Friday, December 20, 2019

So does Pete Buttigieg write his own Wikipedia entry?

Slate:
The Wikipedia user known as Streeling, however, is not Pete Buttigieg, according to the Buttigieg presidential campaign. I reached out to them after trying and failing to dismiss a tip I’d gotten about the account possibly being the mayor’s own. “It’s not his. He’s never had a Wikipedia account,” Buttigieg spokesperson Chris Meagher told me over email. The account has no connection to Pete Buttigieg’s past or present political campaigns, Meagher says, and Pete Buttigieg has no knowledge of who’s responsible for it. “It appears it is an overzealous supporter of the mayor’s,” Meagher said. “He does not know whose it is.”

Streeling has also denied being connected with Pete Buttigieg. “I am not affiliated with this candidate’s campaign,” Streeling wrote after creating the original “Pete Buttigieg” Wikipedia page just hours after the 2011 South Bend mayoral race had been called in Buttigieg’s favor. The more I looked into Streeling, however, the more the various denials around any affiliation with Buttigieg seemed bizarre and, in a few instances, explicitly untrue. Though why a campaign would try to dissemble about something so completely benign is unclear.