Tim Berners-Lee Launches Campaign To Save the Web From Abuse (theguardian.com)

Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global campaign to save the web from the destructive effects of abuse and discrimination, political manipulation, and other threats that plague the online world. A report adds: In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new "Contract for the Web" that aims to protect people's rights and freedoms on the internet. The contract outlines central principles that will be built into a full contract and published in May 2019, when half of the world's population will be able to get online. More than 50 organisations have already signed the contract, which is published by Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation alongside a report that calls for urgent action.

"For many years there was a feeling that the wonderful things on the web were going to dominate and we'd have a world with less conflict, more understanding, more and better science, and good democracy," Berners-Lee told the Guardian. "But people have become disillusioned because of all the things they see in the headlines. Humanity connected by technology on the web is functioning in a dystopian way. We have online abuse, prejudice, bias, polarisation, fake news, there are lots of ways in which it is broken. This is a contract to make the web one which serves humanity, science, knowledge and democracy." Under the principles laid out in the document, which Berners-Lee calls a "Magna Carta for the web", governments must ensure that its citizens have access to all of the internet, all of the time, and that their privacy is respected so they can be online "freely, safely and without fear." Berners-Lee, added, "We're at a 50/50 moment for the web. We've created something amazing together, but half the world is still not online, and our online rights and freedoms are at risk. The web has done so much for us, but now we need to stand up #ForTheWeb." You can watch his talk here (skip the first 10 minutes).

Comments

Re:free speech or PC speech

[UnknownSoldier]

Excellent points! I would also add:

* Who defines what is offensive?
* What is or isn't offensive? (The person receiving it??)

Also what if someone is offended by the truth (such as China's retarded ban on the number 64 -- a reference to the 1989 Tiananmen Square murder -- does national Law trump Censorship ?

Re:The right to offend is the right to free speech

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only "censorship" when the government does it, under the Constitution, dumbass.

Re:free speech or PC speech

[Immerman]

There is a middle ground - courteous speech. If I'm at the bar and see someone I don't like, I can go give them a ration of shit, and maybe chase them off, or maybe get a punch in the nose for my trouble. Having immediate potential repercussions for discourteous speech is one of the biggest differences between real-life and online conversations. Perhaps we need to bring that online.

Not necessarily as a top-down "official rules of conduct" sort of situation, such a thing is far too vulnerable to being used for agenda-based censorship by the appointed authorities. But a bottom-up implementation to mimic in-person interactions might be possible.

One possible off-the-cuff implementation that could be easily implemented by any "members only" social network:
One of your comments gets flagged as inappropriate by someone reading it, so it and the surrounding context get anonymized and shown to X randomly selected people with no connection to anyone involved (the jury), who then vote Guilty or Not guilty on its inappropriateness. If it gets voted guilty by the threshold margin (1/2? 2/3?) that comment gets hidden, and you get a black mark on your posting record. Accumulate enough black marks, and your posting freedom begins being restricted. If it gets voted Not Guilty by a similar threshold, then the flagger gets a black mark on their flagging record, and accumulating enough of those similarly restricts their flagging abilities.

Other considerations could also be thrown in to help reduce overhead - e.g. a post needs to accumulate a certain number of flags before being sent to trial. That could actually work well with recording flagging histories as well: the more comments that you flag inappropriate that are found not-guilty, the fewer "flagging points" your flag is worth, some flag-happy busybody might be only worth 0.1 point, while someone who only ever flags comments bad enough that they're always found guilty might be worth several.

Similarly, if you make a lot of posts that get flagged and found guilty, you might get a few flagging points automatically applied to every post, so that very little additional flagging is needed to send a post to trial. Keep it up and you might even reach the point where your every posts is presumed guilty and hidden until a trial determines otherwise. Or you might just get banned outright.

There will still be some censorship of unpopular people and opinions, but it will be democratically applied censorship, just as is seen in any real-life social setting, rather than some top-down system designed to enforce the agenda of those in power. And the greater the supermajority required to be found guilty, the less the level of censorship.