The Internet is Broken: Part 1

13-06-2017 11:08:42

After four decades, the internet has started corroding both itself and the users. Although it is still an awesome and magnificent invention right now they are problems in its foundation and trolls in its basement. There is a problem in the way the internet it was designed originally that initially looked like a good feature but hackers, trolls and malevolent actors have exploited that feature. The inventors of the web gave it a compounding architecture that connected all the computers on the web using a one-way hyperlink that can only tell you where you’re going but does not tell the owner of the content who is using his or her content. Initially, the advantages of this anonymity outweighed its disadvantages as it was celebrated in the 1993 New York Cartoon “on the Internet, nobody knows who you’re”. However, lately, this has poisoned civil discussions, enabled hacking, allowed people to cyber bully each other and made using electronic email a risk. It is obvious the internet’s lack of security allowed the Russian hackers to screw the United States democratic process.

The “internet is broken”. This can be seen in its inadequacy of identification and authentication visible in the internet’s genetic code that has disallowed easy transactions, averted financial inclusion, disorganised the business models of content creators and unleashed spam. According to Walter Isaacson CEO at Aspen Institute “The internet is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora, every day more sites are eliminating comments sections” he said. 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 behaviour like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them”. The problem now on the internet is due to this anonymity no one can tell if you’re a troll, or a hacker or a bot or a high school teenager publishing a story that Donald Trump has resigned.




The “internet is broken” can also be observed in the “Youtube ad-apocalypse”. The Youtube advertising relies on what’s called programmatic advertising that uses algorithm’s and not human’s to dictate placement. For decades Youtube has been the leader in the online video industry with porous restrictions surrounding graphic and offensive contents and content creators spewing contents traditional broadcasters classify as hate speech. This made Youtube increase its popularity. Youtube due to its immunity by the Federal law is not held responsible for supporting the hosting of illegal content, copyrighted material or terrorist propaganda. Youtube which enjoys four hundred hours of video uploaded every sixty seconds and one billion hours of video consumed every day is now incapable of policing its platform against those hateful content videos that its content advertisers want nothing to do with. According to Wall Street Journal findings, PepsiCo, Walmart, Dish, Starbucks and GM have pulled their advertising joining a growing list of dozens of companies in Europe and the US since London Times first spotted the problem. The reason for the massive pull out from Youtube is Google’s inability to ensure that content advertisers ad does not appear next to hateful and offensive content. It turned that this algorithm that allocates the ad’s that run before or after videos automatically was not differentiating between videos that are “brand friendly” and those that are not.



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