@congressedits turned
up one of the more interesting edits from the House of Representatives
today:
If you follow the link in the tweet and go and look at the
edit you can see that this text was removed (emphasis mine):
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions has been nominated, as of January 2017,
to succeed Loretta Lynch as the 84th Attorney General of the United
States. Dana J. Boente of Virginia was appointed on January 30, 2017 to
serve as acting Attorney General. The first acting Attorney
General under President Trump – Sally Yates – was dismissed by Trump
after Yates told justice department lawyers not to defend his executive
order restricting entry for people from seven countries.
Sessions was confirmed by the Senate on February 8, 2017.
In case you were wondering what the rationale for the edit was they
boldly stated:
Then three minutes later another anonymous user reverted the change
saying:
The thing that I find interesting here is that the person who
reverted the edit clearly knew the user was accessing Wikipedia from the
US House of Representatives.
Now it’s possible that they found out by some other means, but I
think it’s likely that they found out from @congressedits itself. Maybe
someone else would have noticed the edit independently, but it’s
significant how the provenance of this edit mattered.
I think it’s a great example of how social media can work to
establish and maintain facts rather than just be a mechanism
for spreading alternate facts and so called fake news.