May 06, 2025 15:00:00

Tim Berners-Lee proposes 'breaking down the walls of social media,' and what is the new Internet that the inventor of the web calls 'an evolution of ChatGPT and DeepSeek'?

Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist known for inventing the World Wide Web, has been concerned about the fragmentation of the Internet caused by social networks, stating in the past that '

we need social networks where bad things are less likely to happen .' In a new column for the Financial Times, Berners-Lee went a step further on this issue, proposing that social media should eliminate the ' walled gardens ' that surround users and use AI to allow individuals to consolidate their data.

Let's knock down social media's walled gardens
https://www.ft.com/content/79d2d19a-08df-48fc-9a6f-a9dbef58f642

Berners-Lee has two main concerns about the current state of the World Wide Web: one is 'parts of the Web not working,' and the other is 'the potential of the Web that has yet to be realized,' meaning he is dissatisfied with the current state of the Internet.

The first example of the 'dysfunction' is the polarization of social media users, as companies' revenues are determined by the time users spend on the platform, and social media platforms attempt to maximize their revenues by flooding people's feeds with content that provokes anger.

Changing the algorithms that determine our feeds to prioritize calm content rather than anger isn't difficult, and in fact, Berners-Lee points out that social media platforms like Pinterest have done a good job of providing a forum for interaction and discussion of ideas without promoting harmful content.

Regarding issues surrounding social media, Berners-Lee said, 'Regulation should be a last resort, but the social media industry's failure to clean up is causing real harm to young people and the online public sphere. I urge the government to legislate and regulate this issue.'

A hint at Berners-Lee's second concern, and also his hope, is found in the early days of the web. At the time, anyone with an internet-connected PC could create their own website, and internet users could make a big contribution with little effort by starting a blog, posting whatever they wanted, and adding links to other blogs they liked.

However, with the rise of social media, this sense of individual empowerment, also known as

digital sovereignty , has been lost and people have become boxed in by unscalable walled gardens.

For example, at the time of writing, you can't share Facebook photos with your LinkedIn colleagues, or use the same ID to share your friend list on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, etc. This is the 'social media wall' that Berners-Lee points out.

'With email, you can combine emails from different services like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail into one email group. We need that same interoperability with social media,' Berners-Lee said.

One way to achieve 'interoperable social media' is to develop new standards and require platforms to follow them, but this will require enforcement.

Another way, Berners-Lee suggests, is to build a different system that complies with new standards and convince people that it's better, like how AOL and Prodigy moved from closed, subscription-based internet services to the free web.

The Open Data Institute, which Berners-Lee co-founded in London, is working on a new standard called Solid (short for Social Linked Data) that would give users control over their own data. Solid would be managed by

the W3C , the web standards body.

Solid's uses go beyond social media. Another startup, Inrupt, which Berners-Lee co-founded, is developing a data wallet on Solid that can store everything from driver's licenses to photos to medical data.

In this way, by centralizing all data, it is expected that new insights will be gained from different data, leading to a synergistic effect that Berners-Lee calls 'magic.' As an example, a study published in 2023 showed that early signs of ovarian cancer could be detected by analyzing the purchase history of painkillers and digestive medicines using point card data from a major British retailer.

Gaining new insights from disparate data can seem like a challenge, but Berners-Lee believes that anyone can benefit from AI agents. To avoid repeating the same mistakes as social media, however, AI agents must be developed with the user's benefit in mind, like Inrupt's 'Charlie,' an AI agent that aims to generate personalized answers from Solid wallet data.

Speaking about a future where everyone can make the most of their data through AI agents, rather than being boxed in by social media, Berners-Lee said, 'This is a vision of a new interface that connects users to the web, and it is an evolution of ChatGPT, Gemini, Pi and DeepSeek. We have shown what is technically possible before. Now we must show how socially linked data can empower people all over the world.'

Berners-Lee's ambitious proposals have raised questions about the transparency of AI.

Robin Cook-Haar, director of British real estate company Hightrees House, and a Financial Times writer on topics including AI and climate change, wrote a response to Berners-Lee's column saying, 'Unless there are robust, verifiable mechanisms for testing the accuracy of the data trained by AI, I believe Berners-Lee's vision will be difficult to realise. Two thousand years ago, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ, 'What is truth?' In today's world, where ever more data is circulating without being moderated or verified, this question seems increasingly relevant.'