Actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen recently tweeted a complaint about how Facebook is handling his posts, in ironic juxtaposition with his previous pro-censorship statements.
.@Facebook - I criticized you for not blocking false info about Covid. Now your AI is blocking my article because the photo has false info about Covid!
— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) October 13, 2020
Instead of just AI, use the $ you've made during Covid to hire more humans to moderate and factcheck!https://t.co/XV7Tf8CfKo
Cohen famously spoke at the "Never Is Now" conference, put on by the Anti Defamation League in 2019:
"The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and trigger outrage and fear. That’s why fake news outperforms real news on social media; studies show lies spread faster than truth."
"On the Internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC, and the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends."
"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"
Ironically, Cohen himself has been no stranger to controversy throughout his career and has himself faced calls for censorship for his more famous works such as the movie "Borat and its many spinoffs.
Professor Bret Weinstein, himself no stranger at a personal level to thinly-veiled censorship and cancel culture, tweeted in response:
The problem with Sacha Baron Cohen's speech is that, while it sounds like a muscular take-down of internet giants, it is cryptically an argument for these unaccountable, profit-driven companies to set the bounds of the Overton Window. What could go wrong?https://t.co/tUlf3ekRo5
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) November 22, 2019
Others on Twitter had lots to say, pointedly replying to Weinstein's tweet:
Sacha Baron Cohen lobbies for Facebook censorship.
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) October 24, 2020
Is then censored by Facebook.
"You get what you f***ing deserve." https://t.co/RBslAdallh
Given his joke history, you'd think it obvious to him by now that the hate-speech mob will NOT defend his vision of some kind of unified communal humor.
— Esteban Diaz (@estebanthediaz) November 22, 2019
I wish him luck when the tide eventually turns on him.
Worse, it calls for the government to set the parameters in which the companies are to undertake their censorious measures.
— Matthew Pritchard (@mw_pritchard) November 22, 2019
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