Web needs ratings warns Berners-Lee

 

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Posted on 15 Sep 2008 at 08:19

The internet is increasingly being used to spread conspiracy theories, rumour and misleading information, warns Tim Berners-Lee, who is launching the World Wide Web Foundation to rectify the situation.

Berners-Lee himself developed the internet as we know it while working at CERN, but says that the web today needs to provide people with a way to determine which information is reliable and which is not.

"It's not just where I go to decide where to buy my shoes... it's where I go to decide who I'm going to trust to vote," he said, speaking to the BBC on the importance of the web as a research tool today.

Ironically, one of the largest such misleading rumours in recent months referred to CERN itself. Many websites speculated that when the Large Hadron Collider, which is located at the institution, was switched on a black hole could be created that would consume the entire planet. This led to death threats being levelled at scientists working on the project.

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was twelve people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable. A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging," he warns.

To avoid scenarios such as this in the future Berners-Lee proposes that a system be developed to steer people towards accurate and factual information online, although the existing World Wide Web consortium has explored many fruitless ideas along these lines in the past, he said.

"I'm not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways. So I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways," he says, although details of the exact implementation are yet to be decided.

The World Wide Web Foundation, which is yet to be officially launched, will be tasked with developing the system, as well as improving accessibility to the web from developing nations and working on the infrastructure of the mobile internet.

"We're talking about the evolution of the web," says Berners-Lee, explaining that the future of the internet could lay in some interesting directions. "Perhaps by using gestures or pointing. When something is such a creative medium as the web, the limits to it are our imagination."

Author: Matthew Sparkes