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Prisoners of their business model, Twitter and Facebook have “badly” handled disinformation under President Donald Trump, said Wikipedia founder, the American Jimmy Wales, in an interview with AFP.
Interviewed in the United Kingdom, where he lives, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the free online encyclopedia, its founder criticizes the attitude of these two giants of social networks.
For Jimmy Wales, the responsibility for the assault on the Capitol on January 6 rests “100%” on Donald Trump, but Twitter and Facebook have “struggled with disinformation.”
“Regarding Donald Trump, they did a bad job for a very, very long time,” slices the American. “He was clearly spreading disinformation, he was clearly offensive.”
After the violence in Washington, the two platforms indefinitely suspended the accounts of the billionaire Republican, who used them to relay to tens of millions of people accusations without evidence of election rigging.
– Not perfect –
Twenty years after its creation, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world, accessed over 15 billion times per month. Some 55 million articles in more than 300 languages are referenced on this participatory site.
It is also, as Jimmy Wales initially thought, “a world in which every inhabitant of the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge”.
The 2003 Wikipedia founder’s decision to make it a non-profit is one of the reasons he believes the online encyclopedia hasn’t had to face the same tough decisions and backlash as Twitter and Facebook.
“They have a business model that says: + We need as many pageviews as possible,” Jimmy Wales says. “It also hurts their brand. So they have to deal with this. But I think they will have a hard time ”.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which are closely associated with cultural conflicts in the United States and the spread of disinformation around the world, Wikipedia is considered one of the last and best examples of early web utopianism.
In the early 2000s, however, it was the lies and aggressiveness of Wikipedia users that sparked debates on web regulation.
“I always say we’ve never been as bad as we have said or as good as we think,” said Jimmy Wales. “We know Wikipedia is not perfect. We still have a lot of work to do ”.
– “Awful opinions” –
The entrepreneur points out that Wikipedia is fundamentally different from social networks. “We have a very clear mission: to create an encyclopedia,” says Wales, noting that this premise is “very different from a social network that says, + come and post what you think, post your opinions. Because the truth is, a lot of people have really awful opinions ”.
Jimmy Wales believes that Wikipedia still has challenges to overcome, one of which is the question of the diversity of the thousands of “Wikipedians”, the nickname given to the editors and administrators who keep the site running.
In 2021, Wikipedia will implement a uniform code of conduct with sanctions against insults and harassment, which have in the past targeted minorities.
Jimmy Wales acknowledges that the code of conduct wording “took longer than it should have”, explaining that the community is so big “it takes a long time to sort things out and get buy-in”.
The ambition for the next 20 years is quite similar to that of the first 20.
In 2006, Wales set a goal of having 100,000 Wikipedia entries for every language with over one million speakers. “It will take us at least another 20 years to achieve this,” he predicts.
However, he hopes to have created with Wikipedia an institution that could last as long as the over 900-year-old British University of Oxford: “We are really focusing our efforts on how to build an institution that can last.”
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