The creator of the internet advocates limiting social media to those under 16 years old

BarcelonaTim Berners-Lee is one of the men who has changed the world. Born in London in 1955, he is a computer engineer and also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known worldwide as the creator of the World Wide Web (www), the revolution that allowed communication between a client and a server for the first time and, in doing so, changed the history of the internet. In a conference at the Talent Arena at the Montjuïc Fair, the space for digital talent promoted by MWCapital alongside Mobile World Congress, Berners-Lee criticized the massive use of addictive algorithms on social media and argued that some countries should ban social networks or phones in response.

"I'm happy with most of the evolution of the web, but there are some things that disappoint me, and those are the things that lead Australians to say that phones shouldn't be used until the age of 16, for example," Berners-Lee pointed out. "Part of the web runs on addictive algorithms; the part where social media is. They've learned to train AI and optimize it to keep people on the platform, and these parts of the web are a problem," the computer scientist criticized.

In this sense, Berners-Lee has especially criticized TikTok, and compared it to Pinterest, a network that does work without these kinds of algorithms: "Both are social networks, but one of them is much more addictive than the other. When they're designing systems, developers choose whether or not to use addictive systems, before an audience full of developers and students who are creating apps: 'Many systems feed people things that are unpleasant. So if you're building a system, this is the red line. Don't deliberately offend people with unpleasant things or things that aren't true.'" fake news "They might get more clicks, but it shouldn't be done. Don't design it like TikTok," he urged.

Berners-Lee also explained that he had recently been in Australia and found that not all children were against the ban; on the contrary. "I think some have discovered that having a world where they can play without phones with friends is quite something." Regarding open source: "The spirit of open-source developers around the world is where I draw my hope," he concluded.

Berners-Lee is considered a man who changed the world, at least the world of technology and data. Without the World Wide Web, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist. Berners-Lee, awarded a Turing Prize—considered the Nobel Prize of computing—in 2016, began his professional career at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the late 1980s, where he identified a problem shared by thousands of researchers: the difficulty of exchanging information between computer systems. In 1989, he proposed a hypertext system to connect documents over the internet; this idea would become the World Wide Web. During the early 1990s, he developed the technical foundations of the web, such as HTML, HTTP, and URLs, and promoted its open and free distribution: "It was very important that it wasn't free," he emphasized. In 1993, CERN made it freely available, which accelerated its global expansion. Later, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to ensure open standards and preserve a universal web. "Initially, I didn't think it would become so big. I didn't do it thinking globally, even though I gave it that name. I simply wanted to launch it into the world and see what happened, and the rest is history," Berners-Lee concluded.