World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said that he did not foresee the web being used by people and states to interfere in western elections.
The British engineer and computer scientist waded in on the debate around misinformation, adding that “very clever and advanced operators” have managed to manipulate people into believing “junk”.
“I didn’t predict that people, nation-states would be hacking western elections, but on the other hand, it’s not a total surprise because there has been a constant battle over cybersecurity,” he told Washington Post Live.
“Underneath this web, there is a constant battle of people trying to attack companies, attack people and individuals, and attack organisations and attack governments, because, if they can, they can get an advantage.
“But the problem with an election is once it’s gone down, you can’t rewind it. It’s very hard, in fact, to do the analysis and the research to find out actually what happened. I think a lot of the world at that point did a double-take.”
Sir Tim’s comments come ahead of the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which is marked on March 12.
The 63-year-old added that recent uses of the web had caused him to “step back” and reflect on the technology.
“At a certain point, I think when those two elections went down… the Brexit and Trump elections went down, where actually it’s not just about there being junk out there which we should all ignore,” he continued.
“There is junk out there which people believe, which people are being manipulated into believing and by very clever and advanced operators, some of them deliberate and malicious, and some of them just like the people in Macedonia sort of got just folded into their commercial operation.
“So I think, at that point, I did a big step back. I think the Web Foundation did a big step back. A lot of people did a big sort of step back and said, ‘Well, let’s reconsider the web. The Web Foundation says that the Web should serve humanity, what’s going on here?’.”
