Wikipedia founder brands Australia’s social media ban an ‘unmitigated disaster’ and an ‘embarrassment’

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales condemned Australia’s new social‑media ban for under‑16s as an “unmitigated disaster,” warning it normalises surveillance (age verification and facial checks) and creates policy risk for platforms. He also said AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok) have reduced human visits to Wikipedia by about 8%, shifting traffic composition toward costly automated crawlers. That mix — regulatory pressure on platforms plus changing referral patterns from AI — could affect social platforms’ user engagement and ad monetization, while creating a potential revenue opportunity for Wikipedia via paid enterprise access for AI firms.