Bill Gates spends a lot of his time and money trying to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems — from climate change to poverty. One major problem has even him stumped.
“Misinformation is the one where I, a little bit, had to punt and say, ‘OK, we’ve handed this problem to the younger generation,’” Gates tells CNBC Make It.
Misinformation is becoming more common, as technological advances like artificial general intelligence chatbots make it easier to generate and spread falsehoods quickly. AI-generated misinformation was named as the top global risk of the next two years in a World Economic Forum survey in January. Fifty-five percent of Americans said the U.S. government and tech companies should act to restrict false information online, in a 2023 survey by the Pew Research Center.
Gates, the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, is likely more familiar with misinformation than he’d care to be. But a conversation with his daughter Phoebe further opened his eyes on the issue’s severity, he says.
“Hearing my daughter talk about how she’d been harassed online, and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn’t thought about before,” says Gates.
Last year, Phoebe Gates spoke out about what she called “the misconceptions and conspiracy theories” about her family and her own relationships in an interview with The Information, including racist online commentary about one of her ex-boyfriends, who is Black.
Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder, is set to tackle the topic in an upcoming five-part Netflix docuseries called “What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates,” due to premiere on September 18. In an advance screening of the series provided to Make It, Gates tells his daughter he feels bad for not having a handy solution to slow the spread of misinformation.
Other issues, like eradicating diseases or promoting cleaner energy, still aren’t easy to solve — but they have clearer paths to solutions, he tells Make It.
Gates is still overcoming his ‘naivete’
When Gates started Microsoft, he thought most people would want to use home computers — and later the internet — for purely productive and responsible purposes, he says. When he began working on the docuseries, he still harbored some of “my naivete that when we made information available, that people would want correct information,” he adds.
Instead, speaking with misinformation experts while filming helped Gates realize: He too shares the human impulse to seek out information that confirms previously held beliefs.
“Even I will wallow,” he says. “Let’s say there’s a politician I don’t like, and there’s some article online criticizing him a little bit. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s such a good critique [and] I enjoyed reading it, even if it was exaggerated.’”
Gates says he isn’t entirely sure how to stop the spread of misinformation. He’s sensitive to the counter-argument that restricting any type of information online could harm the right of free speech, yet agrees that some kinds of rules need to be established, he says. By whom, he’s not totally sure, he adds.
Common tactics to tamp down misinformation and disinformation include internet literacy programs and content moderation by social media platforms. Some tech companies have pulled back on those costly efforts, which only scratch the surface of the problem, according to researchers who study disinformation.
Google executive Beth Goldberg told Make It last year that technology could help, with researchers developing AI tools to identify misinformation and toxic speech online. But the nature of a technology arms race — someone creates a solution, someone else figures out how to get around it — means “it won’t be a perfect success,” Gates wrote in a blog post last year.
The problem isn’t going away, either: It’s already far too easy for false information to spread to the billions of people actively using the internet, says Gates.
“And, if you catch it a day later, the harm is done,” he says.
