Stephen Fry Calls X, Meta Cultural ‘Polluters’

Actor and comedian Stephen Fry has likened X owner Elon Musk and Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to “polluters” for their role in producing cultural “toxic particulates”.

Fry’s remarks during a lecture at King’s College, London, come after senior Meta executive Sir Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister, made similarly scathing remarks about X, which competes with Meta’s Threads.

Speaking to an audience at the Digital Futures Institute, Fry said: “You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world.”

Fry has been an enthusiastic early adopter of technology, including Twitter, whose name was changed to X following its acquisition by Musk in late 2021.

‘Worst passions’

He told the audience he was initially optimistic that social media could bring people together and change society, citing as an example the Arab Spring protests that were coordinated online, according to a BBC report.

But he said events proved he had been a “chump” for believing this.

Fry stopped posting on X in 2022, a few months after its acquisition by Musk, and is no longer active on social media.

He said commercial imperatives to “maximise engagement” had ended up highlighting “the worst passions” such as anger, shock and horror.

“We are decidedly hopeless at knowing where technology will take us or what it will do to us,” he said.

During the one-hour speech he also spoke about artificial intelligence (AI), saying it is “poised to disrupt every space we have” and voicing his hope that those developing it would “remember your humanity”.

‘Hobby horse’

Last Thursday Nick Clegg, speaking at a think tank event at Chatham House, London, said Musk had turned X into a “tiny” unregulated platform for elites that lets “anyone say anything”.

Since buying Twitter, Musk has turned into “a sort of one-man, sort of hyper-partisan and ideological hobby horse”, Clegg said.

He said people blocked from Meta’s platforms were allowed to continue posting on X and Telegram ahead of violent far-right protests that occurred across the UK last month.

He mentioned as examples Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson, both prominent far-right figures that are barred from Meta’s platforms over hate-speech policies.

X said in a post in March that it had 250 million active daily users, while Meta said in its second-quarter earnings report it had 3.3 billion.

Regulation

X, Meta, Telegram and other social media platforms have been regularly taken to task for content moderation issues, with the EU taking a harder line since the passage of the Digital Services Act (DSA) this year.

X was recently banned in Brazil amidst a row with a Supreme Court judge over blocking accounts.

Musk called the Australian government “fascists” for instituting a new law aimed at tackling social media misinformation.