WikiLeaks Opens For Questions on Reddit: Strategy, Censorship, Partisanship, More

A verified WikiLeaks account took to the public website Reddit today to answer questions from its community of anonymous users. Much of the discussion concerned WikiLeaks and its documents.

Reddit is a community bulletin board where users create submissions and then people may comment. Users may vote on submissions or comments “upvoting” or “downvoting.” More votes means the submission shows up higher on the list.

Update: REDDIT PLAYING WITH THE POPULARITY NUMBERS

The submission by WikiLeaks keeps ranking lower in the Reddit algorithm as its raw score increases. The effect of this deterioration is to reduce exposure of the page.

At its peak, the WikiLeaks submission had received a net total of about 6400 votes. While this article was being prepared, we noticed the total plummeting. In one hour, the net total fell from 3850 to 3470 — a drop of 380 points.

wikileaks-iama-dropping

This is the only submission ever made by this WikiLeaks user account. The user account showed 5928 votes but the submission itself shows 3263 votes. These two numbers should equal. Instead, there is a difference of 2664 or 45 percent. Refreshing the page five minutes later, the numbers are now 5929 and 3235.

Twelve hours after posting, numbers are now 2470 and 6108. Reddit is only giving the WikiLeaks post 40 percent of its score.

WIKILEAKS DISCUSSION HIGHLIGHTS

WikiLeaks releases documents according to an “editorial strategy” to maximize impact. WikiLeaks only releases information that has “political, diplomatic or importance.” WikiLeaks does not censor material. It takes time to verify items, so releases may be delayed. WikiLeaks answers tough questions about censorship and partisanship.

WikiLeaks likes public discussions of differences with Edward Snowden on censorship so that people can “make up their own minds.” WikiLeaks is “concerned about anyone that gets access to the mass spying system the US has built.” Internet service for Julian Assange is still shut off.

WikiLeaks introduces itself.

We are the WikiLeaks staff, including Sarah Harrison. Over the last months we have published over 25,000 emails from the DNC, over 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton, over 50,000 emails from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and many chapters of the secret controversial Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA).

WikiLeaks releases all documents according to an “editorial strategy.”

QUESTION: How do you determine what to release and what to keep as insurance? Are you holding onto anything that could benefit people, or mostly things that would hurt those in power?

WebLineNews: “Insurance” refers to releases of encrypted materials not-readable to the public without a key, but safely saved on too many computers to be eliminated. In case of an emergency, they key would be released and the documents would then become readable.

ANSWER: Insurance files are made from unpublished files we are still working through. As soon as we can we will publish all submissions we received that adhere to our editorial strategy.

OBSERVATION: “What we do not do is censor.”
“…we will publish all submissions we received that adhere to our editorial strategy.”
Don’t these statements contradict each other? This implies (to me, anyway) that you censor materials that don’t further your agenda.

OBSERVATION: Curation and deciding “how to present and where and when” is gatekeeping. Editorial voice is as much about deciding where and when to say something as it is about what is said. Thinking that somehow you’re not a gatekeeper when you are timing the release of information for maximum political impact is either disingenuous or dangerously naive.

ANSWER: We decide for maximum impact, source protection etc with the goal to publish as soon as possible after submission as we are ready (things like source protection and validation can take some time) according to our editorial policies. We do not withhold or censor information and we publish full archives. If we didnt that would be gatekeeping. We have published more classified or otherwise supressed documents than the rest of the worlds media combined. We do publish as fast as we can. We always call for leaks early and often to ensure that as fast as possible is as fast as needed.

OBSERVATION: Part of your duty as “journalists” and purveyors of information is to sit back and look at the entity of a situation and its circumstances and ask yourselves “Are we being played?” or “are we being used by someone else for their cause?” If you believe that is the case, pursue that as well and let the world know the circumstances of how and why you have the information. You and the information do not exist in a vacuum. If you received information or documents from a source that is aiming to use it to damage a particular person or side you bear part of the responsibility for the outcome it caused. It would not have mattered if you published information from a source in the current american administration intending to damage the Republicans in order to keep their party in power, or if the current suspicions are true about a foreign actor giving you the information with the intent of causing political change in their favor. You have been used as a tool.

