Q&A: Tim Berners-Lee on net neutrality and why he won’t have Alexa in the house – Wikitribune

Check the full article for his views on Alexa and other topics

"Q: How do you think “fake news” can be tackled?

A: I think the label “fake news” covers a really complicated, interesting space of many different dysfunctional mechanisms…I think the power of fake news is the ability of humanity to divide itself into different pools, where you have one group, which are scientific and … the other group, they live off conspiracy theories, they’ll believe anything they hear from an authority or science, and who will have a completely inconsistent view of the world but not consistent with reality. [They are] quite consistent with themselves and where they’re in an echo chamber…

[Berners-Lee said it was important to do more research on how Twitter and Facebook, as examples of social media, might drive the creation of those echo chambers.]: Maybe we shouldn’t really blame those people so much as the people who engineered the software they use, because the software they use is encouraging them. It’s built to feed them more of what they had before, and connect them to more people who like the same stuff. If the software has been deliberately built to make the echo chambers and thought bubbles, then the responsibility is with the people who built them…You as a journalist, I as a member of the web, should be holding these people and these web properties to account and say, “Oh, you need to do better. You need to reprogram these things so we get a less polarised world.”"

Q&A: Tim Berners-Lee on net neutrality and why he won’t have Alexa in the house – Wikitribune