Anti-Defamation League
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2025
24:44 · 2.3M views · Nov 22, 2019
Sacha Baron Cohen's speech accepting the ADL International Leadership Award, in which he criticizes social media companies for amplifying hate and propaganda. He argues that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.
Quoted heavily in moderation and free speech debates, particularly the line about freedom of speech and reach.
18 comments from Hacker News
This is a thought-provoking speech. Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: this video Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen: * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement , which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content. * Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click. * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs? * Are social media companies publishers , like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers? I'm barely scratching the surface. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!
This is a thought-provoking speech. Do yourself a favor and watch it in its entirety -- before commenting: this video Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen: * The business model of social media companies is powered by engagement , which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content. * Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click. * Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs? * Are social media companies publishers , like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers? I'm barely scratching the surface. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!
Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It is as if the age of reason -- the era of evidential argument -- is ending. Knowledge is de-legitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy which depends on shared truths is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history. The above is by Sacha Baron Cohen, see: this video More excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen this video Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the "pedophile hillary pizza place" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society. Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like "Hillary is an alien" and "Vaccines cause autism" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it. This guy can explain it better than I do: this video