Wikipedia founder brands Australia’s social media ban an ‘unmitigated disaster’ and an ‘embarrassment’ | Social media ban

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has described Australia’s social media ban as an “unfinished disaster” and a “shame” that teaches children to accept surveillance from tech companies when they go online.

The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit was born in 2001 in a world before social media. But Wales told Guardian Australia that many of the ills of social media were present even in the early stages of the internet.

“Before social media, before Wikipedia, there was Usenet, which was like a giant, unmoderated message board,” he said.

“It was incredibly toxic: constant flame wars, personal attacks, and general awfulness.

“People don’t need algorithms to treat each other badly. We can do it on our own, so we shouldn’t look too rosy at the past.”

Wales is visiting Australia in May for author festivals promoting his book, The Seven Rules of Trust, which shows how the model of trust between people who edit Wikipedia pages can be applied to political polarization in modern discourse.

The seven rules include being transparent, making a discussion between two people personal, and being polite.

Wales said the basic rule of the Wikipedia community is no personal attacks.

“If you’re attacking the other person, that’s viewed really negatively in the Wikipedia world,” he said.

“This is very different from a lot of freelance social media, where when you get out of control and start attacking someone, the algorithm recognizes that you are causing engagement and you get promoted and gain more followers.”

Wales describes the current social media landscape as one where users are “serfs in the master’s mansion” and the rules are set from above. It is enforced by “anonymous, faceless moderators” working for the platforms.

“Whereas on Wikipedia, everything is in the hands of the community.”

Despite the Albanian government’s criticism of social media, including algorithms, which are part of its rationale for banning under-16s from platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, Wales has expressed opposition to government policies like those in Australia to keep young people off social media.

“I think it’s an absolute disaster and it’s a shame,” he said. “When it comes to demands that we, as adults, prove our age, that is, identify ourselves with personally identifying information… that is insane and really unsafe.”

He drew attention to the recent changes made in the gaming platform Roblox, which started to use hundred age assurance for users; These changes then separate these users, who may be younger than five, into specific age demographic groups that can only interact with each other; This aims to reduce the risk of adults grooming children and other unsafe experiences on the platform.

He said it’s not a good idea to teach kids to get used to turning on their cameras at the prompting of a technology platform.

“You’re putting pressure on kids to have really bad, unsafe behavior,” he said.

“I think there is a huge moral panic around young people and social media that is really unfair.”

Wales said there was a deeper societal issue in thinking about young people’s online rights. “Most of the people who are in favor of this kind of thing are not in favor of that surveillance state and surveillance capitalism,” he said. “I just think they haven’t really thought about it.”

He said he often encounters parents unaware that parental controls exist, and that governments should instead educate adults about parental controls for children’s phones.

“It’s really easy to set up on both Android and Apple… why don’t we have regulations requiring retailers to sell phones pre-configured as children’s phones?”

Artificial intelligence ‘not a disaster’ for Wikipedia

Since the arrival of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, AI chatbots designed to answer user queries, Wales said Wikipedia has seen an 8% drop in human traffic.

“It’s not a disaster, but it seems significant,” he said.

Wales said the loss was largely due to low engagement traffic; that is, people looking for a quick answer to a question rather than a more in-depth experience where they “read a dozen articles, follow links, and go down an educational rabbit hole.”

On the other hand, AI crawlers that crawl pages to find information are “really hitting” Wikipedia.

“Boat traffic is very different from human traffic,” he said. “When the Queen died, millions of people came to read that page, so we memorized it and blew it up. It cost very little.”

On the other hand, the service of an AI bot that crawls obscure pages that are not kept in memory is “disproportionately expensive,” he said.

Instead, he said, Wikipedia’s enterprise product, which allows AI companies to directly access the database for a fee, is being promoted “more and more tightly.”

Wikipedia does not allow AI to directly edit Wikipedia, but Wales does not think AI is useless to the site and its editors. But he noted that when people use AI to answer questions about a topic, it often makes mistakes.

“This is especially true, the more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that random things will be made up; this is not the case with Wikipedia,” he said. “Uncertain topics are often highly researched by super nerds.”

Jimmy Wales will appear at the Melbourne Capitol (20 May) and the Sydney Writers festival (17-24 May), presented by the Wheeler Centre.