WikiLeaks releases documents for “maximum impact.”

QUESTION: How did you decide timing of #PodestaEmails and how to groups emails into parts?

ANSWER: We publish according to our promise to sources for maximum impact, along with our goal of informing the public, so often we split large archive releases into sections to ensure the public can fully absorb and utilise the material. For the Podesta Emails our release strategy was based on our Stochastic Terminator algorithm. We are of course also only able to publish as fast as our resources allow. You can help us to publish faster by supporting us here: https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

WikiLeaks defends itself against claims of censorship.

OBSERVATION: “What we do not do is censor.” But you do selectively release information. I honestly don’t see much of a difference.

ANSWER: We dont. We can only publish what we receive and are able to validate. But as long as its within our editorial policy (true and important for the historical, diplomatic or political record) we publish as soon as we can.

WikiLeaks would “definitely” release war crime documents if available.

QUESTION: Wikileaks first made news sharing this brutal Iraq video and other such content- Collateral Murder Wikileaks – Iraq: Reuters Journalists and an Ambulance Attacke
Any plans to once more cover genuine war crimes?
It’s isn’t like Yemen, Sudan, etc are absurdly moral nowadays. (formatting removed)

ANSWER: We will definitely publish on war crimes if and when we get the submissions. Without commenting too much on upcoming publications we do have documents regarding war we will be publishing soon.

WikiLeaks respects privacy. Only important “political, diplomatic or historical” documents will be released.

QUESTION: Are there any things that you wouldn’t condone leaking? Anything that has come in that was just too much of a risk, or would have too much impact on something?

ANSWER: We have an editorial policy to publish only information that we have validated as true and that is important to the political, diplomatic or historical. We believe in transparency for the powerful and privacy for the rest.
We publish in full in an uncensored and uncensorable fashion. We have had to, and will have to, take risks ourselves (the secret Grand Jury that began due to our 2010 publications continues to this day) in a number of the publications we do. But we are not risk adverse and will continue to publish fearlessly.

WikiLeaks does not withhold information over retaliation concerns.

OBSERVATION: The second they publish anything against him, they’re fv@^ing gone that’s for sure.

ANSWER: We are used to retaliations against us by the subject(s) of the information in our publications. However, it has never, and will not stop us. We call for submissions on any US administration. Once we have validated it we will publish it.

WikiLeaks answers more tough questions on censorship.

QUESTION: You take pride in making enormous document dumps with no regard for censoring or altering the information contained in the dump, but you’re asking people for money so you can flick the switch and turn on the webpages “faster”?
Let’s be honest, your whole mission is to publish documents without any interference or editorial control, or it’s supposed to be. What part of the process is creating some kind of publishing speed bottleneck?

ANSWER: You are right that we take great pride in not censoring our publications. We believe in the value of pristine archives. However, we do have a lot of editorial control and much work is done to make these publications. We must search through all our submissions (we get many every single day) and validate them. We research and contextualise them. We then have to prepare them for publishing. As we make each publication as searchable and useable as possible this takes a lot of highly skilled work. All this is time and money……

OBSERVATION: Are you not concerned this introduces your own biases and slants to the leaks? Especially in the most recent election cycle you haven’t exactly seemed neutral with your dumps.

WikiLeaks would rather not know who leaks documents.

QUESTION: How much information comes from sources wikileaks is aware of vs. those that are anonymous?

ANSWER: Our submissions system is based on the concept of sources being as anonymous and protected as possible. We dont want to know who our sources are for their protection, and ours.

WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden disagree on curation.

QUESTION: what is your response to Snowden’s remarks saying: Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.

