Jimmy Wales: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I also hope that it’s kind of like what you’re writing about in your book that we could also have citizen journalists that have a stable, verifiable trust that builds up. So, it doesn’t have to be in New York Times with this organization that you could be in an organization of one as long as it’s stable and carries through time and it builds up or it goes up. No, I agree. But the one thing I’ve said in the past, and this depends on who that person is and what they’re doing, but it’s like I think my credibility, my general credibility in the world should be the equal of a New York Times reporter. So, if something happens, and I witness it, and I write about it, people are going to go, “Well, Jimmy Wales said it. That’s just like if a New York Times reporter said it. I’m going to tend to think he didn’t just make it up.” The truth is nothing interesting ever happens around me. I don’t go to war zones. I don’t go to big press conferences. I don’t interview Putin and Zelenskyy. To an extent, yes. Whereas I do think for other people, those traditional models of credibility are really, really important. And then there is this sort of citizen journalism. I don’t know if you think of what you do as journalism. I kind of think it is, but you do interviews, you do long form interviews. If you come and you say, “Here’s my tape,” but you wouldn’t hand out a tape. I just gesture to you as if I’m handing you a cassette tape. But if you put it into your podcast, ” Here’s my interview with Zelenskyy.” And people aren’t going to go, “Yeah, how do we know? That could be a deep fake. You could have faked that.” Because people are like, “Well, no, you’re a well known podcaster and you do interview interesting people. Yeah, you wouldn’t think that.” So, that your brand becomes really important. Whereas if suddenly, and I’ve seen this already, I’ve seen sort of video with subtitles in English, and apparently the Ukrainian was the same and it was Zelenskyy saying something really outrageous. And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t believe that. I don’t think he said that in a meeting with whatever. I think that’s Russian propaganda or probably just trolls.” Yeah. And then building platforms and mechanisms of how that trust can be verified. If something appears on a Wikipedia page, that means something. If something appears on my Twitter account, that means something. That means I, this particular human, have signed off on it.…

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