During a session of the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill, Dean Russell questioned the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, about ensuring that sufficient protections are in place on the platform to protect the reputation of individuals online.
Dean asked what mechanisms Wikipedia has in place to enable the person who is the subject of a page to have inaccurate information about them corrected. Mr Wales explained that this can be done through a ‘Talk Page’ or by the person emailing Wikipedia themselves to raise a concern, and that this will then be investigated by a group of selected editors who are trusted members of the Wikipedia community. He also explained that, in 2006, the platform introduced a ‘Biography of Living Person Policy’, which meant that if anything negative is posted on a page about a living person that is offensive and unsourced then it should be removed from the website immediately.
The issue of immediacy was then raised by Dean, as he is concerned that even if there are processes in place to intervene when harmful untruths are posted on a person’s page, that the person will already have experienced irreversible reputational damage by the time this is resolved. Mr Wales agreed with this concern and suggested that there could be a system in place similar to the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act that would allow an individual to complain about an infringement on their page and for the person who has done the post to then have a short amount of time to either remove the post or defend it.
Finally, Dean raised the important question of who owns a person’s identity online, asking whether there is a burden of responsibility on platforms such as Wikipedia to ensure that if something is posted about an individual online, then that person has the right to be notified about this. Mr Wales responded by saying that the large number of websites on the internet would make this logistically difficult to do, but that Wikipedia does already have a function that allows a person to subscribe to be notified about changes to certain pages.
If you would like to watch the full session, you can do so via this link: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/d3916789-39c6-4891-9fbb-c5adbcc15a5c
