Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent anti-defamation league speech was quite a performance, even by his standards. In shrill, bordering on hysterical tones, he labelled large social media companies (including Facebook and Google) the ‘greatest propaganda machine in history’, responsible for the spread of ‘hate and violence’ around the world. If they were not curtailed, he warned, democracy, civilisation and indeed the very idea of truth itself would be threatened.