Authoritarian power is learning to use the internet and social media, and the impacts on traditional media and news gathering could undermine civil society, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told attendees at a conference sponsored by Morningstar on Wednesday.
“In the ’30s and ’40s, for the first time, authoritarian politicians understood the value of controlling mass media,” Wales said. “You had real propaganda going out and controlling the message in a broadcast way. One of the great things about the internet is you can’t control all the flow of info. Putin can’t control it by owning a few news outlets.”
However, with fake news stories circulating about different political candidates—something seen in the U.S. elections, ahead of the U.K. Brexit vote and now possibly in France ahead of the runoff election between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron—there are questions about who is funding these stories.
“That makes me start to think, authoritarian power has just started to learn the new media,” Wales said. “They didn’t just start to learn to broadcast Hitler propaganda right away. It took a while to figure it out. Now they’re figuring out Facebook and social media and it’s not as obvious.”
And he notes that just as targeted ads follow internet users to different sites, these new fake news purveyors can target messages to readers.
“If you can target people in a specific demographic, that’s kind of scary,” he said.
Wales made these observations in a speech at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago and in comments to the press afterward.
He’s concerned by the fact that President Donald Trump uses the term “fake news” to talk about established media sources like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
“I’m not trying to be super anti-Trump here, but he’s a problem. When he calls The New York Times fake news, it devalues fake news,” Wales said.
It would be one thing if Trump took issue with a story the newspaper wrote and countered it with facts, Wales said, but that’s not what’s happening.