Wiki Founder Jimmy Wales

LISTENING TO JIMMY WALES SPEAK IS A BIT like reading a Wikipedia page: Sound bites are few, but the tone is fair and measured. That’s one reason people tend to listen to him; another is that Wales is one of Silicon Valley’s most successful internet entrepreneurs. Wikipedia, his brainchild, attracts 1.2 billion page views per month by one ranking, second only to Google’s YouTube.

Now Wales is sounding the alarm about social media. The problem, he says, is that Facebook makes most of its money selling advertising targeted to users according to information gleaned from their behavior on Facebook—a practice that Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” In recent years, Facebook has been using artificial intelligence to make inferences about users, the better to keep them engaged with the site—or, as some critics assert, addicted to it. Critics also say the focus on engagement accounts for a proliferation of extremism on Facebook and other social media, which contributes to a polarized political atmosphere that is eroding the nation’s democratic institutions.

Wales’ response to this trend is to start a non-profit alternative to Facebook.