EuroNews

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told Euronews Next he does not make tech predictions but spoke of his hopes for the web in 2025.
The inventor of the World Wide Web is optimistic that 2025 will be the year of digital human rights but said that there could be a possible backlash against “polarising social media”.

Speaking to Euronews Next in November at the Web Summit technology event in Lisbon, Berners-Lee blamed the toxic content produced and shared on social media on algorithms. While developers could easily fix this, he said, the social media platforms do not want to.

“Should you blame the person who wrote [the message]? Well, maybe, but they’re actually a small part of the ecosystem,” he said.

“Maybe you should blame the fact that the algorithm showed that tweet to 2 million people. So the reason why you saw it isn’t that the world is toxic, it’s because that will get you to click, that will get you to raise your eyebrows”.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is in its 35th year after Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to develop a distributed single information system to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.