Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said social media giants Twitter and Facebook were too slow to crack down on President Trump.
Silicon Valley faces criticism for its deplatforming of the president, which was preceded by months of warning labels about misinformation related to election fraud claims.
Claiming both platforms have consistently “struggled with misinformation, disinformation” from the president, Wales argued that regulators should have acted sooner than the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“With Donald Trump, they did a poor job of dealing with him for a very, very long time,” Wales told France’s Agence France-Presse. “He was clearly spreading disinformation. He was clearly being abusive to people.”
In light of their simultaneous limitations of Trump’s online speech, Florida’s state government has taken steps to divest from the tech giants, an Idaho internet provider said it was blocking users’ access to Twitter and Facebook, and Twitter’s stock tumbled by as much as 12%.
In addition, Wales argued that Wikipedia, which recently celebrated its 20th birthday, has escaped some of the scrutiny currently placed on Twitter and Facebook due to their fundamentally different business models. Whereas Wikipedia promotes “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” Wales said, the social media platforms “have a business model that says, ‘We need as many eyeballs as possible. We need as many page views as possible.'”
Still, Wikipedia has not completely evaded criticism for its content curation practices. In July, T.D. Adler, a former Wikipedia editor under the username “The Devil’s Advocate,” wrote that Wikipedia’s editors purposely allowed a smear campaign against conservative personality Mark Levin to go unchallenged on their platform.
“Levin warned his audience during his show early in 2018 to ‘Avoid Wikipedia like the plague’ after reading the content that had been added to his page,” Adler wrote. “Since then, Levin’s article has been expanded with even more slanted negative material and most efforts to remove smears have been repeatedly rejected.”
