Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X proprietor Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human historical past”, Stephen Fry has stated.
The actor and comic made the declare throughout a lecture at Kings Faculty, London.
“You and your youngsters can’t breathe the air or swim within the waters of our tradition with out respiratory within the poisonous particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their corporations into the currents of our world,” he stated of the pair.
The BBC has approached the 2 males’s corporations for remark.
Mr Fry has a monitor file of being an early adopter of expertise – and was as soon as a daily poster on X, when it was often called Twitter.
He stopped posting in 2022, a number of months after the platform was bought by Mr Musk, however has retained his account. He’s now not lively on any social networks.
“I’m the chump who thought social media may change the world,” he informed his viewers on the Digital Futures Institute.
He stated he was at first enthusiastic in regards to the potential of social media to unite folks around the globe and convey about optimistic change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which have been coordinated on-line for instance – however added that he had been proved unsuitable.
He described what he thought of to be a deadly flaw in makes an attempt by early Fb algorithms to “maximise engagement”, saying no one had predicted that engagement can be “most maximised by… the worst passions” similar to anger, shock and horror.
“We’re decidedly hopeless at realizing the place expertise will take us or what it’ll do to us,” he stated.
He returned to the theme a number of instances all through his one hour speech, during which he additionally thought of the way forward for synthetic intelligence.
Mr Fry argued that AI was “poised to disrupt each area we have now”.
He stated he hoped company greed wouldn’t corrupt the event of AI tech on the expense of security.
“The very best I can do is that this – Einstein and Russell stated of their manifesto on nuclear weapons – we enchantment as human beings to human beings, keep in mind your humanity and overlook the remainder,” he stated.
Mr Fry’s broadside was not the one assault on Mr Musk.
Earlier on Thursday, senior Meta govt Sir Nick Clegg, speaking at Chatham Home, in London, had been equally scathing of Mr Musk’s platform X.
The previous deputy prime minister known as it “a tiny, elite, news-obsessed, politics-obsessed app” and added that in his view the social community had turn out to be “a one-man hyper-partisan passion horse.”
In March 2024 X claimed to have 550 million month-to-month guests. Fb has simply over 3bn.
Extra reporting by Liv McMahon
