The 'Net is a Conspiracy to promote Conspiracy Theories.

A week after the whole United Airlines Fiasco, sir* Tim Berners Lee warns about the use of the Web as a way to to promote the ideas of the conspiracy theorists, religious nutters, corporate communicators and other assorted crazies:

The use of the web to spread fears that flicking the switch on the LHC could create a Black Hole that could swallow up the Earth particularly concerned him, he said. In a similar vein was the spread of rumours that the MMR vaccine given to children in Britain was harmful.

And I thought the Black Hole story was a feint by the LHC PR to disguise the furore about its cost ....

Anyway, Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources.

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he said. "A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

Sir Tim and colleagues at the World Wide Web consortium had looked at simple ways of branding websites - but concluded that a whole variety of different mechanisms was needed.

This has been well known for ages though - memeticists have been studying what makes some memes survive for centuries and others die very fast, and the sad conclusion is that "sticky" ideas are more like mental parasites than particulalrly good for you (a recent, fairly approachable book on this is Made to Stick).

Sir Tim's suggestion is that the Web itself accredits websites in various ways so the reader can ascertain the worthiness of the source. Duncan Riley believes that sir Tim has "Lost the plot"

Is not the very nature of the internet, a free platform for most, a conduit that allows the truth to shine when all around us is lies? Do not internet users in China find ways of bypassing the national firewall so they to can find the truth. Do not those of us in free countries benefit from receiving news that isn’t filtered and controlled by the corporate media elite? Is not this very freedom protection against wrongdoing?

While comforting, the view that the truth will shine out, of its own accord, against the best endeavours of those who will suppress it is a sticky meme itself, but seldom correct when put under scrutiny. Freedom of information has been hard fought for by our forefathers in the West, and even today is under continual attack.

This ties to one of the big themes the 'Net will have to solve over the next few years, which is around the cycle of Trust, Privacy and Identity. No one system is capable of giving an accurate picture, and any system which becomes too popular will be gamed unless there is constant vigilance (Wikipedia being the best cared for publicly available system out there at the moment).

Thus the best approach going forward will be some ability to cross reference, a sort of triangulation of trust approach, where multiple authentication sources are used.

*He doesn't like being called Sir