McDonalds caught on dirty play

Nowadays Wikipedia became a powerful tool to influence on people minds. The Wikipedia Scaner developed by Virgil Griffith tracks the edit history of wiki articles. It has already spotted many companies editing articles for PR.

Users from CIA network edited biographies of former presidents Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. Somebody from a computer traced to Democrat headquarters edited a page on conservative American radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling him "ridiculous", "idiotic", and labelling his 20 million listeners as "legally retarded".

The biggest scandal was about Diebold, a supplier of voting machines. Somebody from Dieblod’s network made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations. One piece of deleted text said: "In August 2003 Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fundraiser for George W Bush ...".

The latest company busted by Wikipedia Scaner is McDonalds. It would be logical to assume that they wanted to remove some criticism or edit articles about competitive chains of fast-food restaurants. But surprisingly they didn’t do something like that. It seems that McDonalds is not afraid of competitors, but appetite suppressants are one of the biggest problems for them. Someone edited almost all articles about appetite suppressants using a computer belonging to McDonald’s network.

This person acted as a common network troll – a lot of negative information has been added to wikipedia articles about hoodia, phentermine, sibutramine and many others suppressants. It was not scientific information about side effects of these dugs, but a flood like this example: “It didn’t work for me. I’ve even started to eat more. Phentermine is bullshit.” Many “reviews” like this have been added, but now all of them are removed and the McDonalds network was blocked by Wikipedia for vandalism.