The father of the internet says social pressure — people collectively saying, « This is wrong » — is crucial to battling misinformation and harassment.
Vint Cerf speaks onstage Sunday at « An Internet for and by the People » during SXSW 2017.
Technology has advanced more quickly than social norms can keep pace, says the guy who pretty much invented one of the most widely used technologies of today.
That would be the internet, and the man considered the father of the internet on Sunday said that the burden is on us to catch up and to curb the misinformation and abuse running rampant online.
« This is a sociological problem in large measure, » said Vint Cerf, speaking at the SXSW Conference and Festivals. « Our technology has outraced our intuition about its social consequences. »
His comments came just hours after Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an open letter detailing his worries about the web, including problems like « fake news. » Though harassment and fake news have been problems since the internet’s early days, those problems have risen to prominence with the sprawling popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and with the bitterness that flavored the US presidential election campaigns last year.
