Stephen Fry: Musk and Zuckerberg have 'polluted culture'

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk are "the worst polluters in human history", Stephen Fry has said.

The actor and comedian made the claim during a lecture at Kings College, London.

"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," he said of the pair.

The BBC has approached the two men's companies for comment.

Mr Fry has a track record of being an early adopter of technology - and was once a regular poster on X, when it was known as Twitter.

He stopped posting in 2022, a few months after the platform was purchased by Mr Musk, but has retained his account. He is no longer active on any social networks.

"I’m the chump who thought social media could change the world," he told his audience at the Digital Futures Institute.

He said he was at first enthusiastic about the potential of social media to unite people around the world and bring about positive change in society, citing the Arab Spring protests which were coordinated online as an example – but added that he had been proved wrong.

He described what he considered to be a fatal flaw in attempts by early Facebook algorithms to “maximise engagement”, saying nobody had predicted that engagement would be “most maximised by... 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.

He returned to the theme several times throughout his one hour speech, in which he also considered the future of artificial intelligence.

Mr Fry argued that AI was “poised to disrupt every space we have”.

He said he hoped corporate greed would not corrupt the development of AI tech at the expense of safety.

“The best I can do is this – Einstein and Russell said in their manifesto on nuclear weapons – we appeal as human beings to human beings, remember your humanity and forget the rest,” he said.

Mr Fry's broadside was not the only attack on Mr Musk.

Earlier on Thursday, senior Meta executive Sir Nick Clegg, talking at Chatham House, in London, had been similarly scathing of Mr Musk’s platform X.

The former deputy prime minister called it “a tiny, elite, news-obsessed, politics-obsessed app” and added that in his view the social network had become “a one-man hyper-partisan hobby horse."

In March 2024 X claimed to have 550 million monthly visitors. Facebook has just over 3bn.

Additional reporting by Liv McMahon