Since that post David Allen Green published another piece on the legal mythology of Assange's extradition and was promptly blocked by the Wikileaks Twitter account. A quick reminder of how -ever so slightly- ironic this is given that Wikleaks states that its aims are:
Curioser and Curioser, said Alice
Last night the Wikileaks account published a tweet, which (if you read it properly) states that it is an archive news item from the BBC website. It refers to the time during which the Swedish authorities briefly dropped charges against Assange, before reinstating them. The problem is that many people apparently missed the word "archive" and assumed this was a current story.
This story is however over two years old and is therefore not "news" in any sense. It is out of date, because Assange is of course once again a rape suspect. Having exhausted his legal remedies in the UK, he has now also jumped bail and is liable for arrest on that count too. Note the context of the tweet: this was not a series of archive pieces: it was positioned between current items.
Wikileaks has 1,621,031 followers at the time of writing. The story was clicked on enough times to launch it to the most read stories on the BBC - which of course then led general users of the BBC News site, who are unaware of the tweet, to click on the story. This looked like news: and big news no less: "Wikileaks rape warrant cancelled". It in fact made it to the most read story on the BBC site at 5am this morning. By the time of this screen shot it has dropped, but only to position 2.
When I tweeted about this today I had a rash of responses from followers who said that they had entirely missed the "21 August 2010" on the top left of the BBC page. Plenty thought this had just happened, which I rather suspect was the intention of the original Wikileaks tweet. I am not able to verify it, but have also been told the Wikileaks Facebook page also contained a link that did not have the word "archive" on it. It was later replaced with the Twitter link with the word included.
Manipulative, Misleading, Attention Seeking
So what to make of all this? It is hard to understand what Wikileaks was seeking to achieve by posting this out of date story in this way, given it was not part of a chronology or linked to anything else. It strikes me personally as being manipulative, misleading and attention seeking. I definitely am not prepared to naively dismiss it as "innocent". If, as widely believed, Assange is himself behind the Wikileaks account now, it comes across to me as mildly deranged and certainly the act of someone who is desperate to remain in the intoxicating limelight of media attention. Was it a test to see how powerful the account is in getting people's attention and pushing stories up the BBC website list? Who knows.
The tweet certainly did achieve the aim of getting the (now, non-) story back up in people's minds. Bravo for that. However it has at the same time further lowered my opinion of an organisation now apparently not concerned about much other than being a mouthpiece for defending its founder against personal allegations against him. It has also taken a lot people for fools, something that might well come back to bite the writer of the tweet.
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