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"The Internet is broken" - Negative effects of social communications

2/6/17

A co-founder of Twitter says he's sorry if the popular social media platform helped put Donald Trump in the White House, as the president has suggested.
In an interview with The New York Times, Evan Williams says Twitter's role in Trump's populist rise is "a very bad thing.''
The president has credited Twitter with his election to the highest office in the land.
To a certain kind of nerd, Ev Williams is the Forrest Gump of internet media. Williams helped write the software that made us call blogs blogs. He founded a podcast company years before most people listened to them. He sent Twitter’s 75th tweet, then ran the company. And now he’s the founder and CEO of Medium, the platform for online writing embraced by sportswriters, Silicon Valley executives, and the President of the United States.
The online environment has several content problems that require solvation affirmed Twitter and Medium co-founder Evan Williams.
Williams believes social platforms tend to encourage deviant and antisocial behaviors, expressing his regret when it came to Donald Trump’s victory.
“I think the internet is broken,” he says. He has believed this for a few years, actually. But things are getting worse. “And it’s a lot more obvious to a lot of people that it’s broken.”
People are using Facebook to showcase suicides, beatings and murder, in real time. Twitter is a hive of trolling and abuse that it seems unable to stop. Fake news, whether created for ideology or profit, runs rampant. Four out of 10 adult internet users said in a Pew survey that they had been harassed online. And that was before the presidential campaign heated up last year.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”
The American entrepreneur reached this conclusion for a while now but the situation became even worse.
‘It’s more and more clear that the Internet is broken’, pinpointed the tech expert.
Considering that, these days, people use Facebook or Instagram to broadcast homicides, rapes and aggression live, the fact that the Internet is not exactly the safest place it’s pretty clear.
Meanwhile, Twitter transformed into this network of cynical, harassing and abusive comment.
Fake news, created to promote wrong ideologies or to generate profit are daily occurrences.
Four from ten adults who use the internet revealed that, at least once in their life, they’ve been harassed online.
‘I thought that, if people are able to express themselves freely, the world will become a better place. I was wrong’, added Williams.
‘The problem with the internet is the fact that it encourages everything thst is extreme. For example, you drive on a highway and you notice a car crash. You tend to stare. Everyone stares. However, the internet interprets this behavior like the people would want to see more crashes’, explained the Twitter co-founder.
The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.. His goal is to break this pattern. “If I learn that every time I drive down this road I’m going to see more and more car crashes,” he says, “I’m going to take a different road.”

But a new road may have other problems. It may, for instance, be a dead end./.
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For A Peace World 2/6/17 21:50

President Trump has said he believes Twitter put him in the White House. Recently, Mr. Williams heard the claim for the first time. He mulled it over for a bit, “It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” he said finally. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”

LawrenceSamuels 2/6/17 21:53

The world needs more effective measures to monitor and keep Internet environment clean!

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