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It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once t

It's pretty clear what happened. People started to view the reporting of Wikileaks as evil or fake as soon as it negatively impacted $theirpoliticalside. Once these perceptions fell into place it was easy to disregard all the good, villify him personally, and ignore the authoritarian and illegal actions taken against him.

barrysteve 4y ago
It was well before the Trump election. Colbert told him that the authorities would come after him in his 2007 appearance on the Colbert Report. The minute he published Collateral Murder, a video maximizing publicity on a fatal error in America's war effort, that was it for Assange and Wikileaks.
- croes 4y ago
  Error is quite an understatement
- wazoox 4y ago
  A "fatal error" in a totally unjustified and illegal war of aggression.
  - psychphysic 4y ago
    This video is likely to be the highlight of the decade for me. https://youtu.be/s1kwq52NKmo https://youtu.be/s1kwq52NKmo
    - f6v 4y ago
      I like how the audience laughs at the expense of a million ruined lives.
      - barrysteve 4y ago
        Can hardly believe the audience is laughing at dead Americans. Even Bushites are not that callous. They're laughing at his implied admission of guilt and the idea that Putin's unjustified wars are in George Bush's shadow.
        f6v 4y ago
        > Can hardly believe the audience is laughing at dead Americans. They’re not the victims who died by thousands.
- starkd 4y ago
  And notice how these fatal errors are still occurring. The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist. No calls for diplomacy. Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.
  - gWPVhyxPHqvk 4y ago
    If your homeland gets invaded one day, I hope to be an apologist for your invaders.
  - driscoll42 4y ago
    Strange how you don't comment on the many more Russians that Putin has murdered by his unprovoked war of aggression as well.
    - starkd 4y ago
      Strange how you automatically feel the need to support one side and can't see the horrible outcome this has been for all parties. This could have been resolved through diplomacy. You never see the term even mentioned anymore.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        > This could have been resolved through diplomacy. Yes, by giving Ukraine to Russia. We know how it works if you try to appease fascists, come on.
        starkd 4y ago
        This is a more complex than that. I don't like the invasion, but its not like Russia has no vital interests in the area that is right on their border. And they have occupied Crimea in the past going back to 1776. I'm just saying they have as much national interest as the West does. Israel Prime Minister claims they had a deal that was agreed to but Biden administration turned it down. It's also the responsible thing to do to look at the prospects of forcing a war though, when the Urkainians are so heavily outgunned. 200,000 Ukrainians have died in this fight. Maybe 50,000 Russians have died (its hard to find out specifics). The US wants to fight this war on the cheap with the Ukrainians taking all the casualties so that Americans won't have to. That is pretty deplorable to me.
snehk 4y ago
It's really this simple. Shows that it was never about the fact that he provided information but about the fact that he provided information that could be used by $mypoliticalside.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  They were working directly with them, not just leaving seeds for the birds to come for later. Make of it what you will but it's apparently an undisputed fact.
psychphysic 4y ago
This is precisely it. My pet theory is that the true effect of "cancel culture" isn't really on rich/popular people. But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views. The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values. The outcome is that entities which don't take sides are the real victims of cancel culture. Why is does CNN always come to the same conclusions and cover the same things? Why does Fox? It's because if they stray they are goners. WikiLeaks was truly neutral dumping all info it got. That was in no one's interest other than the diminishing open minded groups.
- nico 4y ago
  > But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views. > The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values. That’s essentially human society. We organize ourselves in races, countries, cultures, religions, sports teams, etc. We are constantly excluding others and trying to belong to certain groups. The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated.
  - vuln 4y ago
    > The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated. In which given enough time all groups come to that last same conclusion. No group is safe once the extreme amass too much power.
  - krunck 4y ago
    > That’s essentially human society. That doesn't make it OK. The degenerate groupists in human society are the ones responsible for oppression and mass slaughter(war) whereas individual free thinking people are not.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Looks like you just divided humanity into two groups there you degenerate groupist.
mhh__ 4y ago
WikiLeaks arguably helped people to do that quite effectively. They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger). III.B.3 of the Mueller report I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Put yourself in Wikileaks' shoes for a second: you have information, you might even know that the source is malicious, but you also know the information is true. Your mandate as an organization is to release truths. Are they really supposed to not release the truth because it hurts the Democrats? I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.
  - bandyaboot 4y ago
    Release the information when you get it and say, “do with this what you will.” Not at all what they did. They released in batches, for maximum effect, right up until the election. They knew exactly what they were doing.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      That is more or less what the New York Post did with the information on the "Hunter Biden Laptop". It did not work out very well for the New York Post, nor for what is now finally being admitted as "the truth" - this being that the device was his, that the material on the device was his, that the material was not "obtained by hacking". It did work out quite well for Hunter Biden and his family which seems to have been the intended result. Had Wikileaks done the same they would have met with the same fate: they would have been accused of being in bed with whatever enemy-du-jour could be concocted and the material would have been buried under miles of accusations.
