Love Story 2050, Harman Baweja’s new movie is out for release. I just happened to be looking for details of the movie and landed on its Wikipedia Page.

What I saw was quite shocking. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and someone seems to have tampered with Love Story’s Wikipedia page big time.

Check the Pictures below.

Someone seems to have changed the picture on the page (its now already removed probably due to Wikipedia’s Bots). The name of the actor in the movie has also been changed from Harman Baweja to Hrithik Roshan (The Director is listed as Rakesh Roshan – an obvious play on some of the media stories floating around). The name of the movie has also been changed to LoveStory 1999. The budget (60 Cr.) is now 60 Thousand.

The language has been listed as Haryanvi by the spammer.

We tried to do a check on who might have done this by looking at the history of the page. It seems like the IP originates from Delhi and the person who did this subscribes to BSNL. This seems like a calculated and strategized move because the particular IP has not edited anything else on Wikipedia. 

This is not the 1^st time this has happened on Wikipedia but it just goes to show how individuals and brands need to be very careful when dealing with their images on the Internet. With the mass proliferation of social media, the control of conversations has become increasingly limited.

Interestingly, I was at a conference yesterday speaking to a couple of people and someone was telling me about how he wanted to buy a car and went to a social forum to see what others were saying. In the process, he looked at all the comments and became sceptical about the ingenuity of these comments. He was not sure if all those comments were paid placements or were actually genuine. This is something that social media needs to be increasingly concerned about or else it will eventually lead to the downfall of social media. We might soon see a situation where brands pay advertisers to defame competitors on social media.

Linkedin (a business networking network), if you notice has an answers section; and within the answers section, when someone asks a question and receives answers, you can flag the answer as many things – one of the options is ‘Connection Building Spam’. All the options in the picture below. Expect more of these ‘safeguarding’ mechanisms from other networks soon. On a similar thread, Facebook withdrew from Google’s Friend Connect citing privacy concerns.

Hear what Esther Dyson has to say about Privacy and Control on Social Networks – she spoke to us on WATShow. 

Update – Just Checked out the Wikipedia Page again – seems like Wikipedia’s Bots have cleared the page out.

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