ANSWER: This sort of conversation about a journalist’s role in controlling information is an important one. We have also had public conversations with Glenn Greenwald on this too. I like that these happen publicly, so that the public can follow and interact with the position of both sides and make up their own minds.
I think it was clear even before this twitter exchange that WikiLeaks and some others have different stances on this. For example it has been said the whole Snowden archive will never be published – something we highly disagree with.
Regarding the curation comment – I would disagree with Snowden’s comment here. Working at WikiLeaks I know we do work with our submissions a lot for validation, how to present and where and when.
What we do not do is censor. We believe in full access to information and knowledge for all citizens. We do not think we are the gatekeepers of information and your right to know. We publish what we receive that is true, for you all to see. Your right to information shouldn’t be controlled by others.

WikiLeaks is still concerned about the “mass spying system.”

QUESTION: Are you concerned about the Trump administration’s positions on net neutrality and surveillance?

ANSWER: We are concerned about anyone that gets access to the mass spying system the US has built. We will be happy to publish any documents on changes/abuses/policy changes on these topics and others from the Trump administration.

WikiLeaks cannot say the “pizza” coded language relates to child abuse.

QUESTION: Are those of us investigating the Comet Pizza/Human Trafficking scandal on the right track? And if not, where should we be looking?
EDIT: This is very real and we need to SAVE these kids. If the Wikileaks staff is uncomfortable posting this here, please give us a bat signal somewhere else.

ANSWER: It is curious. So far we dont know what to make of it.

WikiLeaks is watching the situation with Julian Assange, still no internet.

QUESTION: Why have you been silent about Assange’s situation at the embassay?

ANSWER: We at the team are monitoring his situation very closely. It is of course highly concerning that his internet is still severed without explanation. He has over the period occasionally been able to do interviews in person or over the phone which showed publicly he was still alive.
Generally the staff, except a couple that have a public profile do not speak publicly. There are obvious security risks for the team (a US secret Grand Jury still continues to this day), however, we have at this moment decided to do this AMA as a team to answer questions at this difficult time when we are very aware that our editor’s communications situation is tricky.

QUESTION: What do you mean “without explanation”? The Ecuadoring government is sheltering him with an agreement to not interfere with international elections, which he is doing (one-sidedly, at that). He violated the agreement he has with his current protector, so they cut his internet. The Ecuadorian government even released a statement saying as much. You guys sure like to spin things for an organization that ostensibly supports transparency and honesty. (slightly edited)

ANSWER: His internet hasnt been turned back on, despite the elections being over, and we dont know why, though it was meant to just be turned off over the elections.

WikiLeaks faced “non-stop” computer attacks in the past few days.

QUESTION: Stats on the attacks? What are plans to mitigate the attacks?

ANSWER: For the last 5 days we had a non-stop attempt at basic SYN flood. What’s worse, a lot of traffic, about 20TB burned in the same time.

WikiLeaks denies favoring Donald Trump in the presidential election.

QUESTION: Why did you want Donald Trump to be elected president?

ANSWER: Sorry to just see this one now. We arent ignoring the question. There are a lot of questions coming in – which is great, just please forgive us for taking time to go through them….
We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected. We were publishing with the one goal of making the elections as transparent as possible. We published what we received.
I know that many media, including the New York Times, did editorially back one candidate over another. We didnt and havent. We would have published on any candidate. We still will if we get the submissions.

OBSERVATION: “We were not publishing with a goal to get any specific candidate elected.”
How do you reconcile this with the fact that you sold Bill Clinton “Dicking Bimbos” t-shirts on your website? Also, Assange has stated you declined to publish information on Trump because it wasn’t interesting enough.
Both of these seem to reveal your organization as partisan against the Clintons. I never saw a “grab them by the pussy” shirt on your website. Would you care to comment?

QUESTION: Why do you only seem to have information on Democrats?
If you were as Noble as you say you would believe in government accountability at all levels, not just for one party.

