So, Australia thinks it’s going to solve society’s ills by yanking TikTok, Instagram, and X out of the hands of teenagers. Cute. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a man who probably remembers a time before even dial-up felt slow, basically called it a steaming pile of bad policy. He’s in town, likely promoting his new book on trust (ironic, given the subject), and he’s not holding back.
He’s branded the entire affair an “unmitigated disaster” and an “embarrassment.” And here’s the kicker: he says it’s teaching kids to just roll over and accept surveillance from tech companies. You know, that thing we all supposedly hate, but willingly hand over our data for a few minutes of scrolling. Apparently, even before social media, Usenet was a dumpster fire of “flame wars” and “general horribleness.” Humans, Wales reminds us, don’t need fancy algorithms to be awful to each other. We’ve got that covered.
Is this surveillance state the real problem?
Wales’s beef isn’t just with the ban itself, but what it represents. He’s talking about a world where we’re expected to prove our age with “personally identifying information.” He likens it to the madness we see on platforms like Roblox, where even five-year-olds are getting facial age verification. This isn’t protecting kids; it’s training them to accept being monitored. “You’re pressuring really bad, unsafe behaviour on kids,” he said. It’s a “massive moral panic” that, in his view, most proponents haven’t truly thought through. Instead of bans, he suggests a far more practical (and less invasive) solution: educate parents about existing parental controls. Why aren’t we mandating that phones come pre-configured for kids? It’s a question that feels almost too simple in a world obsessed with high-tech fixes.
The Wikipedia vs. AI Showdown
Now, here’s where it gets interesting for those of us watching the AI circus. Wales is also dealing with the AI invasion on his own turf. He’s seen an 8% drop in human traffic since the LLM explosion—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, you name it. But he’s surprisingly sanguine about it. It’s not a “disaster,” he clarifies, just “meaningful.” This drop, he reckons, is mostly low-engagement users just grabbing a quick answer. The real AI action, though? The bots are “really hammering” Wikipedia, crawling pages relentlessly. And that, he notes, is “disproportionately expensive” to serve.
So, what’s Wikipedia doing? Pushing its enterprise product. AI companies paying for direct database access. It’s a classic Silicon Valley pivot
🧬 Related Insights
- Read more: CZ’s ‘Freedom of Money’: A Billionaire’s Prison Confession on Binance’s Wild Ride
- Read more:
