Social media: ‘Greatest propaganda’ tool ever
Actor Sacha Baron Cohen tells ADL, ‘If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’.”
Sacha Baron Cohen made a career out of playing absurd comedic characters, from the dopey Brit Ali G to the Kazakh journalist Borat to the Israeli veteran Erran Morad. He rarely gives interviews and stays relatively far from the movie star limelight.
But on Thursday, Cohen tossed aside the humorous facade to excoriate, in a non-ironic speech, the social media industry and the “autocracy” he says it promotes.
After receiving the international leadership award from the Anti-Defamation League at its annual conference at the Javits Center in Manhattan, the British Jewish comedian slammed social media sites as the “greatest propaganda machine in history” — reserving most of his 15-minute speech to specifically critique Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
“Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear,” Cohen said. “It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth.
“And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, ‘Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook’.”
Cohen spent a significant part of his speech criticizing a recent address Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown University in which the Facebook founder spoke about the importance of upholding free expression on social media. Cohen called out Facebook for allowing political ads on its platform without verifying the veracity of their claims. Twitter and Google recently took steps to ban such ads.
“Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’,” Cohen said.
The actor also urged social media sites to consider delaying real-time posts that could spread hateful content, citing the gunman who attacked two mosques in New Zealand and livestreamed his attack.
“Why can’t we have more of a delay so this trauma-inducing filth can be caught and stopped before it’s posted in the first place?” he asked.
Cohen said that social media companies should be held responsible for the content spread on their sites, referencing a federal law that shields them from liability for specific posts.
“Maybe it’s time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies: You already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections, you already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar, do it again and you go to jail,” Cohen said. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about basic human decency.”
Cohen addressed the idea that he promotes anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies, which groups like the ADL have criticized.
“Now I’m not going to claim that everything I’ve done has been for a higher purpose,” he said. “But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing ‘Throw the Jew down the well,’ it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism.”
“On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate,” Cohen said. “Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.
“When I, as the wanna-be-gangsta Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin ‘what woz it like to walk on de sun?’ the joke worked, because we, the audience, shared the same facts. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke was not funny.”
He continued: “When people in that [Arizona] bar agreed ‘that Jews control everybody’s money and never give it back,’ the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.”
