Over the past 7 days about 20 people have been killed in Gaza.
These included:
* Hassan Mahmoud Siam: Hamas commander. Participated in Oct. 7 and involved in holding four Israeli hostages.
* Adham Sohbi Salim Ziara: Hamas operative. Planned shootings and explosives against Israeli forces.
* Jabr Moqbel: Hamas financier. Ran a money-exchange network funding Hamas operations and infrastructure.
* Hasan al-Batta: Hamas sniper involved in planning attacks.
* Ibrahim Fawzi Ismail Mohsen: Platoon commander in Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force, involved in planning attacks.
* Mohammed Kamel Suleiman Mohsen: Hamas operative involved in planning attacks and rebuilding military capabilities.
* Muhammad Abu Alwan: Senior Hamas financial official involved in transferring large sums to Hamas.
* Mahmoud Abd al-Fattah Awad: Hamas commander involved in holding seven Israeli hostages and planning attacks.
Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
the pay-to-play claim is wrong, the issue is the ban threshold itself, post certain topics from the "wrong" political side and you get banned almost instantly, the same ideas posted repeatedly from the other prefered side of the us gov face no consequences on especially meta and twitter
If they changed their name to “Flobular” it wouldn’t change a thing.
They’re Facebook in many people’s minds.
“Meta” doesn’t convey the same meaning that “Facebook” does. And it’s also squatting on an important term in English. Mets is used all over the language, like metaphysical.
Was the name change related to publicity from that? My memory is that it was part of an attempt to be the new Second Life. But on the other hand I tend to be naive.
During Covid I was told that when Meta censors speech it’s not censorship because it’s a private company -despite much of the contentious censorship at that time being precipitated by Biden admin “embeds”?
It is censorship. The american libs love to have this very narrow definition of free speech where it's ok for a powerful company to buy every single sheet of paper so you can't print anything ever.
Liberals in general are terrible people and I wish for them to really live in the place they desire, on a little island somewhere, where it won't affect the normal people.
Socials should do no scoring whatsoever. Once you score you are editorialising which means you should have a director that is liable for everything published.
If you don't want that, no editorialising, let people see just the people they follow or what their friends share and that is it.
Look up Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It explains the current situation and should be obvious that it's less than perfect. Basically without this then online platforms would be responsible for the content they host (publishers) and would have been sued into oblivion before any of them got up and running... especially Facebook with it's beginnings. So to compensate there's the good samaritan provision which is the whole censorship thing from the right's perspective (like back during Covid) and the protection from being a publisher let's them host hate speech from the left's perspective.
Personally I think making them public square is probably the only real solution if you want to keep social media and avoid this drama, or make them liable as publishers and these platforms will disappear overnight (maybe the best result?!?)...
This carries over into LLMs I presume, which have bias and I assume are not being sued for the content the publish? I'm not really sure about how it applies to LLMs to be honest.
Regardless, other countries will have different laws, that have different takes on censorship and what private companies are responsible for.
The whole SV VC industry (and this site) start from a position that their business has a right to be profitable, so any law in the way of that is unjust.
What people are objecting to is how this relates to facebook's recently stated principles. They'd said that things like deplatforming Trump were mistakes and that they won't do these sorts of things again. And then...
Facebook marked a video where a famous Italian author was saying what he was going to vote and why as "fake news". Of course he's opposing the current right wing pro-USA government.
Can't we just ban Facebook everywhere? I bet that will make a lot of people a lot happier in a lot of different ways. It's ridiculous how much power over our lives and our internet experience we've given to American Big Tech companies. Time to roll it back.
That is exactly what this article is about. Censoring people in order to interfere with an election, most likely on direct behalf of Donald Trump. That is far beyond anything the EU would ever ask for.
Exactly 2 days (before and on the day of election), banning electoral advertising is the right thing, gives voters the mental space to make up their own decision.
Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.
It's difficult to completely block all political expression, but I think it's a no brainer to simply not allow any political advertising money to be accepted. From the pacts or anyone. When you're taking money to promote a political opinion you've become part of that influence.
Social media is too powerful and influential to be allowed continue unchecked. Falsities, defamation cases all take too long for the election cycle. So you get garbage in, and then you get a populist TV show host as president who doesn't understand economic interests rates, international trade, pain points of international war.
In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
> In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.
