|
Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the
Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his
intention in building it had been for the public to "do good
stuff" and share ideas among each other, as was the case with
websites such as Wikipedia.
Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites
in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised
by online spying.
"We need to rethink the way we build society on top of these web
pages," he told the Innovate Finance global fintech summit in
London.
"How come nasty, mean ideas, seem to have traveled more
prevalently than constructive ideas on Twitter sometimes? Is
that the way it has been designed? Could Twitter be tweaked?"
Social media has become active in polarized political campaigns
such as the U.S. presidential elections and Britain's referendum
on membership of the European Union last year.
There have also been instances of public figures being abused
online, often by robots programmed to send out negative tweets.
The conclusion was that a "complete change of strategy" was
needed. Facebook and Twitter were already rethinking approaches,
he said.
Berners-Lee, who has previously criticized state-sponsored
eavesdropping as well as censorship, said he had given humanity
"an open internet to play with" in the hope that they would use
it in a positive manner.
"We have tried to keep it open, we kept it royalty-free. We have
kept it open in the sense of no censorship. On a good day, in a
good country, we keep it free of spying."
There was a need to analyze the effects networks have on
society, Berners-Lee said.
"We actually have to not leave people to make whatever social
networks they like."
Last week he told the Guardian newspaper that U.S. President
Trump administration’s decision to allow internet service
providers to sign away their customers' privacy and sell
customers' browsing habits was "disgusting", after he won the
prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s AM Turing
award.
Despite the web being world-wide, with the possibility of school
children from India, China and Syria interacting with each
other, Berners-Lee said, people were broadly parochial, choosing
to communicate with others like themselves.
(Editing by Pritha Sarkar)
[© 2017 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2017 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
