Posted March 13, 2017 06:46:46

Photo: Tim Berners-Lee says the web has lived up to his original vision for it. (Reuters: Stefan Wermuth)

On the 28th birthday of the World Wide Web, its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has lamented the rise of fake news and called for everyday users to fight against the misuse of their personal data.

The 61-year-old British computer scientist set out a five-year strategy for tackling fake news and other worrying issues surrounding the spread of information.

Sir Tim wrote in an open letter for the World Wide Web Foundation that in many ways the web had lived up to his vision of an open platform that would "allow everyone, everywhere to share information" but that trends emerging over the past 12 months had made him worry about its future direction.

He also warned of increasingly insidious forms of political advertising that use the algorithms of social media platforms like Facebook to target users with misinformation.

Here are some of the highlights of the Sir Tim's letter.

On fake news

The net result is that these sites show us content they think we'll click on — meaning that misinformation, or "fake news", which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire.

And through the use of data science and armies of bots, those with bad intentions can game the system to spread misinformation for financial or political gain.

Nefarious political advertising

The fact that most people get their information from just a few platforms and the increasing sophistication of algorithms drawing upon rich pools of personal data means that political campaigns are now building individual adverts targeted directly at users. And there are suggestions that some political adverts — in the US and around the world — are being used in unethical ways — to point voters to fake news sites, for instance, or to keep others away from the polls.

What are the solutions, according to Sir Tim?

"A few broad paths to progress are already clear," said Sir Tim.

• Work together with web companies to strike a balance that puts a fair level of data control back in the hands of people
• Fight against government overreach in surveillance laws, including through the courts if necessary
• Push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is "true" or not
• Algorithmic transparency to understand how important decisions that affect our lives are being made
• Perhaps a set of common principles to be followed

Sir Tim finished his letter with a rallying cry for everyday web citizens who contribute blogs, posts, tweets, photos, videos, applications and web pages, as well as the politicians and other groups who fight to keep it open, to continue to "build the web we want — for everyone."

Topics: internet-technology, computers-and-technology, science-and-technology, internet-culture, information-and-communication, social-media, media, united-kingdom