Can Jimmy Wales ‘fix the news’?

In an era of Donald Trump, fake news and propaganda, tech giants such as Google and Facebook are struggling to find an effective way to stop the spread of disinformation. 

For this week’s Headliner, we examine this issue with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who says he has the solution. Wales is launching his own news outlet, WikiTribune, which aims to combat fake news by combining the work of professional journalists and volunteers.

“Yes, I do,” said Wales, when asked if he believes that fake news posed a grave threat to democracy. 

“I think it’s a fairly serious problem and it’s a broader problem than just what I would call pure fake news,” he added. “There’s also the broader problem of a rise of relatively low-quality media which is competing with the more traditional, more respectable media in a really aggressive way for clicks and ad revenue and so forth, which is really putting a lot more pressure on journalism than it has already experienced.”

On the subject of Russian interference during the US presidential election, Wales commented on their use of Facebook and Google to publish political ads and target voters with misinformation.

“I think it does appear to have played a significant role,” he said. 

“The Russian influence that has been uncovered so far indicates a fairly high level of sophistication. This wasn’t as simple as simply paying for ads that said Donald Trump is great, it was really more about very complex strategies of voter suppression.”

Follow UpFront on Twitter @AJUpFront and Facebook.