phphphphp 4y ago
From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth. Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support. You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
  - psychlops 4y ago
    Why not? Why is public support necessary for transparently publishing information?
    - thunfischbrot 4y ago
      Wasn't that the whole idea behind Wikileaks? To not only be a platform to upload and publish random documents, and instead to provide context and work with writers to make it understandable for a wider audience? That's how I understood it at the time, that Assange was unhappy with the limited audience existing platforms were reaching. /e: I see my reply was less targeted towards your comment but the one above.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    > Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support. Turns out history has gifted you with a test case. :) What you are describing was literally the early version of Wikileaks[1]! The ostensible problem was that it generated little to no public awareness[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Submissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Submissions
psychlops 4y ago
I don't really think you can lay the blame here on people or perceptions and I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion from the article. He was targeted by people in power and they laid an effective smoke screen and got rid of him.
mjklin 4y ago
A similar thing happened when Alexander Solzhenitsyn defected to the US from the USSR. As long as he was blasting the Soviets everybody listened, but when he started critiquing the US as well…his speaking invitations dried up.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Solzhenitsyn was famously full of shit, according to most historians and his own wife. Not exactly a good comparison, the only similarity is the reaction of the US press.
raincole 4y ago
The use of $theirpoliticalside as if it's a variable is pretty interesting. Because in this case, it's almost a const.
BashiBazouk 4y ago
I thought the disillusionment around here with wikileaks had more to do with the way they had changed from careful curation, removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. Less that Hillary's emails were leaked and more that the personal information of lesser figures in and donors to the DNC were also released in mass. They had changed in perception from journalism to personal revenge against Hillary for her pursuing Assange as Secretary of State. The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception...
- 93po 4y ago
  > removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. This is often repeated anti-WL propaganda that isn't true. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into censoring leaks and it's by far the most time consuming part of the process. They spend literally months on it. Just because they chose not to censor something that you would have preferred for them to censor doesn't mean a tremendous amount of time and thought didn't go into that decision. > The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception... This is also not true. Why would WL refuse to publish something if the source could go to literally thousands of other journalists? It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    > It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse. Because WikiLeaks had become the Julian Assange show and published releases based on his whims. The DNC e-mails hurt his "enemies" while RNC e-mails did not.
  - BashiBazouk 4y ago
    As opposed to your pro-WL propaganda that is blatantly false? Yes, what you describe is how I and I think many others generally viewed wikileaks up to 2016. With the DNC email leak, that changed: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighting_the_man_by_er_publishing_the_personal_details_of_ordinary_citizens/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighti... One example news story of many... As to the RNC hack, I never said wikileaks had anything but the RNC was hacked and whatever was found was never released by the hacking organization. Whether this is intentional or just because what was found was not interesting or too old to matter, just the story circulating added to the perception wikileaks had changed.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
There was no need for villification. For whatever good Wikileaks did for "the truth" or people's curiousity, it was a danger to US troops and their allies from the first moments. That's got nothing to do with political views. And the charges against him are still perfectly legal. An "authoritarian" system would go about this completely differently.
gWPVhyxPHqvk 4y ago
It was easy to do all that because he actively put his thumb on the scale for the Republicans. > “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...
- bakuninsbart 4y ago
  I wonder where his animosity towards Hillary Clinton came from, I guess we will never know.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    Imagine the amount of documents they reviewed from the cable leaks to the emails and more. If anybody had the most information from which to judge how dangerous a leader would be, it was probably Julian. He did want to impede the war machine by sharing truth to the world, but the volume of data could not be absorbed by most.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Maybe butchering Libyans has something to do with it? Or even just her husband cutting welfare? Both US parties are neoliberal war hawks, sadly.
- kornhole 4y ago
  In context of limiting the amount of war upon the rest of world, it is hard for me to disagree. Although the foreign policy is not much different between the party sides, the Democratic party is historically and continues to be the more war party. Look at the votes for sending $117B to Ukraine. The Democrats voted unanimously for it.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    I think the point of the Ukraine aid is to limit the amount of war being waged on the Ukrainians...

