Web inventor: Twitter transom getting extreme

Sir Tim Burners Lee, the technologist who invented the building blocks which made the World Wide Web possible, must be wondering what's happening to his creation. After watching the extreme comments he sometimes saw flying across the Twitter transom during the net neutrality debate, Berners-Lee says that it's time to find a way to improve the tone of cyber-discourse.

Berners-Lee voiced his critique during a gathering in Oxford, England of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards organization he directs. Net neutrality is the principle that regulation is needed over Internet Service Providers that would require them to treat all data equally.

"Watching the Twitter stream go by, I noticed what people said -- people who understood what it [net neutrality] was and people who didn't understand what it was -- all of the tweets were extreme," Berners-Lee said. "They were just foaming at the mouth, frustrated with how stupid President Obama was that he didn't do complete net neutrality, or foaming at the mouth at how stupid President Obama was because he was sneaking this net neutrality thing in to take control of the internet before the next election so that he could win. They were all foaming at the mouth, furious."

In the case of net neutrality, Berners-Lee was quoted saying that while there were two sides to the argument, those comments get drowned out. "One possibility is that Twitter, in that case, is a medium which was only amplifying the emotionally charged," he said.

All that set the table for his challenge: "How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?" he said.

No official response yet from Twitter.

This isn't the first time Berners-Lee has publicly faulted social media for failures. Last year, he criticized Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster for erecting so-called wall gardens that prevent the free flow of information on the Internet.