14 DAY TRIAL // America is all about turkey and Black Friday right now, but some Internet vandals decided to have a little fun with something that’s at least as American.
The Wikipedia page of Donald Trump was modified by several editors to display a penis instead of the US President’s face, so as a result, Apple’s very own digital assistant Siri imported the photo and brought it right to your iPhone.
Asking Siri anything about Donald Trump, like “Who is Donald Trump?”, puts the penis photo right on your iPhone screen, as The Verge discovered. The same thing for questions like “How old is Donald Trump?”.
Apple already pulled the Knowledge page
Before anything, it’s important to remember that Apple’s isn’t the one to blame for this prank. The way Siri works makes it possible for such acts of cyber vandalism to affect iPhones as well, as the digital assistant searches for information on Wikipedia and also displays the images that are associated with articles.
In theory, this is a system that works neatly, but given that Wikipedia is a free service that can be edited by anyone with an Internet connection, it opens the door to occasional incidents like these.
A Wikipedia editor confirmed for the cited source that more than one editor made changes to the page to display the said photo, and they have all banned. At this point, the page no longer shows the image, but a correct photo of Donald Trump. The public logs for the edits made on the Donald Trump page show that multiple editors indeed made changes on November 22. After a few hours, the page was locked.
As for Siri, Apple has pulled the Knowledge article for Donald Trump entirely, as the company has promptly reacted after more and more people looked for information on the US President and posted the results online.