‘It’s lame!’: Elon Musk wants you to ‘delete Facebook’ immediately (metro.co.uk).
Sasha Baron Cohen: ‘Let’s think about it. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter and others—they reach billions of people—and 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.’
The billionaire famously pulled down his personal profile as well as the pages of Tesla and SpaceX in 2018.
Now he’s jumped on Twitter to issue an anti-Facebook message in response to a tweet from Sasha Baron Cohen which said: ‘Why do we let one man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people?’
Seemingly more a rehashing of some likely beef he has with nawty Zuck when the virtual spotlight had fallen on him for expressing it time to #DeleteFacebook at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Blog updated 29th March 2018) and seemingly again more of a PR “jump” than anything else with regards the awkward, outspoken messes the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has found himself over the last few years.
The Metro article then proceeded to focus on what comedian Cohen, an outspoken critic of the monolithic social network, had said, which was much more than Musk’s hashtag-including sentence urging his 31m followers to “#DeleteFacebook It’s lame“Musk had used to steal that virtual spotlight again:
“Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It’s as if the age of reason—the era of evidential argument—is ending, and now knowledge is de-legitimised and scientific consensus is dismissed,’ [Cohen] said.
With much talk of “democracy” and “shared truths” being “in retreat” in the post-truth age with the help of those more interested in “boosting their share price than protecting democracy”, although some may have wondered if he had Ali G’s jumpsuit or Borat’s mankini on at the time. But Musk had perhaps not read all, with Cohen not limiting his distaste to Fidiotbook:
“Let’s think about it. Facebook, YouTube, Google and Twitter and others—they reach billions of people—and 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.”
With that “appeal to our baser instincts” perhaps resulting in Elon Musk calling the British caver who helped in last year’s rescue of trapped Thai schoolboys a “pedo guy” to keep the millions on his social media platform of choice, toxic Twitter, “engaged” after the caver had called his attempt to assist with an awkward untested mini-submarine seemingly built out of spare Tesla parts a PR stunt, with all seemingly of the opinion, besides his expensive team of lawyers and the American legal system who found him innocent when, after provoking him on Twitter to sue him, it went to court last year (bbc.co.uk, Dec. 2019), that he had indeed defamed the caver, but with the court determining that it was nothing more than a mere playground insult frequently used in his native South Africa despite the fact the thin-skinned, bullying business magnate had then hired a private investigator to try and prove it. Indeed, #DeleteToxicTwitterToo.
And so back to Cohen’s diatribe of “unelected” executives in Silicon Valley:
“If we make that our aim—if we prioritise truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses—then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work,” he said.
But then again perhaps it’s as much the human nature of getting attention on those platforms that makes free speech and free expression synonymous with arsehattery, and while allowing those with fame and fortune to grandstand and narcissise and allows everyone else to “prioritise” having their say and to indulge in the seemingly global hobbies of complaining and demeaning that before would have languished somewhere on Blogger, Wordpress, or indeed your own home-rolled Latest Picks micro-blog rather than be picked up by tabloids eager to print playground feuding now played out on the world stage, reminding some of the reasons why they don’t engage: Wot no social media?
Recent/related stories
- US regulators approve record $5bn data privacy violations fine on Facebook (Latest Picks 13th July 2019)
- New AI text generator [backed by Elon Musk] too dangerous to release for fears of fake news (Latest Picks 14th February 2019)
- Elon Musk: Chance we are not living in a computer simulation is ‘one in billions’ (Blog 3rd June 2016)
Share this story