Actor Sacha Baron Cohen has described the banning of Donald Trump from Twitter as, “the most important moment in the history of social media.” The Borat star has been highly critical of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook for not doing enough to block hate speech and has been at the forefront of campaigns to get them to do so.
“We did it,” he tweeted. “This is the most important moment in the history of social media. The world’s largest platforms have banned the world’s biggest purveyor of lies, conspiracies and hate. To every Facebook and Twitter employee, user and advocate who fought for this–the entire world thanks you!”
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Thank you @Variety, @BrentALang
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Thank you.Borat is an absurdity and Chicago 7 really happened, but the message’s the same:
When leaders lie, people die–as we saw again this week.
Our pluralist democracies can only survive if we stop hate, conspiracies and lies. https://t.co/d6ziS2XmOz
— Sacha Baron Cohen (@SachaBaronCohen) January 10, 2021
On Facebook’s decision last week to ban President Trump indefinitely, Sacha Baron Cohen tweeted, “FINALLY – Facebook suspends Trump indefinitely’!” Baron Cohen wrote on Twitter.
“The dam is breaking. Every social media company, every online platform, every advertiser has a choice: Stand with Trump and the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol. Or stand for democracy.”
“Authoritarian regimes rely on shared lies, democracies rely on a system of shared facts,” Baron Cohen recently said in an interview with Variety. “People have their own opinions about that system of shared facts. Social media is predisposed to spread lies and conspiracy theories, while the truth is quite boring and dull. So people don’t want to wait for the truth and they don’t want to share the truth.”
“We still have 80% of those who voted for Trump believing the election was stolen and that’s a very dangerous figure,” he added. “I’m a comedian and an actor. I’m not a historian or a sociologist, but having spoken to some of the eminent historians who specialize in how democracies turn into authoritarian regimes, there’s a consensus that when you have a large body of the population who believe they’ve been wronged, that segment of the population can be used to do horrific things.”
Meanwhile, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Sacha Baron Cohen and his wife Isla Fischer moved from Los Angeles to Sydney last year because of Donald Trump. “They didn’t want to raise their kids in Trump’s America,” a source close to the couple told the publication.
Isla Fischer is an Australian actress who converted to Judaism when she married Sacha Baron Cohen.