The king of mockery has himself fallen a victim of mockery - Sacha Baron Cohen’s heated rant about Facebook’s failure to stop “lies” about the COVID vaccine has received a number of trolling comments.
The legendary comedian behind ‘Borat’ went on a verbal tirade against Mark Zuckerberg on Twitter, slamming the Facebook CEO for the platform’s algorithms failing to tackle coronavirus misinformation.
“Mark Zuckerberg, how do you sleep at night?” Cohen asked, attaching a photo of work from an Australian mural artist known as “Lushsux” that featured prominent vaccine cheerleader Bill Gates.
In the drawing, Gates was portrayed with a needle and a vaccine bottle in his hands alongside the flamed message: “Time to install your update.”
“This is on Facebook's Instagram right now,” Cohen raged.
But his recital has soon got a reply from the artist himself – Lushsux mocked the comedian for failing to see the irony behind his work.
“Funny how the guy who does satire for a living couldn't spot a satire,” he wrote, adding multiple laughs to his post.
"This a joke piece you dork," the artist fumed.
Lushsux then moved to his Twitter page to share few mocking graffities of the actor in his famous Borat character and with Cohen’s face superimposed on Mark Zuckerberg’s body.
Other social media users joined the graffitist in calling out Cohen – an actor who developed a controversial reputation over his jokes and parodies many have seen as offensive – for presenting the artist’s satire as COVID misinformation.
“The art he is calling out is literally satire. Cohen, the king of satire, couldn’t even recognize actual satire lmao,” one user commented on the actor’s post.
Two years ago Cohen famously attacked Facebook and other platforms for enabling the spread of misinformation through “not vetted” political ads. Speaking at an Anti-Defamation League gathering, Cohen dubbed Facebook “the greatest propaganda machine in history”, claiming that it could have allowed Hitler to run anti-Semitic posts if the platform had existed at that time.