On Friday, Twitter banned Donald Trump from his favorite platform, citing the potential of the 45th president to generate more violence after the week’s deadly riot on U.S. Capitol Hill. The ban followed Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to bar Trump indefinitely from Facebook, limiting the president’s ability to communicate directly with tens of millions of his most diehard supporters. The move has sparked praise from liberal sectors and condemnation from conservatives who believe it is an example of Silicon Valley exaggeration.
For Sacha Baron Cohen, it was the culmination of an extensive campaign, which saw the comedian use his celebrity to mount an extraordinarily consistent effort to pressure big technology to suppress QAnon and other marginal and far-right groups. Shortly after Twitter enacted its ban, Baron Cohen, one of the most outspoken critics of the role of social media in spreading conspiracy theories and hate speech, was enthusiastic.
“We did it,” he tweeted. He followed that tweet with another message: “This is the most important moment in the history of social media. The world’s largest platforms have banned the world’s largest provider of lies, conspiracies and hatred. To all the employees, users and supporters of Facebook and Twitter who fought for it – the whole world is grateful! “
During an extensive interview for a recent Variety the cover story about his star turns into “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7”, Baron Cohen made it clear that he was concerned that social media platforms posed an existential threat to democracy.
“Authoritarian regimes have shared lies, democracies have a system of shared facts,” said Baron Cohen. “People have their own opinions about this system of shared facts. Social media is predisposed to spread lies and conspiracy theories, while the truth is very boring and boring. Thus, people do not want to wait for the truth and do not want to share the truth. “
Baron Cohen went public for the first time with many of these concerns in 2019, at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now meeting, where he presented a violent withdrawal from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media companies direct approach to policing his content. He then helped form Stop Hate for Profit, a coalition of advocacy groups and civil rights organizations that included NAACP, Free Press and ADL. This organization mounted boycotts of advertisers and convinced celebrities to stop posting on Instagram in protest. It is one of the reasons why Facebook banned QAnon and Twitter started offering disclaimers on content that made baseless allegations about electoral fraud. It was not a position, that of digital Cassandra, that Baron Cohen avidly embraced.
“I spent my entire career trying to escape advertising,” he said Variety during the cover interview, adding: “Although I was aware of the dangers of social media from 2015 onwards, I was trying to find a celebrity who really took the cause. They know who they are, but I’ve approached several celebrities over the years, trying to say, ‘Listen, this is the problem now. That is very dangerous. Will you be the spokesperson for the cause? ‘They all refused. “
When he spoke to Variety in December, Baron Cohen was eerily prescient in outlining the risks he thought some of these allegations of electoral fraud posed even after Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden.
“The danger of Trump and Trump-ism will remain,” said Baron Cohen. “We still have 80% of those who voted for Trump believing that the election was stolen and that is a very dangerous figure. I’m a comedian and an actor. I am not a historian or sociologist, but having spoken to some of the eminent historians who specialize in how democracies become authoritarian regimes, there is a consensus that when you have a large part of the population that you believe has been wronged, that segment of population can be used to do horrible things. “
The connection between this type of outrage and the violence it can provoke was vividly shown during the Capitol insurrection. Baron Cohen also predicted that social media platforms could have a deleterious impact on the ability of public health officials to encourage Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine.
“What if [social media companies] don’t act fast to prevent antivaxxers from spreading your conspiracy theories on social media, the number of people who will die will be hundreds of thousands, if not millions more, ”he said.
Zuckerberg and other figures in Silicon Valley are reluctant to crack down on conspiracy theorists because they argue that this violates freedom of expression. Baron Cohen does not believe this argument.
“They tend to keep saying the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ without any real understanding of the purpose of freedom of expression and the definition of freedom of expression or that the United States has an exceptional view of freedom of expression that has come about because of its history exceptional, ”said Baron Cohen. “There are limits to freedom of expression in Europe that arose because of the effect of Nazism. There is a form of ideological imperialism in which the opinions of a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley are imposed on the entire world. “
The star “Borat” has a new idea. He argues that Facebook, Twitter and other platforms should deploy an army of fact-checkers and digital monitors to stem the spread of conspiracy theories.
“These are trillion dollar companies,” he said. “They are run by some of the richest people in the world. There is huge unemployment now due to the coronavirus. “
Baron Cohen argued that these companies should say, “We are going to share part of that wealth. We will employ hundreds of thousands of people, potentially millions of people worldwide, and share those profits and use those people to help contain the excesses of our companies. “