Majorityrights News > Category: British Politics

Sacha Baron Cohen Calls Out Social Media as ‘the Greatest Propaganda Machine in History’

In a recent Anti-Defamation League keynote, Cohen outlines how internet companies have fueled bigotry and hate speech. But he has a solution.

IndieWire, 21 Nov 2019:

Sacha Baron Cohen has courted controversy his entire career, portraying characters, from Ali G and Borat to Bruno, that have pissed off all groups from left to right.

He’s an equal-opportunity offender, but his alter-egos have long served to expose the hypocrisies of society by mocking humanity’s worst tendencies. His 2018 Showtime series “Who Is America?” tackles humankind’s dark side head-on by bait-and-switching real-life figures to catch them in their blind spots. In the show, he got Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit, former chief justice Roy Moore to take a pedophile lie-detector test, and “The Bachelor” star Corinne Olympios to endorse the training of child soldiers on camera.

But at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate, Baron Cohen took off his comedy hat when honored with the ADL’s International Leadership Award. He used the platform to deliver a keynote outlining how social media and the information it disseminates have fueled the bigotry dominating the current political moment in the U.S. (Watch full video of the speech below.)

“Yes, some of my comedy, OK probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile and the other half completely puerile,” he said. “I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

“Think about it. 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,” Baron Cohen said, adding that “it’s time for a fundamental rethink of social media and how it spreads hate, conspiracies and lies.”

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Well done, Andy. A bit hyperbolic to express relief over his not having been sentenced to jail, when fines, restitution, hundreds of hours of imposed community service and sex offender registration is hyperbolic enough. That quibble aside, to articulate this sort of feminist insane injustice is a needed social service. Thanks.

I recall myself, in my teens and twenties, ‘peon’ guilty-of-everything White man that I was, being overwrought with complexty and yes, ambivalence at having to approach the all too precious and valuable princess…

..already conditioned for the mine field of sudden, shrill, egregiuos interpretations of my motives that could be detonated with any awkward misstep.

...conditioned by the pervasive hostility of my mother and general social atmosphere of feminist insanity, but most accutely, by the sudden, shrill, humiliating reactions from my feminist older sister if, for example, I expressed preference for a beautiful woman, or perhaps noticed a nice female ass; I was overwhelmed by a horrible intentional oscillation regarding women.

Now, you must understand that I was getting something like thousands of volts of electricity sent through my forebrain by the manly incitements of my father and brothers as well…

...good and scrambled, I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in this context…

...that I was able to locate and orient my ownmost innocence by asserting the truth that I was willing to take my equal in a woman on 1 -10 scales of physicality, emotion and intellect. That is, I knew for myself that I was fair.

However, this does not necessarily make up for missing confirmation… puerile females can be absurdly punishing of any sort of timidity, while overvaluing sheer confidence at horrific cost to intellectual and social capital.