Social media content too 'ghastly' for humans to monitor, Tim Berners-Lee says

Social media content is too “ghastly” to be monitored by humans, the British inventor of the web has said. Tim Berners-Lee warned that sifting through harmful and dangerous online content was an “awful job to do” that left people “changed” by the things they saw.

His comments come as the 64-year-old, who is seen as the father of the modern internet, called for a “mid-course correction” from Governments and tech giants to prevent the web “plunging towards things which could be really bad.”

On Sunday, Mr Berners-Lee gave this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture to mark 30 years since he created the world wide web system at CERN that now forms the basic architecture of the internet.

Following the lecture, Ian Russell, whose 14-year-old daughter Molly took her own life in 2017 after viewing self-harm and suicide marterial on Instagram, asked Mr Berners-Lee if he felt it was as difficult to clean up dangerous content online as tech firms claimed.

Facebook, which owns Instagram, now employs over 20,000 human moderators worldwide to take down prohibited content flagged by users and artificial intelligence systems.

It’s latest figures show that Instagram removed almost 10,000 pieces of self-harm and suicide content every day between April and September this year.

Mr Berners-Lee described the proliferation of such content as “a really big problem” but said that artificial intelligence programmes appeared unable to remove it without human help.

Asked if social media companies should hire more people to remove harmful content, Mr Berners-Lee said: “Then you have a human being who is paid probably not very much to sit all of their working life looking at things that are borderline really horrible and ghastly.

“It is not so much the pay, it is that it is an awful job to do. They end up being changed as it is more than a person can take to be constantly asked to make these decisions and to see this horrible stuff.”

During his speech, Mr Berners-Lee also called on Governments and tech giants to sign up to a new ‘contract for the web’ and to find ways to combat mass misinformation and data abuses.

He added: “The web does not have to stay the way it is now. It can be changed, it should be changed, it needs to be changed.”