Post by Admin on Jan 1, 2020 23:53:35 GMT
In late November, actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen gave a talk at the Anti-Defamation League about hate speech and anti-Semitism on social media. He called Big Tech and social media "the greatest propaganda machine in history," adding: "Just think what Goebbels could have done with Facebook."
Shortly after, Facebook rejected the accusation, releasing a statement saying that hate speech is banned on the platform.
Baron Cohen's speech has received much attention and widespread support, particularly in mainstream media which echoed and disseminated his observations.
The charge of being "the greatest propaganda machine in history" is, of course, loaded and draws our attention to other propaganda machines that existed long before Facebook and which might have a claim to that dubious distinction. Among them are the American war machine and the Israeli hasbara, neither of which Baron Cohen seems to reject.
State propaganda and monopoly of information
There is some element of truth to what Baron Cohen says. There are people on the racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and white supremacist lunatic fringe that take advantage of social media to propagate hate.
Facebook and other social media platforms have, all their troubling dimensions notwithstanding, offered sites of resistance to their hegemony.
For those of us old enough to remember the mode of media coverage prior to the emergence of the internet, Baron Cohen's observations actually sound quite ludicrous.
I remember vividly when the Iranian Revolution of 1977-1979 broke out. Then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, I felt despair at being at the mercy of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any one of the three major US networks (ABC, CBS or NBC) - or particularly BBC radio - to tell me what was happening in Iran.
I remember driving to a Radio Shack shop in the King of Prussia suburb of Philadelphia to buy a short-wave device in order to listen to Tehran Radio and find out what was happening in my homeland. This is not to say that Tehran Radio told the truth and the New York Times spread lies. It just means we all needed more than one dominant and hegemonic source of news to make up our own minds.
Books have been written on how the New York Times and other major corporate media have helped state propaganda machineries. Consider Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky's 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media or Richard Falk and Howard Friel's 2007 book The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy. They both document how monopoly over information, whether state or corporate, has helped justify to the public enormous atrocities and kept it purposefully ignorant of the truth.
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