barrysteve 4y ago

It was well before the Trump election. Colbert told him that the authorities would come after him in his 2007 appearance on the Colbert Report. The minute he published Collateral Murder, a video maximizing publicity on a fatal error in America's war effort, that was it for Assange and Wikileaks.

croes 4y ago
Error is quite an understatement
wazoox 4y ago
A "fatal error" in a totally unjustified and illegal war of aggression.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  This video is likely to be the highlight of the decade for me. https://youtu.be/s1kwq52NKmo https://youtu.be/s1kwq52NKmo
  - f6v 4y ago
    I like how the audience laughs at the expense of a million ruined lives.
    - barrysteve 4y ago
      Can hardly believe the audience is laughing at dead Americans. Even Bushites are not that callous. They're laughing at his implied admission of guilt and the idea that Putin's unjustified wars are in George Bush's shadow.
      - f6v 4y ago
        > Can hardly believe the audience is laughing at dead Americans. They’re not the victims who died by thousands.
starkd 4y ago
And notice how these fatal errors are still occurring. The moment you question the proxy war in Ukraine, you are immediately labelled a Putin apologist. No calls for diplomacy. Meanwhile, 200,000 Ukrainians have been led to their deaths.
- gWPVhyxPHqvk 4y ago
  If your homeland gets invaded one day, I hope to be an apologist for your invaders.
- driscoll42 4y ago
  Strange how you don't comment on the many more Russians that Putin has murdered by his unprovoked war of aggression as well.
  - starkd 4y ago
    Strange how you automatically feel the need to support one side and can't see the horrible outcome this has been for all parties. This could have been resolved through diplomacy. You never see the term even mentioned anymore.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      > This could have been resolved through diplomacy. Yes, by giving Ukraine to Russia. We know how it works if you try to appease fascists, come on.
      - starkd 4y ago
        This is a more complex than that. I don't like the invasion, but its not like Russia has no vital interests in the area that is right on their border. And they have occupied Crimea in the past going back to 1776. I'm just saying they have as much national interest as the West does. Israel Prime Minister claims they had a deal that was agreed to but Biden administration turned it down. It's also the responsible thing to do to look at the prospects of forcing a war though, when the Urkainians are so heavily outgunned. 200,000 Ukrainians have died in this fight. Maybe 50,000 Russians have died (its hard to find out specifics). The US wants to fight this war on the cheap with the Ukrainians taking all the casualties so that Americans won't have to. That is pretty deplorable to me.

snehk 4y ago

It's really this simple. Shows that it was never about the fact that he provided information but about the fact that he provided information that could be used by $mypoliticalside.

mhh__ 4y ago
They were working directly with them, not just leaving seeds for the birds to come for later. Make of it what you will but it's apparently an undisputed fact.

psychphysic 4y ago

This is precisely it. My pet theory is that the true effect of "cancel culture" isn't really on rich/popular people. But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views. The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values. The outcome is that entities which don't take sides are the real victims of cancel culture. Why is does CNN always come to the same conclusions and cover the same things? Why does Fox? It's because if they stray they are goners. WikiLeaks was truly neutral dumping all info it got. That was in no one's interest other than the diminishing open minded groups.

nico 4y ago
> But the public cancelling means on an individual level social groups eventually become homogeneous in their views. > The result is you must eject any idea, person or news source which doesn't 100% align with the current group values. That’s essentially human society. We organize ourselves in races, countries, cultures, religions, sports teams, etc. We are constantly excluding others and trying to belong to certain groups. The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated.
- vuln 4y ago
  > The issue is when it becomes extreme and a group decides that all other groups should be exterminated. In which given enough time all groups come to that last same conclusion. No group is safe once the extreme amass too much power.
- krunck 4y ago
  > That’s essentially human society. That doesn't make it OK. The degenerate groupists in human society are the ones responsible for oppression and mass slaughter(war) whereas individual free thinking people are not.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Looks like you just divided humanity into two groups there you degenerate groupist.

mhh__ 4y ago

WikiLeaks arguably helped people to do that quite effectively. They've never really claimed to be neutral but especially around 2016 they were either getting played by or explicitly choosing to aid the trump campaign via the Russian state (at best as a messenger). III.B.3 of the Mueller report I don't know if they are evil but I find it very hard to view them as anything other than selectively truthful at best.

kerkeslager 4y ago
Put yourself in Wikileaks' shoes for a second: you have information, you might even know that the source is malicious, but you also know the information is true. Your mandate as an organization is to release truths. Are they really supposed to not release the truth because it hurts the Democrats? I'm not a Trump supporter by any means, but the truth is the truth. If we only care about the truth when it favors us, I don't see how we're better than liars.
- bandyaboot 4y ago
  Release the information when you get it and say, “do with this what you will.” Not at all what they did. They released in batches, for maximum effect, right up until the election. They knew exactly what they were doing.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    That is more or less what the New York Post did with the information on the "Hunter Biden Laptop". It did not work out very well for the New York Post, nor for what is now finally being admitted as "the truth" - this being that the device was his, that the material on the device was his, that the material was not "obtained by hacking". It did work out quite well for Hunter Biden and his family which seems to have been the intended result. Had Wikileaks done the same they would have met with the same fate: they would have been accused of being in bed with whatever enemy-du-jour could be concocted and the material would have been buried under miles of accusations.

