Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X proprietor Elon Musk are “the worst polluters in human historical past”, Stephen Fry has mentioned.
The actor and comic made the declare throughout a lecture at Kings Faculty, London.
“You and your youngsters can not 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 firms into the currents of our world,” he mentioned of the pair.
The BBC has approached the 2 males’s firms for remark.
Mr Fry has a monitor file of being an early adopter of know-how – and was as soon as an everyday poster on X, when it was often called 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 not lively on any social networks.
“I’m the chump who thought social media might change the world,” he informed his viewers on the Digital Futures Institute.
He mentioned he was at first enthusiastic in regards to the potential of social media to unite folks around the globe and convey about constructive change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which had been coordinated on-line for example – 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” comparable to anger, shock and horror.
“We’re decidedly hopeless at figuring out the place know-how will take us or what it would do to us,” he mentioned.
He returned to the theme a number of occasions all through his one hour speech, through which he additionally thought of the way forward for synthetic intelligence.
Mr Fry argued that AI was “poised to disrupt each house now we have”.
He mentioned he hoped company greed wouldn’t corrupt the event of AI tech on the expense of security.
“The most effective I can do is that this – Einstein and Russell mentioned of their manifesto on nuclear weapons – we enchantment as human beings to human beings, bear in mind your humanity and neglect the remainder,” he mentioned.
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 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.
Extra reporting by Liv McMahon
