While a great majority of the global community seem to hang their lives practically on social media, creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has warned the world needs a thorough rethink on the application and use of social media.
Saying that his intention in building the Web had been for the public to “do good stuff” and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia, Berners-Lee was furious that rather than this being the case, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying.
He warned that the world must work to prevent the Web from being used for spying as well as what he termed the spread of “nasty, mean ideas” on social media websites.
Speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Fintech Summit in London on Monday (April 10, 2017), the London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said:
“We need to rethink the way we build society on top of these web pages.
“How come nasty, mean ideas, seem to have travelled more prevalently than constructive ideas on Twitter sometimes? Is that the way it has been designed? Could Twitter be tweaked?” he queried.
Social media has become active in polarised 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.
In countries like Nigeria, there have been cases resulting in death through activities on social media, such as the case of Miss Cynthia Osokogu, who, in 2012, was lured from Nasarawa State to Lagos State, through Facebook, by two men who eventually strangled her to death in a hotel.
The conclusion was that a “complete change of strategy” was needed. Facebook and Twitter were already rethinking approaches, he said. They two were on March 23, 2017 sentenced to death by hanging by a Lagos State High Court.
Berners-Lee, who has previously criticised 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 analyse the effects networks have on society, Berners-Lee said.
“We actually have to not leave people to make whatever social networks they like.”
Despite the web being worldwide, 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.
There was a need to analyse 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.