Jimmy Wales, the internet's favorite librarian and founder of Wikipedia, has described Australia's ban on social media for under-16s as an “unmitigated disaster” and an “embarrassment.” Speaking to Guardian Australia, Wales argued the ban teaches kids to accept surveillance from tech companies, rather than protecting them.
Wales, who will be in Australia in May for writers' festivals promoting his book *Seven Rules of Trust*, noted that the internet was plenty toxic before social media. “Before social media, before Wikipedia, there was Usenet, which was like a giant, unmoderated message board,” he said. “It was unbelievably toxic: flame wars constantly and personal attacks and just general horribleness. Humans don’t need algorithms to be mean to each other. We can do it on our own.”
Despite his own criticisms of social media algorithms - the very thing the Albanese government used to justify banning under-16s from platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok - Wales opposes government mandates to keep teens offline. “When it comes with demands that we adults have to prove our age, ie identify ourselves with personally identifying information … this is madness and it’s really unsafe,” he said. He pointed to Roblox's recent use of facial age assurance, which groups users as young as five into age-specific demographics. “You’re pressuring really bad, unsafe behaviour on kids,” Wales added.
Wales suggested governments should instead educate parents about existing parental controls on Android and Apple devices. “Why don’t we have regulation requiring retailers to sell phones pre-configured as child phones?” he asked. He also dismissed the panic over youth social media use as a “massive moral panic.”
On the AI front, Wales noted Wikipedia has seen an 8% drop in human traffic since the rise of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. “It’s not a disaster, but it seems meaningful,” he said, attributing the loss to users seeking quick answers rather than deep dives. Meanwhile, AI crawlers are “really hammering” the site, consuming expensive server resources by scraping obscure pages. Wikipedia is now “more and more firmly” encouraging AI companies to use its enterprise product, which offers direct database access for a fee.
Wales stressed that Wikipedia does not allow AI to edit directly, noting that AI frequently “makes random stuff up,” especially on obscure topics - which, he said, “tend to be quite researched by super nerds” on Wikipedia.