ANSWER: To date, we have not received information on Donald Trump’s campaign, or other campaigns. If it were to be submitted now we would happily publish it. Information on how campaigns are fought is important in the moment, and after to learn lessons from. We certainly believe in accountability and transparency for the powerful. And this includes for all the campaigns in the election. We can of course only publish what we receive. If anyone has information on any of the other campaigns we urge them to submit it now before it is deleted – https://wikileaks.org/#submit

OBSERVATION: This directly contradicts Assange.
Assange has said that wikileaks received information on the Trump campaign but declined to post it because they didn’t think people would find it interesting.
As an Amercain whose livelihood is being threatened by this new administration, I would like to know why Wikileaks is suddenly the arbiter of what I can and cannot know about my presidential candidates.
Assange’s direct quote: “We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.
“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day,” Assange said.

Claims that WikiLeaks worked with Russia or Donald Trump are “groundless and false.”

QUESTION: Many people have suggested that WikiLeaks was brazenly partisan in this election and colluded with Team Trump (and by extension, Russia). Just today a top Russian ally to Putin is quoted as saying Russia did not interfere in the election but “maybe helped a bit with WikiLeaks”.1
“How much do you consider the impact of selective releasing, insinuation, the timing of releases and the intentions of your sources when preparing to release documents? Would there ever come a point when these factors outweigh the benefit of informing the public or is informing the public inherently worthwhile regardless of the circumstances?”
Many thanks.

  1. Note: the ally was speculating, not admitting – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/putin-applauds-trump-win-and-hails-new-era-of-positive-ties-with-us?CMP=share_btn_tw

ANSWER: The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter, or with Russia, are just groundless and false. We receive information anonymously, through an anonymous submission platform. We do not need to know the identity of the source, neither do we want to know it.
The intention of the source is irrelevant in our editorial process. Every source of every journalist has an intention and an agenda, may it be hidden or clear. Requesting the intention from our sources would firstly likely jeopardize their anonymity, and secondly form a bias in our understanding of the information we received.
Their authenticity and their relevance to the public or the historical record are the only preconditions for us to publish the documents we are given.

OBSERVATION: The problem with this is, in the same way that we trusted Clinton’s campaign for being open and honest and then found out they were not, we are trusting that you are being open and honest. You have given us the opportunity to see behind the veil of government, though we do not have the same opportunity with you. This might be alleviated by leaking some of your own internal documents in one way or another.
If not, we have exactly the same problem trusting you as we do the people you leak about.

QUESTION: Yesterday, while denying Russian interference in the US electoral process, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said “maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks.”

  • Who is the “we” that Ryabkov is referring to here?
  • Why would a member of the Russian Foreign Ministry claim credit for the work that you do?

ANSWER: I dont know. We are rather annoyed though he tried to take credit for our work! 😉
He is just a political pundit, akin to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, and was just repeating speculative claims.

OBSERVATION: “We dont want to know who our sources are for their protection, and ours.” (quoting earlier answer)
Since you don’t know who your sources are, then who are you to dismiss the Russian foreign ministry’s involvement. What measures are you taking to not end up being a medium, through which nations can attack or influence each other through cyber-attacks/leaks while being anonymous.

OBSERVATION: They’ve hinted multiple times this election that they do actually know who the DNC source was. They’ve stated that they haven’t revealed who it was “yet,” that they didn’t steal the emails, and that it definitely wasn’t Russia.
They have an anonymous system to keep sources as anonymous as they can, but that doesn’t mean sources will never reveal themselves voluntarily.

WikiLeaks compliments social media site Reddit, but does not address site censors.

QUESTION: How often does the Wikileaks team browse Reddit and has it influenced any of your own ideas about the Wikileaks material and Clinton/DNC scandals?

ANSWER: We have definitely followed the great citizen journalism that has been happening on Reddit. Its the public being able to interact with material in this way and gain the knowledge first hand that is a main goal for us. So, thanks Redditors!

WebLineNews: Just after this answer, a user comment was removed by an anonymous and apparently unpaid community moderator.

WikiLeaks faces more harsh criticism about its appearance of partisanship.

QUESTION: What is your most unique trait? There’s plenty of other sites that expose the truth but why do people like you so much?

