Al Gore, who once boasted about inventing the Internet, is speaking out about what his brainchild has become.
“But in the United States and in Western countries and other nations that have adopted a form of representative democracy, that’s similar to the one innovated in the US, the shift from an information ecosystem based on print to one based on broadcasting and then moving on to the internet and to social media has disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better,” Al Gore claimed.
“These centralized information systems tempt autocrats to control information,” he continued. “Hitler’s book, the Triumph of the Will implies a question triumph over what? One thing it triumphs over is the authority of knowledge.”
“Because a free self-governing people rely on a shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively,” he went on. “But if you have social media that is dominated by algorithms that pull people down these rabbit holes that are a bit like picture plants, these algorithms, they are the digital equivalent of AR-15s.”They ought to be banned. They really ought to be banned.”
“It’s an abuse of the public forum,”