
Sacha Baron Cohen: Facebook would have let Hitler buy ads for 'final solution' - yevster
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/movies/sacha-baron-cohen-facebook-would-have-let-hitler-buy-ads-for-final-solution/ar-BBXaK3S
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mcguire
Duplicate?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21606642)

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Vaslo
Hah yeah and the same top comment on both...

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dang
Comments moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21604394),
which was posted first.

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cs702
dang: thank you for choosing the other thread over this one. (I felt compelled
to comment on both threads due to the clickbaity, potentially incendiary
nature of this thread's headline, which doesn't do justice to the speech.)

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kostko
The irony... ADL is against free speech.

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cs702
This is a thought-provoking speech.

Do yourself a favor and _watch it in its entirety_ \-- before commenting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM)

Among the many thorny issues and questions raised by Cohen:

* The business model of social media companies is powered by _engagement_ , which is greatest for content that arouses the basest instincts and feelings of human beings, including fear and hatred. Social media companies earn more with the basest content.

* Social media companies are ideal propaganda machines, enabling anyone willing to appeal to the worst in human nature to reach billions of people with a click.

* Do social media companies bear responsibility for the negative impact their products have on society, in the same way that, say, car companies bear responsibility for faulty engines or airplane manufacturers bear responsibility for faulty plane designs?

* Are social media companies _publishers_ , like broadcast TV networks, magazines, and newspapers? Should social media companies be held to decency standards, like all publishers?

I'm barely scratching the surface.

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole thing!

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dang
Please don't post duplicate comments to HN! It lowers signal-noise ratio and
makes it hard to merge threads. Now that the threads are merged, we have to go
find the other copies and kill them, and if they have replies, move the
replies to the surviving copy. That takes REPL work and is a pain.

Here's what to do instead: when you notice that a discussion has forked and
your comment is languishing in the losing branch, email hn@ycombinator.com and
get us to merge them. Then your comment will get moved to the winning branch,
and you've benefited the whole community with an un-split discussion.

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cs702
dang: Will do from now on.

Funnily enough, right before you posted this comment I had responded to you,
explaining my decision to post twice, here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21609044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21609044)

Please feel free to delete my parent comment :-)

