Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook
I&#x27;ve watched the whole thing and while I appreaciate the sentiment, I can&#x27;t agree with it. I mostly agree with his description of the state of the worlds where platforms attempting to maximize for &quot;engagement&quot; prioritize fake news and conspiracy theories aimed at basic instincts. Hovewer, the solutions he like many other commentators on the subject is proposing, releval poor understanding and lack of consideration of the complexity and potential ramifications.<p>Here&#x27;s some quotes of him that I believe illustate it really well.<p>&gt; This is not about limiting anyone&#x27;s free speech. This it about giving people including some of the most reprehensible people on Earth the biggest platform in history to reach the third of the planet.<p>This basically advocates for banning people off Facebook if they fall into a certain category deemed undesirable.<p>In a tightly connected world social networks like Facebook play increasingly important role in people&#x27;s lives. More and more social live migrates there and losing access would have very significant career and social implications. In a way, you could compare modern day social networks to roads and highways, except privately owned. Imagine being &quot;banned&quot; from drinving on the road. Sure, you can still walk to some places, but so much opportunity would become unavailable to you just because travelling trivial distances is prohibitively expensive. In this sense, social networks become much closer to being a &quot;utility&quot; rather just a service one could choose to use or not to. I don&#x27;t think this trend is going to slow down any time soon.<p>So, maybe losing access to Facebook is not 100% equal to limiting free speech, but it&#x27;s quite close.<p>Again, maybe we could somehow limit the reach of information that has undesirable effect, but more on that futher...<p>&gt; We&#x27;re not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society, we just want them to be responsible on their platforms.<p>Leaving the ambiguity of &quot;be responsible&quot; aside here, I think these platforms are quite representative of the society as a whole. Again, Facebook is not some elitist club, it&#x27;s almost an utility being used across all of the society.<p>&gt; Now if a neo-nazi comes into a restaurant and starts threatening all the customers and say he wants to kill jews, would the owner of the restaurant, a private business, be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of cource not. The restaurant owner has every legal right and moral obligation to kick this nazi out<p>This is a perfect example of false equivalence. SBC raves about the importance of Facebook, and then compares this situation to some private restaurant. Facebook is a more like a restaurant chain, available all over the world, that dominates the market to the point where none other restaurants are able to compete and are forced to shut down. If you&#x27;re not welcome in Facebook-restaurant, you&#x27;re not welcome in all restaurants. There&#x27;s no other place you can go to to have a meal. This is a very important distinction imo.<p>&gt; Six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they&#x27;re above the reach of law. It&#x27;s like we&#x27;re living in the Roman Empire and Mark Zeckenberg is Caesar.<p>Except it&#x27;s the opposite. SBC critisizes people who refuse to become arbiters of what&#x27;s acceptable and permissible on their platforms as &quot;imposing their vision&quot; and urges them to impose more control of their own vision on their platforms. This is a very clear contradiction.<p>Again, he calls Zuch unaccountable Ceasar for refusing to exercise his power to control.<p>&gt; Now here&#x27;s an idea. Instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives, voted for by the people of every democracy in the world, have at least some say.<p>Multiple problems with this one.<p>Certain democracy in the world have elected Donald Trump. This individual has a known tendency to call any information not representing him in the best way possible &quot;fake news&quot;. He, while not being terribly informed, has opinions on almost every subject and has would love to &quot;have some say&quot; in what Facebook should and should not allow to host and what Google&#x2F;Youtube should show in its search results.<p>Having politicians control what is allowed in public discource is a terrible idea and I&#x27;m surprized SBC actually uttered this with a straight face and audience cheered. Have we all lost our minds?<p>&gt; Objective facts do exist and if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor.<p>This is so naive and idealistic and impossible in real world with the current state of technology and failing to recognize it is a massive issue.<p>&gt; Yes, drawing the line can be difficult, but here&#x27;s what he&#x27;s actually saying: removing those lies and conspiracies is just too expensive. These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They can fix these problems if they wanted to.<p>Nobody has yet proposed a solution that is actually viable and not prohibitely expensive. It doesn&#x27;t mean that the solution doesn&#x27;t exist necessary, it just means that similar to traveling salesman problem, existing tech can&#x27;t solve it at a large enough scale.<p>&gt; Twitter could deploy an algoritm to remove more white supremacist hate speech, but they have reportedly haven&#x27;t because it would eject some very prominent politicians...<p>Define &quot;white supremacist&quot; first. There&#x27;s some fringe tankies on Twitter who consider Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters white supremacists. Whose definition of &quot;white supremacy&quot; should Twitter use here? Yours? Well, you&#x27;re also one according to some.<p>It&#x27;s easy to speculate on how Twitter could just do this or that when you forget that other people might have criteria that is significanly different from yours.<p>Twitter is already in some very interesting position where they&#x27;re forced to remove tweets quoting established scientific facts in response to some crazed trans-activists because those are deemed hate-speeach (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;louiecaruana&#x2F;status&#x2F;1186861368835788801" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;louiecaruana&#x2F;status&#x2F;1186861368835788801</a>)<p>Nobody can agree on what is or is not bigotry anymore, and forcing their hand here is hardly beneficial to anyone.