Political campaigns spend tens of millions trying to clean up their candidates’ public image. Campaign managers buy TV ads. They test slogans in focus groups and flood mailboxes with leaflets that portray swamp creatures as borderline saints. But in modern elections, those traditional PR blitzes matter far less than what happens on a single online reference page.
The recent election of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan offers a textbook case study in how public memory gets manipulated right before voters step into the booth. In recent months, a rather prolific Wikipedia editor using the handle CopyleftEverything has carried out a massive makeover of El-Sayed’s profile page. Between October 10 and November 1, the spin merchant made 17 edits to the page, adding over 15,000 bytes of
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