Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has attacked Facebook, Google and Twitter for promoting misinformation and “questionable” political advertising while exploiting people’s personal data, in a stinging rebuke to the world’s biggest internet companies.
The British computer scientist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor is a pioneer of the internet and has long advocated for better technical standards and access to the web as a basic human right.
In an interview with the Financial Times, he said a new legal or regulatory framework may help to limit the power of big tech companies, which had become overly-dominant and unaccountable to ordinary users.