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Pictures of Swastikas temporarily replaced Wikipedia pages for Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck

Aug 16, 2021, 23:27 IST
Business Insider
Grace Dean/Insider
  • Pictures of Swastikas briefly replaced certain Wikipedia pages on Monday morning.
  • Users said the symbol replaced pages for Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, Madonna, and Joseph Stalin.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation was not immediately available for comment.
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Dozens of Wikipedia pages were temporarily replaced with pictures of Swastikas Monday morning.

The changes, which were only in place for a few minutes before the pages reverted to their usual contents, removed all the text and images from the pages and replaced them with a bright red background and large Swastika image, which is also the German Nazi Party's flag.

A spokeperson for Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that oversees Wikipedia, said a wiki template used to support page functionality was vandalized on English Wikipedia, resulting in the Nazi flag appearing for a few minutes.

The spokesperson added volunteer editors reverted the vandalism within five minutes and protected the pages from additional negative behavior.

The Wikipedia pages of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck were among those affected. Twitter users say that the pages of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, singer Madonna, and Joseph Stalin were also hacked.

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"This particularly vile action - a form of vandalism on Wikipedia - is something Wikipedia volunteers have experience with," a spokesperon said in an email. "Over the years, a number of tools and processes have been developed to quickly spot and revert vandalism on the site."

The US has experienced a rise in antisemitism over the last few years. More than 3,000 anti-Semitic incidents occurred last year, the third-highest year on record since 1979, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

QAnon, a conspiracy theory that has gone viral and entered mainstream politics in the last several years, builds on centuries of anti-Semitic tropes, Insider's Rachel Greenspan reported. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has defended the QAnon conspiracy theory, supported an anti-Semitic conspiracy that a Jewish-financed laser beam ignited wildfires in California.

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