Posted on Friday, June 10 2016 @ 14:31 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck"It controls what people see. It creates mechanisms for how people interact. It's been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people's content, taking you to the wrong websites completely undermines the spirit of helping people create," he said.Berners-Lee is working with a group of Internet activists on ways to re-decentralising the internet, a project that aims to give individuals more control and ensure better privacy and security.
"The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging."
In particular, he points out that companies like Facebook now have so much power that they can control somebody's view of the planet.
"It will decide which friends' posts and which news articles a person sees, and we realise that we're talking about one big corporation suddenly having complete control over somebody's view of the planet on which they live. It's a constant battle and we are very close to it all the time."Last month there was quite a ruckus as former Facebook workers confessed colleagues at the social network routinely suppresses conservative and right-wing news:
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
