The creator of the world wide web always managed his creation was a reflection of humanity the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee’s sight for an “open principles that allows anyone to share data, access possibilities and collaborate across geographic boundaries” has been confronted by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponized by master manipulators.
“I’m still a dreamer, but an optimist reaching the top of the hill with a nasty storm blasting in my face, hanging on to a fence,” said the British computer scientist.
“We have to grit our teeth and attach on to the fence and not take it for admitted that the web will lead us to wonderful things,” he said.
The spread of misinformation and promotion online has collapsed partly because of the way the promotion systems of large digital programs such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people’s attention.
“People are being changed by very finely trained AIs that form out how to distract them,” said Berners-Lee.
In some cases, these programs offer users who create content a cut in advertising revenue. The economic incentive drove Macedonian teenagers with “no political skin in the game” to generate political clickbait fake news that was disseminated on Facebook and funded by revenue from Google’s automated advertising engine AdSense.
“The policy is failing. The way ad revenue works with clickbait is not meeting the goal of helping humanity promote truth and justice. So I am concerned,” said Berners-Lee, who in March called for the regulation of online political advocacy to prevent it from being used in “unethical ways”.
Since then, it has been reported that Russian operatives bought micro-targeted political ads aimed at US voters on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Data analytics firms so as Cambridge Analytica, which builds character profiles of millions of individuals so they can be handled through “behavioral micro-targeting”, have also been studied for creating “weaponized AI propaganda”.
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