On the 20th of February a mobile user from 73.245.188.148 (Miami, FL) made three sets of edits to a Wikipedia page about the “Black Tom” explosion in 1916.

The teenage-themed hateful vandalism edits are intentionally obvious.

Now I want to draw your attention to the speed of the revision listed at the top.

• Revision as of 00:13, 20 February 2022 (vandalism)
• Latest revision as of 00:19, 20 February 2022

That’s an impressive restore time of about 5 minutes. Yet it wasn’t enough to prevent search engines from absorbing the vandalism and keeping it alive much longer.

Even today — March 4th — a lack of integrity in Wikipedia still flows to users, with breached data spreading via search engines like DuckDuckGo and Qwant.

This brings up the question of who is really targeted by the vandalism, given how and where such an attack manages to impact information integrity.

Bing and Google appear unaffected.