Web Needs Rethink to Stop ‘Nasty’ Ideas Spreading, Says Its Creator

(Reuters) — The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of “nasty, mean ideas” on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday.

Berners-Lee, a London-born computer scientist who invented the Web as a platform on top of the internet in 1989, said his intention in building it had been for the public to “do good stuff” and share ideas among each other, as was the case with websites such as Wikipedia.

Instead, negative ideas were proliferating on social media sites in particular, he said, while privacy was also being compromised by online spying.

“We need to rethink the way we build society on top of these web pages,” he told the Innovate Finance global fintech summit in London.

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