by Chris White
Apple’s voice-controlled assistant told the big tech company’s customers Saturday night that Israel President Reuvin Rivlin is the leader of the Zionist occupation state.”
Someone changed Rivlin’s Wikipedia page to describe Israel’s president as the “main child of Israel,” Israel’s i24 News reported Saturday. Apple and Google often rely on Wikipedia to answer customer questions about politicians, historical events, and people who are in the public eye.
Rivlin is the 10th president of Israel and was elected in 2014 having previously served as the speaker of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. Rivlin’s Wikipedia page no longer refers to Israel’s leader as the “president of the Zionist occupation state.”
Israel’s enemies frequently refer to the country as the “Zionist occupation state,” a term many Israelis and Jews around the world view as promoting anti-Semitic ideology.
“Anti-Zionism is a prejudice against the Jewish movement for self-determination and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in the State of Israel,” the Anti-Defamation League notes on its website. Twitter users posted tweets explaining what happens when they asked Siri about Rivlin.
Got the same response https://t.co/UMM8VwqziA pic.twitter.com/Y7QxicQUeQ
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 19, 2020
Another Twitter user told his followers: “Not doctored, this is real.”
https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1218727405910667264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Apple has not responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Google users experienced a similar problem in 2018. Google reportedly blamed Wikipedia that year when the company identified one of the ideologies of the California Republican Party as “Nazism” on its highly popular search platform.
The problem happens when “people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search,” Google told the DCNF in a May 2018 report explaining why the company described the California GOP as a fascist group.
“We have systems in place that catch vandalism before it impacts search results, but occasionally errors get through, and that’s what happened here,” a Google representative told the DCNF at the time.
The same problem happened again in November 2-18, when Google search results for the National Federation of Republican Women displayed the organization’s name instead as the “National Federation of Republican Enablers.” Google cited a Wikipedia editor as the culprit.
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Chris White is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