phphphphp 4y ago

From the start, wikileaks was a partisan project masquerading as a righteous cause. Those of us old enough to remember their original releases (like “Collateral Murder”) remember that wikileaks was always about building a narrative rather than exposing the truth. Suggesting that people started thinking negatively about wikileaks once it came for “their side” is painfully revisionist. Many people believe wikileaks is a net good but despise Assange. Assange failed wikileaks, the media did not fail Assange.

ethbr0 4y ago
Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support. You can't transparently publish information and have an opinion.
- psychlops 4y ago
  Why not? Why is public support necessary for transparently publishing information?
  - thunfischbrot 4y ago
    Wasn't that the whole idea behind Wikileaks? To not only be a platform to upload and publish random documents, and instead to provide context and work with writers to make it understandable for a wider audience? That's how I understood it at the time, that Assange was unhappy with the limited audience existing platforms were reaching. /e: I see my reply was less targeted towards your comment but the one above.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > Imho, if WikiLeaks had focused on being the Craigslist of information, without attempting to market themselves, they would have gotten a lot more public support. Turns out history has gifted you with a test case. :) What you are describing was literally the early version of Wikileaks[1]! The ostensible problem was that it generated little to no public awareness[1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Submissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Submissions

psychlops 4y ago

I don't really think you can lay the blame here on people or perceptions and I'm not sure how you drew that conclusion from the article. He was targeted by people in power and they laid an effective smoke screen and got rid of him.

mjklin 4y ago

A similar thing happened when Alexander Solzhenitsyn defected to the US from the USSR. As long as he was blasting the Soviets everybody listened, but when he started critiquing the US as well…his speaking invitations dried up.

dontlaugh 4y ago
Solzhenitsyn was famously full of shit, according to most historians and his own wife. Not exactly a good comparison, the only similarity is the reaction of the US press.

raincole 4y ago

The use of $theirpoliticalside as if it's a variable is pretty interesting. Because in this case, it's almost a const.

BashiBazouk 4y ago

I thought the disillusionment around here with wikileaks had more to do with the way they had changed from careful curation, removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. Less that Hillary's emails were leaked and more that the personal information of lesser figures in and donors to the DNC were also released in mass. They had changed in perception from journalism to personal revenge against Hillary for her pursuing Assange as Secretary of State. The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception...

93po 4y ago
> removing the personal information of those not involved, to just bulk dumps. This is often repeated anti-WL propaganda that isn't true. There is a vast amount of effort that goes into censoring leaks and it's by far the most time consuming part of the process. They spend literally months on it. Just because they chose not to censor something that you would have preferred for them to censor doesn't mean a tremendous amount of time and thought didn't go into that decision. > The fact that the RNC had been hacked but emails not released helped in this perception... This is also not true. Why would WL refuse to publish something if the source could go to literally thousands of other journalists? It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  > It wouldn't serve them at all to refuse. Because WikiLeaks had become the Julian Assange show and published releases based on his whims. The DNC e-mails hurt his "enemies" while RNC e-mails did not.
- BashiBazouk 4y ago
  As opposed to your pro-WL propaganda that is blatantly false? Yes, what you describe is how I and I think many others generally viewed wikileaks up to 2016. With the DNC email leak, that changed: https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighting_the_man_by_er_publishing_the_personal_details_of_ordinary_citizens/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/07/22/wikileaks_keep_fighti... One example news story of many... As to the RNC hack, I never said wikileaks had anything but the RNC was hacked and whatever was found was never released by the hacking organization. Whether this is intentional or just because what was found was not interesting or too old to matter, just the story circulating added to the perception wikileaks had changed.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

There was no need for villification. For whatever good Wikileaks did for "the truth" or people's curiousity, it was a danger to US troops and their allies from the first moments. That's got nothing to do with political views. And the charges against him are still perfectly legal. An "authoritarian" system would go about this completely differently.

gWPVhyxPHqvk 4y ago

It was easy to do all that because he actively put his thumb on the scale for the Republicans. > “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win.” https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...

bakuninsbart 4y ago
I wonder where his animosity towards Hillary Clinton came from, I guess we will never know.
- kornhole 4y ago
  Imagine the amount of documents they reviewed from the cable leaks to the emails and more. If anybody had the most information from which to judge how dangerous a leader would be, it was probably Julian. He did want to impede the war machine by sharing truth to the world, but the volume of data could not be absorbed by most.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  Maybe butchering Libyans has something to do with it? Or even just her husband cutting welfare? Both US parties are neoliberal war hawks, sadly.
kornhole 4y ago
In context of limiting the amount of war upon the rest of world, it is hard for me to disagree. Although the foreign policy is not much different between the party sides, the Democratic party is historically and continues to be the more war party. Look at the votes for sending $117B to Ukraine. The Democrats voted unanimously for it.
- namdnay 4y ago
  I think the point of the Ukraine aid is to limit the amount of war being waged on the Ukrainians...