The Sacha Baron Cohen Thing about Zuckerberg et al

It's not the fault of people who gobble up misinformation and racist memes on Facebook. ... It's the fault of Facebook itself and the guy who gave people Facebook.

Did anyone else find it ironic at all that a guy who has made his name playing fictional characters that try to dupe people. . ... was essentially calling out the internet and social media platforms because they allow people to dupe others?

I get that he thinks what he does is righteous because he is trying to expose all the isms. And Facebook isn't righteous, because bad people can use it to promulgate those isms.

But the kind of censorship he is essentially advocating for would necessarily have to shut down his career.

 

Not everyone is in on it. The joke is always that his marks are NOT in on the joke.

DD, the point I wanted to make was that I found it ironic.... a guy whose shtick is duping people should be careful about advocating censorship or regulation of others on the basis of how their platforms can be used dishonestly.

 

You can't have an " 'anyone with a brain' can tell the difference" or "One is 'art of the highest order,' " standard for regulating one type of speech for some reason, and excluding other things that (less subjectively) fall afoul of the same standard.

That is putting aside the fact that our constitution (thankfully) protects speech -- even hate, false infomation, etc. -- and it should be incumbent on each of us to evaluate the truth of all the freely diseminated stuff we are bombarded with for ourselves. ...not have a truth ministry type of law doing it for us. That is so dangerous to a free society.

You (and I do, too for what it is worth) think his characters are funny and are good at "finding people without brains and showing how out of touch they can be." But when someone else disagrees and says, "No, what he is doing is disguising his intentions and using false information to try to trick people into taking something false as the truth," they are essentially making the same argument you made about some of the things other people use facebook as a platform for.

Which is where I saw the irony in him trying to be this messenger. ... given how he has made his name.

I am against any kind of censorship or regulation of speech like the type he is advocating for. Particularly when it isn't just a pressure campaign to try to get the platforms to do the bidding of the people advocating for the censorship. ... but even worse, when it is people wanting our government to create the speech restrictions.

What gets me about people like him is that everyhing they advocate for is predicated on their sensibilities of what is harmful speech as pposed to what is righteous or satirical or good intentioned and doesn't need to be regulated that way. The fact that nobody agrees about stuff like that is why in order to actually have free speech, it needs to be an absolute right, not one with subjective standards of what is OK and what isn't. Otherwise, it is meaningless.