McDonald's Sparks Ethical Concern After Taking Over Its Fandom Page To Advertise Grimace's Birthday Meal

The wiki site Fandom is likely well-known to lovers of pop culture as a sort of fandom specific Wikipedia clone where niche pop culture lore gets extensively documented.

However, that mission was compromised in the eyes of many earlier this month when McDonald's itself took over Grimace's page and later its own to advertise its June Grimace's Birthday promotion.

Last week, Nathan Steinmetz, the primary writer of Grimace's Fandom page, noticed that the work he had put into the entry had been entirely replaced by an ad for Grimace's Birthday — part of an ongoing promotional campaign from the fast-food chain that notably includes the release of the viral "Grimace Shake."

Speaking to Kotaku, Steinmetz expressed that while it was somewhat silly this debacle happened over Grimace, of all things, it did set a disturbing precedent for wikis to have their general purpose overwritten if a corporation wants to use its wiki as a marketing page.

"I think it probably sets a really bad precedent that an IP holder can approach Fandom or whoever and have user-generated content basically ‘suppressed’ and replaced with a press release," he said. "I get how dramatic it sounds to talk about the suppression of Grimace lore, but just about every pop culture property has thousands of hours of work put into these wikis."

Some online echoed – albeit hyperbolically – Steinmetz's concerns online.

Currently, Grimace's page is back to being a standard Wiki-like entry, while the page for McDonald's itself is devoted to the advertising copy.

Though the situation will likely resolve soon as McDonald's ad campaign ends, it may indeed be a disturbing precedent should other companies with a more devoted following attempt a similar stunt.

One needs only imagine the sort of chaos that would ensue if, say, years of work put into a Sonic the Hedgehog wiki get erased ahead of a Sonic game.