Governments in Southeast Asia use Facebook as public evidence of wrongdoing, imprisoning activists and journalists for expressing dissent. Facebook does not have an office in Cambodia or Myanmar, and only a small office in Thailand despite its popularity in the countries. Facebook is affecting Southeast Asia politically just as much as the rest of the world, but the tech giant does not seem to act.
Facebook can't cope with the world it's created - Business Insider
But too often web companies just plow ahead without understanding the consequences. He criticized the likes of Google, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. for creating advertising systems that, for example, incentivized fake-news purveyors in Veles, Macedonia, “who learned that if you tweet something which is wrong, and put an article with a fake headline on your site, you will get more clicks and more ad revenue. “They didn’t do that out of malice,” Berners-Lee said. “They did it completely commercially, not even caring about who won the election. … But Google gave them money [to do it], and that trained them to think of headlines like, ‘Hillary really wants Trump to win.’”
Toward the end of the chat, Berners-Lee said it was important for people to be able to own and control their own data and that companies should think twice before assuming it’s a business asset. “It used to be said that data is the new oil,” he said. “Personally, I think it’s like nuclear fuel. It’s becoming toxic. Two years ago, the question from the board was, ‘How are we monetizing the data?’ Now the question is, “How are we protecting ourselves from the damage of this getting out?’”
I asked Berners-Lee if he owned a connected assistant like the Amazon Echo or Google Home. The answer, he said, is no; he believes that when conversations and queries are recorded in our home and transferred to the cloud, they inevitably become vulnerable to intruders and accessible to prying governments. Sounding very unlike the web pioneer who created the web nearly three decades ago, he vowed, “We must resist these technologies.”
Father of the Web Confronts His Creation in the Era of Fake News - Bloomberg