A Comical Tweet & The Folly Of Implicit Trust In Authority

Timo Haapala, 55, is a veteran political journalist. He has reported on politics and provided analysis and commentary for over two decades in Finnish media both on television and in newspapers. Yesterday, he tweeted about noticing to his surprise that "anyone" can edit Wikipedia pages. He wondered if there was anybody overseeing what is written on Wikipedia. Here's a link to the tweet.

Technically, Wikipedia is centralized and it is possible for the administrators to lock a page and prevent it from being updated. But it's funny that a well-known journalist hasn't learned by 2019 that Wikipedia is all about crowdsourced journalism and the whole idea is that anyone can edit the pages. What a dinosaur!

What I find amusing here apart from the fact that not knowing Wikipedia is permissionless and decentralized is a huge gap in anyone's general knowledge is his implicit trust in third parties. In theory, having someone responsible for content posted on a medium should make that source more reliable because of potential consequences for spreading disinformation or outright lying. But Mr. Haapala himself is something of a troll and the last big uproar caused by him was insinuating that Tom Packalen, a Helsinki politician was a Russian agent without proof in 2018.

The media is called the fourth estate or the fourth power along with the executive, the judiciary and the legislative. But it is just as corruptible or capable of low-quality work as the three. While the same criticism can be leveled against citizen journalism, I find it absolutely necessary that citizen journalism have both the tools and the legal rights to flourish. The appalling way @tommyrobinson has been treated by mainstream media in the UK as well as the likes of Facebook globally is a testament to that. The entire body of public statements of Mr. Robinson that I have come across is at stark odds with the sinister impression mainstream press and mainstream social media sites are working hard to convey of him. The way mainstream media used to exercise a degree of self-censorship during the Cold War in Finland and the way political correctness manifests itself in the media space has made me not particularly trusting of the fairly centralized mainstream media space.

Here's a Danish representative of Facebook commenting on the total censorship of Tommy Robinson, including mentions of this name on Facebook (people have had their accounts wiped out because of doing only that) in a Danish mainstream TV documentary critical of Facebook's actions: