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 respiration within the poisonous particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their firms into the currents of our world,” he stated of the pair.
The BBC has approached the 2 males’s firms for remark.
Mr Fry has a observe report of being an early adopter of expertise – and was as soon as an everyday poster on X, when it was generally known as Twitter.
He stopped posting in 2022, a couple 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 might change the world,” he instructed his viewers on the Digital Futures Institute.
He stated he was at first enthusiastic concerning the potential of social media to unite individuals all over the world 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 incorrect.
He described what he thought of to be a deadly flaw in makes an attempt by early Fb algorithms to “maximise engagement”, saying no person had predicted that engagement can be “most maximised by… the worst passions” similar to anger, shock and horror.
“We’re decidedly hopeless at figuring out the place expertise will take us or what it’s going to do to us,” he stated.
He returned to the theme a number of instances all through his one hour speech, wherein he additionally thought of the way forward for synthetic intelligence.
Mr Fry argued that AI was “poised to disrupt each area we’ve”.
He stated he hoped company greed wouldn’t corrupt the event of AI tech on the expense of security.
“One of the 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 neglect the remaining,” 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 change into “a one-man hyper-partisan pastime horse.”
In March 2024 X claimed to have 550 million month-to-month guests. Fb has simply over 3bn.
Further reporting by Liv McMahon
