Congress Has Been Banned from Editing Wikipedia Because Some Douchebag Is Making Transphobic Changes to Entries, Including OItNB's Laverne Cox

By Cindy Davis | Miscellaneous | August 20, 2014 |

Can somebody please tell me what’s up with our country lately? Between things like this and the crap going on in Ferguson, don’t you wonder where we really are — can this really be 2014 America? Aren’t we running out of hate, yet? (I really wish we’d run out of hate.) What kind of people are we that someone working within the US House of Representatives edited Laverne Cox’s Wikipedia page, changing the word “transgender” to “a man pretending to be a woman?

(screencaps via Arthur Giles)

Before edit:

After:

And this isn’t the first edit coming from a particular IP address within Congress; apparently they have their own vicious troll — someone who claims to be going after transgender entries with a U.S. Representative’s permission. Because the address is shared between many computers, a particular user cannot be identified and therefore the ban extends to offices within Congress for 30 days (following a previous ban for 10 days in July).

On the one hand, I’m glad the congress-edits bot (which tweets whenever anonymous Wikipedia edits are made) exists, but on the other I’m sad we need to monitor such a thing. Here’s hoping Congress’ internal IT department gets to work on pinpointing exactly where this crap is coming from. Whether or not it really is connected to a Representative, or it’s some ignorant intern, it’s time to kill the hate.



Cindy Davis, (Twitter) is done reading news tonight.

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