Sacha Baron Cohen spent much of Hollywood awards season calling for more social media censorship against Donald Trump and conservatives. On Monday, Hollywood rewarded him with two Academy Award nominations for his performance in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and the screenplay for his anti-Trump Borat sequel.
Cohen received his first Oscar acting nomination for his supporting performance as far-left radical Abbie Hoffman in Netflix’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. He also scored an adapted screenplay nomination for Borat Subsequent MovieFilm, which was released by Amazon.
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The British star already won big at the Golden Globes last month, where the Borat sequel took home honors for best comedy or musical film and lead actor in a comedy. The actor used his Globes wins to make fun of Trump and Rudy Giuliani.
Cohen stepped up his pro-censorship activism around the time his Borat sequel was released by Amazon in October, just a week before the elections.
The star published an op-ed in Time in which he portrayed conservative Americans as racist, violent gun worshippers. He also bemoaned the popularity of conservative news sources, saying that Facebook has enabled conservative viewpoints to find an audience.
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Cohen later admitted that the movie’s pre-election release was a deliberate move to highlight then-President Trump’s “misogyny, corruption and dangerous slide into authoritarianism.” He said he also had political motive to star in The Trial of the Chicago 7, to show the “importance of standing up to racism, immorality, and police brutality.”
The British actor spent the months leading up to the Oscar nominations pressuring Silicon Valley firms to censor Trump. He has demanded Google kick Trump off of YouTube while urging Facebook to permanently ban the former president from its platforms.
Sacha Baron Cohen has also demanded that Facebook throw more people off its platform, saying in 2019 that businesses have a “moral duty” to eject customers whose views they find abhorrent.
In January, Cohen declared that Twitter and Facebook’s decisions to kick Trump off their platforms represented “the most important moment in the history of social media.”
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