Site’s edge on whistleblowing is gone and its co-founder must recover, yet their resilience may make revival a possibility

As Julian Assange enjoys his first weekend of freedom in years, there appeared to be no question in the mind of his wife, Stella, about what the family’s priorities were.

The WikiLeaks co-founder would need time to recover, she told reporters after they were reunited in his native Australia, after a deal with US authorities that allowed him to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents.

What comes after that is one of the most intriguing questions for anyone familiar with how the site he founded in 2006 utterly changed the nature of whistleblowing. Will it return to its original mission?

James Harkin, the director of the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism, (said) “In retrospect, it’s striking that everything WikiLeaks published was true – no small feat in the era of “disinformation” – but the tragedy is that much of its energy and ethos has now passed to blowhards and conspiracy theorists. Perhaps, in the light of our tepid new involvements in the Middle East and Ukraine, we need a new WikiLeaks.”

  • demonsword@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    He wasn’t in jail. He was in the Ecuadorian embassy. It sounds like you really don’t know the details here.

    what? I did acknowledge that:

    It was just a conjecture of how Assange might have thought about. I never said that there really is any link between him and Russia. And it was long ago, when he was still hiding inside Ecuador’s embassy, when the hypothetical link between him and Russia was new.

    and:

    In 2016 he had already spent years hiding inside an embassy. It’s not that hard to conceive that hatred tends to build over time.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      You literally just said:

      I doubt he still runs wikileaks. Assange was in jail for years.

      So which is it? Was he in jail or not?

      • demonsword@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        He was jailed in 2019. Are you telling me he still managed wikileaks from inside a prison in the UK?

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          01·
          5 months ago

          And how many years was he in prison in the UK? Because you said he was there for years.

          And we were also talking about what happened in 2016, which, last I checked, was before 2019.

          So I take back what I said about you being unfamiliar. You’re familiar, just dishonest about it.