Is there such a thing as “bad” information on the web?

I’m going to defer briefly to the web’s creator, Tim Berners-Lee, before I return to this question in the hopes that I can give a definitive answer.

In 2019, amidst a wave of online misinformation that truly felt like it could alter elections and make change to international agreements, Berners-Lee decided to speak out (and not for the first time either). He diagnosed two major problems.

The first problem, he said, was that there were no guiding principles for the web. Regulators, tech companies, and ordinary citizens made decisions in a vacuum, without a unified theory of how things should work. Without a sense of purpose or a set of values that governments and corporations could agree on, one small decision led to many others that allowed misinformation and fake news to spring up across the web. If we could at least agree on some basic principles, that might help.

Berners-Lee pointed to data portability as the second issue. We, the individuals using the web, had lost all control of our data to powerful, centralized, algorithmically driven platforms that drove national and international conversations. Platforms that were bizarrely incentivized to drive engagement that prey on our blindspots and biases. It allowed this same kind of information to spread widely in the blink of an eye without any human intervention or interaction

It felt… bleak, and unsettling, and it very much still does. In an interview, Berners-Lee described feeling devastated, literally physically sick.

We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places […] producing—with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform—a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human.

To counteract these two issues, he proposed two initiatives.

To address our lack of guidance and values, the W3C launched the Contract for the Web, which loosely defined and bound governments, tech companies, and citizens to a certain set of shared principles meant to drive a better future for the web.

The second was a new protocol he had developed called Solid, meant to give individuals greater control over their own data through portability and local access. Using Solid, each user could theoretically control all over their own data and then choose which platforms had access to it, access that could be revoked at any time.

Both programs have had limited success, though I do think they serve as a useful roadmap. But they also help us get to the question of whether or not information on the web can, in fact, be bad. It’s a question that Berners-Lee has had to wrestle with for many years as he watched his intentions for the web become distorted and twisted over time by bad actors. The solutions and problems he ultimately pointed to reveal some of what his philosophy on the matter is.

Now as one simple caveat, there are some things that are just plain illegal. These are subject to the same rules, laws, and regulations that they are out in the real world. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What were are talking about is information that spreads, which takes the form of misinformation, distorted facts, fake news, harmful biases, and much much more. We’ve all seen that evolve in recent years.

But even given that, I think Berners-Lee arrived at the same answer that I have when confronted with that question.

The answer is no. There is no information that is bad, or unacceptable. If we want the web to be open, that means open to everyone. Period.

Solutions like the Contract for the Web and Solid don’t focus on limiting what kind of information is allowed to be on the web. It focuses on how that information is handled, and spread. And that’s where I think the issue is too.

This is connected to the point that you made. There is, simply too much information. I can’t give you as scientific a number as to how much of it is bad. That’s kind of the point. There is room for any kind of information on the web, and even if we wanted to stop it, we couldn’t. As Berners-Lee pointed out, “you can’t just outlaw fake news. It’s much more complicated.” If we tried to start putting what people can say into different categories, that’s only going to lead to control and limitations on the open web.

That’s also kind of the point. It’s not about what information is out there. It’s about what gets surfaced and promoted and pushed to us. And for too long now we’ve let the worst of what we’ve got rise to the top. It’s causing our platforms to decay and break down, and it’s making people question whether we actually do want to start controlling what can and cannot get said. I care too deeply about the open web for that.

I don’t always like the way we talk about the ideas of the IndieWeb and the Small Web, and protocols like ActivityPub and Solid, and innovations like the Fediverse, as if they are developer playthings. Useful for some people, and technically interesting, but not realistic long term futures for the web. We sometimes act like they don’t matter, excerpt for some short term experimentation.

But they matter. A lot. They may be the key to all of this. If we want to separate people from bad information, we have to first separate them from the silos that produce and amplify it. We can’t just eliminate it.

So please, keep up those experiments. Keep pushing. Find more ways to break free that are interesting and borderline unworkable and contradictory. That way we don’t have to monitor what kind of information is acceptable and unacceptable for everyone. We only have to decide that for ourselves.