Facebook receives plenty of pointed criticism from numerous corners, for refusing to police political speech on Facebook, its seemingly endless string of privacy breaches, and its apparent coziness of late with the Trump administration.
One of the platform’s most prominent critics, somewhat unexpectedly, has become comic, writer, and actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Indeed, his powerful speech to the Anti-Defamation League in November, characterizing Facebook as the “greatest propaganda machine in history,” quickly went viral. (We republished it here.)
Baron Cohen isn’t done railing against Zuckerberg, however. Yesterday, he tweeted in frustration, “We don’t let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people. We don’t let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people. Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people? Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor!
We don’t let 1 person control the water for 2.5 billion people.
We don’t let 1 person control electricity for 2.5 billion people.
Why do we let 1 man control the information seen by 2.5 billion people?
Facebook needs to be regulated by governments, not ruled by an emperor! pic.twitter.com/o4hNRFNpgt
— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) February 5, 2020
Soon after, Tesla founder Elon Musk responded to the morning diatribe, himself tweeting “#DeleteFacebook it’s lame.”
#DeleteFacebook It’s lame
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2020
It was short, sweet, and to the point (and presumably gave Cohen a lift).
One might imagine that Musk, who has always spoken his mind, has been emboldened of late thanks to the skyrocketing value of Tesla of late. But Musk has long been a critic of Facebook, tweeting in 2018 after deleting his companies’ Facebook pages that he doesn’t “like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry.”
Musk and Zuckerberg have butted heads in the past over the future of artificial intelligence, too, with Musk calling Zuckerberg’s understanding of the future of AI “limited” in 2017.
