despite the stage situation being demonstrably irrelevant. Attempts to remove the conjecture were undone.

In the end this edit war caused some to self-reflect. One editor noted how bogged down in recent history the CPAC article had become, despite the long-standing nature of the event itself. Another responded by trying to bury the controversies section further down the page.

For another example of partisan bias: Wikipedia labeled the claims about Hunter Biden's international business dealings as "debunked.

In other recent news one of Wikipedia's co-founders called for decentralization of social media platforms.