A rare treat, Sacha Baron Cohen, speaking out of character as his intelligent and articulate self, during his recent, ADL International Leadership Award acceptance speech.
https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=180
A rare treat, Sacha Baron Cohen, speaking out of character as his intelligent and articulate self, during his recent, ADL International Leadership Award acceptance speech.
https://youtu.be/ymaWq5yZIYM?t=180
Veerrry nice!
Couldn't resist, sorry. Very good speech, definitely worth watching. And he even goes into the meaning of "free speech" which it seems that almost nobody on the Internet understands.
Last edited by jgl; 27-11-2019 at 10:31 AM.
I've watched SBC's speech and now I've read Masnick's rebuttal.
Masnick has taken the easy option to criticise without offering any solutions of his own.
My summary of SBC's speech:
* Social Media is out of control and needs be reigned in
* Social Media should be governed by some kind of framework, as broadcast media is today
I think Masnicks' comparison between the Japanese girls and SBC is completely off the mark, for the simple reason SBC's 'victims' were sharing the same language and chose to follow on regardless, not even mentioning the 'niceness' of two young girls vs any of SBC's characters ..
My take - instead of shooting the messenger (SBC's comedy work has next to nothing to do with his speech) - perhaps more effort could be spent on analysing the problem.
It is surely not so different from other channels of information. If you get all your news from TVB you would have a very skewed view of the world. Laws for all non-print media to present a balanced view should be passed.
Be careful what you wish for. People championing this idea of social media companies censoring content always naively think that they would never get censored themselves, it is the other guy saying offensive things.
But they don't understand that censorship must be broad to work. It is subjective and companies cannot risk toeing the fine line of what is and isn't considered hate speech, fake news or offensive. In the end they must take sledge hammer to anything that is remotely related to anything offensive.
This is how you end up with people complaining about Twitter not allowing Climate Change or Democrats' ads after they implemented their no political ads policy, or YouTube demonetising and censoring content about LGBT issues and sex.
You can't have it both ways, either you don't censor or you get censored.
I think the point to note here is this - one can choose to only watch TVB or only read SCMP. This is an intrinsic choice.
However, when algorithms are determining what's shown at you, they have the ability of shifting views and biases. In this, you do not have much choice.
BBC reports that Apple, Instagram and others have apps to "buy" slaves, including a 16 yr kid
https://www.facebook.com/IvanBwowe/v...1381114727200/
My simplistic view: Making it illegal to reference/create news from social media posts would probably do a lot to control the problem. If Twitter shit storms or Facebook ramblings could only stay on that particular website and couldn't be turned into mainstream news we all would be better off.Original Post Deleted