ANSWER: I think our most unique trait is our ability to push the boundaries of journalism. This began a decade ago when we were founded by Julian Assange with his invention of an online anonymous submissions platform. This has now become common place in many news rooms.
We then pushed the boundaries of publishing in full and allowing the public direct access to the searchable archives of source documents.
Along with our perfect track record in verifying documents and years of dealing with government hostility we will continue to publish fearlessly for the publics right to know.

OBSERVATION: You guys are single handedly one of the greatest organizations to come out of my lifetime.

OBSERVATION: “push the boundaries of journalism”
That’s a fv@&ing joke. You may be accurate, but you are NOT fair and balanced.

QUESTION: Why wasn’t the DNC corruption, or any of Hillary’s corruption scandals released; you know, when Bernie was still in the race?

ANSWER: We publish as fast as we can. When we started that publication it was the first day we were ready. We were able to go out just before the nomination, but to do that we had to work all through the night. As we say: leak early and leak often.

OBSERVATION: So, you just happened to coincidentally get all of this information at crucial times in the election cycle? Just coincidentally, with no help from foreign governments or other agents? You must have tried very hard to get these documents, which begs the question, if what you’re saying is true, why you didn’t try just as hard to dig up dirt on Donald Trump? Your answers don’t seem to be adding up whatsoever. If you really just wanted to go after the Democrats, then you should say it, not pretend otherwise. Reddit isn’t a bunch of dumb children that’s going to let you spoon-feed them evasion.

WikiLeaks restates that it will publish leaks about Russia and provides examples.

QUESTION: Why do you withhold certain leaks, specifically ones involving Russian and Syria?

ANSWER: We publish what we receive. But just to remind you, https://www.wikileaks.org/syria-files/ . We have also published many documents relating to Russia, in fact we have published about every country. But, again, we can only publish what we receive.

WikiLeaks refuses to criticize Reddit censorship while users complain.

QUESTION: Do you feel like Reddit unfairly suppressed your publications during the election cycle?

ANSWER: There were subreddits that were very active and dedicated for the whole time. We have been watching the Reddit citizen journalism with great excitement and its great to be answering these questions here in a community where we have seen so much interaction with our material, that is a large goal of our work.

OBSERVATION: But in the main political subreddit, /r/politics, links to wikileaks were removed by the moderators.

OBSERVATION: Pretty amazing coming from the subreddit that brought down SOPA a few years ago.

WebLineNews: On other occasions, WikiLeaks has complained about online censorship.

OBSERVATION: Aaron Schwartz is rolling in his grave. (actually Aaron Swartz, an original creator of Reddit)

A user questions the responsibility of WikiLeaks to consider partisan impact of releases upon the 2016 election.

QUESTION: You repeatedly say throughout this AMA that you are nonpartisan and did not have a political agenda in how and when you released information.
That being said, the information published by wikileaks clearly DID have an impact on the US election, and clearly DID assist Donald trump in being elected president. This is evidenced by how much harm it did to Hillary’s campaign, and how often the leaks and emails were used as talking points against her. Among other things.
Even if your stance is nonpartisan, do you feel that (your stance) matters given the impact you had on the election? If your goal was truly to be nonpartisan, did you not feel some sort of responsibility (journalistic or otherwise) to either withhold or time differently some of the information to reduce the clear impact on one side of the election?

WebLineNews: This question was not answered, but there were thousands of entries on the webpage. The community users debate the point here.

WikiLeaks is always looking for donations.

QUESTION: What ways other than financial donation can I help Wikileaks?

ANSWER: As Julian Assange announced at our ten year anniversary on the 4th of October we are currently building ways for our community to support us. The first part has already been launched: you can join the WikiLeaks Task Force @wltaskforce on twitter to help fight disinformation about WikiLeaks on social media. You can call out people who post wrong information about our organization on Facebook. And for more information on how to support WikiLeaks in the future please follow WikiLeaks Community @communitywl on twitter.