Wikileaks and the myth of objectivity

@embassycat is the name of a Twitter and Instagram account jokingly belonging to the cat from Ecuador's embassy in London, where Julian Assange has been granted political asylum and where he still resides. The accounts have been inactive since October 15 (Twitter) and September 27 (Instagram). On October 17, Ecuador has cut off Julian's internet due to Wikileaks' influence in the U.S. elections.

Wikileaks define themselves on their website as a library. More than promoting an ideology, their goal is to simply shed light on the truth. Matters are however not that simple. The large volume of data means that some particular documents will receive more exposure than others and the personal information contained in different cables, if not redacted, can potentially harm innocent individuals (this has actually been the case in Belarus and Wikileaks’ policy has come under not unfounded criticism for its handling of data, another example being the publication of the name and address of every female voter in 79 out of 81 Turkish provinces in July 2015, all in the name of transparency and objectivity).

Their publishing activity during the election was also met with criticism, that through their actions, of revealing the leaked documents they had obtained, they were in fact advocating for a Trump presidency, and, as an extension, supporting Russia’s interests. This of course fits very well into the stories of Wikileaks’ receiving data obtained by the Russian government to enforce their own agenda (the timing of the publishing of the DNC emails was indeed purposeful). Security firm CrowdStrike claims Russian involvement, while Julian Assange denied such connections in a recent interview by John Pilger, while also pointing out that Wikileaks has published “over 800 000 documents of various kind that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical”. Evidence seems to point towards the former scenario.

But even so, an insightful article on The New York Times speaks about how the praxis of Wikileaks seems to have favored Russia in numerous cases, as well as how Assange himself has received assistance from the Kremlin, for example getting his own show on Russia Today. We therefore run into a very problematic question, one whose urgency is only increased by new media: can the truth promote a more unfavorable outcome than a cover-up? If a Trump presidency is a generally worse outcome than a Hilary presidency, despite the information unearthed and if a more powerful Putin is a generally worse outcome on the international scene, despite, for example, the morally-questionable practices of American foreign policy, and if these worse scenarios are brought about by Wikileaks’ quest for information transparency, what action should be taken?

One additional problem is that the situation above presupposes absolute objectivity on part of Wikileaks, which, as the article points out, is not always the case, relating to not only who they choose to condemn but who they choose not to. The website’s promotion on social media has been anything but neutral. In addition to sharing content favorable to just one candidate, yet this not by virtue of the evidence Wikileaks has released (for example, the controversial short clip of Slavoj Žižek explaining the ideological reasons why he would vote for Trump, shared on Facebook on November 4), their social media pages have endorsed interpretations of their data bordering on the absurd, with the sharing of an article from an odd news website called wearechange.org, which, based on two emails, one from famous artist Marina Abramović to John Podesta’s brother Tony, the other from the former to the latter:

This has immediately been linked to Abramović’s 1997 installation entitled Spirit Cooking and somehow the conclusion naturally emerged that they had met up and ritualistically followed the (sometimes completely absurd and obviously undoable) instructions written in the video. Conservative media outlets immediately seized on the story, which confirmed the literally demonic character of their least-favored candidate, adding words such as “Satanist” and “Wiccan”, the usage of which in this context only proves their limited (or utter lack of) understanding of either of the terms’ meaning on the one hand and their knowledge of the visceral reactions such words trigger in some people on the other. Even to an average reader, the conclusion the author extracts from only a handful of words is questionable. Like does the choice of words really prove without  doubt that the group would engage not even in a recreation of the Artist’s performance piece, which had taken place about eight years earlier, but in an actual following of the instruction the artist writes on the walls, instead of just playfully suggesting an actual dinner? Yet even so, the interpretation was already served, in shiny emotional packing. #spiritcooking became the No.2 trend on Twitter in the U.S. at the time (source) so that the artist herself denied the allegations and even a spokesperson for The Satanic Temple vehemently denied any form of Satanism being involved. Yet had the interpretation been founded, what would that have told us about John Podesta (nevermind the fact that another email shows that he never even made it to the dinner) and about candidate Hilary Clinton, about her policies and her discourse? Perhaps a vital piece of information with which voters could best determine her accordance to their personal interests or to the interests of society in general. Or perhaps something more akin to the reinforcement of a pre-existing narrative constructed on fear and misinformation.

The Drudge Report's homepage after the release of the story (Source).

This is just one example of the occasionally polemical, biased tone that the website is represented by on social media. Some tweets are even stranger, ranging from overt anti-Semitism to an argument with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey over the ban of gay libertarian (self-defined) “supervillain” Milo Yannopoulos. , which, naturally, has political implications.

Source and explanation of parentheses.

What must be kept in mind is that Wikileaks has always struggled with world powers that seek to silence it. In this context, it is for the survival of the website that figures like Assange, Snowden, and Manning are constantly promoted on social media and that their advertising policy occasionally lapses into sensationalism. Yet the overt ideological choices Wikileaks choose to make over social media escape the scope of mere survival and self-promotion. As far as ties with Russia go, is the fact that they have only benefited from Wikileaks’ actions a mere coincidence or is Wikileaks acting as a platform for the promotion of carefully planned foreign interests? Even without the biasedness of Wikileaks, we are still faced with an epistemological issue. On the one hand, publishing all classified documents in existence is an impossible feat. If Russian hackers therefore come across a piece of information that is favorable to them, they can publish it on an impartial platform at an advantage, as at that point in time there is nothing to counterbalance it. The other side of the coin is that in the context of millions of documents, sorting them and promoting only a select few are a necessary practice. Wikileaks is both revealer and filter, a novel medium which offers potential for both global transparency and for taking advantage of the narrow, incomplete view that we currently possess for personal gains.