The London-born computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with the original creation of the World Wide Web, has implied that Twitter should be held responsible for much “fake news”.
Speaking today at London’s Innovate Finance Global Summit, Berners-Lee recalled that, upon creating the web, he and his team shared “utopian” hopes of possibly better uniting the world and breaking down borders. “The assumption was if we gave humanity an open space to play with, good things would happen,” he acknowledged before conceding: “Last year, a lot of people did a re-think.”
Sir Tim seemingly implied, according to Business Insider, that the US presidential election and Brexit referendum, both of which conducted amid a torrent of negative “fake news” stories on social media sites, altered his stance. He said: “Look at Twitter, is this actually a net good for the planet?”
It was, however, really online social networks generally, rather than strictly Twitter, that mainly provoked the ire of Berners-Lee, who is now the World Wide Web Foundation’s founding director. He expressed his belief that Facebook and Twitter were both rethinking their self-regulation practices.
