What the heck is going on at WikiLeaks?

In the last two weeks, the font of digital secrets has doxed millions of Turkish women, leaked Democratic National Committee emails that made Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign look bad but also suggested the site was colluding with the Russian government, and fired off some seriously anti-Semitic tweets.

WikiLeaks has endangered individuals before, but their release of the so-called Erdogan Emails was particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens. Worse, it included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters. That’s irresponsible any time, and disastrous in the week of a coup.

The incident exposed gross negligence, though it’s true that lots of publications (including WIRED) made things worse by failing to vet the leak’s content and linking to the documents in their coverage. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (herself of Turkish descent), wrote an essay criticizing WikiLeaks and Western media outlets for endangering Turkish citizens, and WikiLeaks and their supporters turned on her, hard. “Within five minutes they called me an Erdogan apologist, which speaks volumes to their lack of research,” Tufekci says. “And then they blocked me. So much for hearing something they don’t like.”

WikiLeaks and Assange say they have no responsibility for the content they leak, and that no one has evidence that the sources of the DNC leak are Russian. But these leaks and tweets damage WikiLeaks’ credibility. If they’re not scrutinizing their own leaks on the base level of their content, it’s not hard to imagine that WikiLeaks could unwittingly become part of someone else’s agenda (like, say, a Russian one). “If you are a legitimate leaker, why go with WikiLeaks? You go with The Intercept or the New York Times, like they did with the Panama Papers” says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who studies the organization. “Wikileaks is a pastebin for spooks, and they’re happy to be used that way.”