by HAMID DABASHI
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.
But is that all there is to Facebook?
Has it, perhaps inadvertently, also provided a venue for those at the
mercy of state and corporate propaganda to talk back at it, reasserting
alternative narratives to those presented by, let’s say, the BBC and the
New York Times?
I would daresay that those media organisations
are, if not the greatest, then certainly major propaganda machines
supporting a settler colony that the UK and US have been chiefly
responsible for creating and sustaining. They have had that monopoly for
decades – deciding and determining the terms of debate on Israel’s
colonisation of Palestine.
Facebook and other social media
platforms have, all their troubling dimensions notwithstanding, offered
sites of resistance to their hegemony.
Al Jazeera for more