Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web: 'The System is Failing' (theguardian.com)

Olivia Solon, writing for The Guardian: The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity -- the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee's vision for an "open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries" has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators. "I'm still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence," said the British computer scientist. "We have to grit our teeth and hang on to the fence and not take it for granted that the web will lead us to wonderful things," he said. The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people's attention. "People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them," said Berners-Lee. In some cases, these platforms offer users who create content a cut of advertising revenue. The financial incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with "no political skin in the game" to generate political clickbait fake news that was distributed on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google's automated advertising engine AdSense. "The system is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not fulfilling the goal of helping humanity promote truth and democracy. So I am concerned," said Berners-Lee, who in March called for the regulation of online political advertising to prevent it from being used in "unethical ways."

Comments

Thanks for the DRM

[Snufu]

Sir Tim.

Re:Thanks for the DRM

[Aighearach]

"Everybody is doing what they want instead of following my vision that they didn't share... the `system' is failing!" Well, maybe not. Maybe it is you that don't share their vision?

I mean, I'm sure I personally prefer his vision, but why would "the system," ie everybody collectively, be following him? Should we also find all the engineers that built our cars and let them choose where we drive? It seems rather silly that an engineer building a tool would also tell us about policy and politics and business and all that.

He complains about content and advertising, why isn't he publishing better content? It is open, people just aren't publishing what he wanted. He can fix that himself if he's actually talking about anything that is lacking; but no, instead he wants to tell people what NOT to publish. It won't work, they won't care.

Re:Thanks for the DRM

[pots]

It seems like you missed the point of the article entirely. The problem is not that people are doing what they want, the problem is that they can't. Or won't be able to. The idea is that, increasingly, it's these "gatekeepers" dictating to us what we should want. The article mentions the attack on net neutrality specifically, being something which prevents people from doing what they want. (Unless of course, what you want just happens to be exactly what will make the most money for ISPs.)

I don't know how you could have read that and heard exactly the opposite of what the article was saying.