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Founder of the World Wide Web,
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is "disappointed" with the current state of his
invention and how it allows hate to prosper.
In a
wide-ranging interview with Reuters, Sir Tim said some sites' software skewed
interactions.
He singled
out Twitter for criticism, wondering why hate-filled comments prospered at the expense
of positive sentiments.
Sir Tim also
suggested that governments could break up the web giants.
Pioneering
work by Sir Tim in the late 80s created the first versions of the technology that
became the World Wide Web.
"If you
put a drop of love into Twitter it seems to decay but if you put in a drop of
hatred you feel it actually propagates much more strongly," he said.
"And you wonder, 'Well is that because of the way that Twitter as a medium
has been built?'"
His comments
come after Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites have faced criticism
for failing to tackle hate speech, misogyny and other toxic comments.
Sir Tim said
his disappointment grew out of seeing the medium become less optimistic and
lose some of its ability to empower individuals.
He also
condemned the "concentration" of user communities in the hands of a
few tech titans such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
Historically,
he said, governments tackled this type of dominance by taking steps to break up
large firms and dismantle monopolies.
However, he
said, technology and shifting patterns of behaviour could end up doing the job
for governments.
"Before
breaking them up, we should see whether they are not just disrupted by a small
player beating them out of the market, but by the market shifting, by the
interest going somewhere else," he told the news organisation.
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