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Sheryl Sandberg’s Departure From Facebook: I Say Good Riddance To Bad Rubbish
The former COO should be held responsible for the mess that we are in today.
The British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, famous for his characters such as Ali G, Borat and so on, gave one of the most impassioned speeches that you will ever hear from a public figure.
In it, he talked about the extraordinary influence being wielded by social media and much more specifically — Facebook.
I have reproduced excerpts of the speech below.
What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.
The greatest propaganda machine in history.
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. 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. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread…