Twitter and Facebook repeatedly mishandled Donald Trump as he pushed baseless claims, including his assertion that the US presidential election he lost was rigged, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told AFP.
The two social media giants indefinitely suspended Trump after his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, an attack on the seat of democracy that on Wednesday led to Trump's second impeachment.
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.
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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."
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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 pointed out that it was blocking users' access to Twitter and Facebook, and Twitter's stock tumbled by as much as 12%.
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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 claimed, 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.'"
In the 20 years since it was founded, Wikipedia is now one of the most popular websites in the world, with in excess of 55 million articles in 300 languages. It is read more than 15 billion times every month.
Nonetheless, 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.
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“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,” the statement read. “Since then, Levin’s article has been expanded with even more slanted negative material and most efforts to remove smears have been repeatedly rejected.”
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Facebook and Twitter have become closely associated with the deeply divisive culture wars in the United States and the spread of misinformation worldwide.
In contrast, Wikipedia is considered one of the last examples of early web utopianism, supporters say.
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