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 kids can not 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 document of being an early adopter of know-how – and was as soon as a daily poster on X, when it was often 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 energetic 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 concerning the potential of social media to unite folks world wide 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 flawed.
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 know-how will take us or what it’ll do to us,” he stated.
He returned to the theme a number of occasions 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 house we have now”.
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 attraction as human beings to human beings, bear 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 government Sir Nick Clegg, speaking at Chatham Home, in London, had been equally scathing of Mr Musk’s platform X.
The previous deputy prime minister referred to as it “a tiny, elite, news-obsessed, politics-obsessed app” and added that in his view the social community had develop 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