Free speech only applies to the government. A private corporation has the right to restrict speech on their own platform at their discretion.
Or at least that's what I was told every time an online platform censored the right in the past. Is it suddenly different now that the shoe's on the other foot?
You’re conflating the first amendment with free speech generally. They are different (related) concepts. The person you’re replying to did not appeal to the first amendment.
I'm not conflating anything, I'm simply repeating what I was told hundreds of times in the past by others in their defense of social media censorship, such as when Twitter banned Trump. So, is it different now?
Well sometimes they do. Plus if another country is regulating or doing something to a company from your country I think it’s fair to have an opinion about it.
Plus a number of folks use the universality of their preferred politics when another country does something they like or don’t like. “International law”, “rules-based order”, those sorts of things. It’s pretty common to see.
You’re inventing a person that thinks COVID censorship was good and this censorship is bad and then you are getting mad at this fictional person (which might just as well exist but no one here made that argument)
I mean, if any of the people commenting on this post calling it censorship also believe Trump getting banned from Twitter was censorship, they're free to reply to me stating so, proving me wrong in the process. Nobody has done so, because I'm right.
It feels like your treat the facebook as some common good, and censorship made by it thus preposterous, something which should be punished
But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange
---
Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations
"Governments are still more powerful than corporations" at this point i would not be so sure anymore. especially when some of corporations have full weight of us goverment behind them.
> Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations
They're not necessarily in conflict, though. In the United States, the government and corporations are currently in bed together.
Spoiler, they only follow court orders. You can violate the law as long as you want until there's a judge saying you do. This is just modus operandi for any big corp in America nowadays.
I was referring to normal business operations in the US.
So if someone thinks this is illegal, it's only illegal until a court says so. It can be in clear violation of the law but until a judge says it is they can pretend they 'interpret' things differently
All the more reason to ban Meta. If Meta are actively taking sides in Brazilian elections, then the site _should_ be banned, even if it's temporary for the lead-up to the election.
Meta can do whatever they want, but so can a sovereign nation if they deem Meta was actively subverting their democratic process.
> Governments are still more powerful than corporations
Corporations aren't all equal. And Meta is one of the most unequal. Add to that the relationship with Trump's government, and your 'corporations' argument is meaningless.
If it were some other mutli-national that doesn't have its own massively popular news platform, I'd be much more likely to agree.
"Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations"
Sure mate, disregard the fact that some companies make more money than half the countries in the world and are actively trying to undermine democracies, but yeah it's the government's fault for trying to protect the citizens.
Meta's specific goal is to have conversations go through them. They want to have the benefits of free speech without the obligations to support it, and use their power and influence to campaign to maintain both aspects of this.
To borrow the EU's language, Meta is a "gatekeeper".
> But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange
You misunderstand: I do not claim they owe us anything.
What I claim is that nobody owes them anything either.
They want to be the platform? Then speech occurring on it is not theirs.
They wish to perform acts of censorship? Then they cannot be the platform.
Make it illegal. Make it illegal for local advertisers to do business with them. Sanction individuals that cannot be locally prosecuted. Sanction the company.
It's already a requirement that to operate in Brazil they need local representation. Someone local who can be prosecuted, even if it's just a proxy - I'm hazy on the details but I remember reading about this at one point when they went after Twitter.
Is it going to fully stop Brazilians from using the service? Most likely not, but it will almost certainly reduce their usage, and the remaining users become a less profitable product to Meta, since they're not going to see ads for companies they can actually spend money on.
This changes incentives and may well be enough to make Meta rethink their policies. Or not, but then its effects can be measured and adjusted.
With adequate checks and balances, following laws approved by a democratically elected legislature, and when it's done to protect democracy and rule of law, then yes. If we can prevent someone from yelling "fire" in a crowded theater in order to cause a stampede and harming people, why not preventing the already yelled word from being heard by the crowd and cause the action to fail?
Yes, this would be a better outcome. Or at least make it illegal for politicians to use facebook / TikTok
From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.
Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.
But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?
Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.
Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.
Private companies are censoring the internet right now to interfere with democracy.
This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.
The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.
You don't need to censor access to the platform itself. Just declare the group for what it is: a criminal cartel. Then just make it illegal to do business with criminal organizations: no Brazilian ads on Facebook anymore.
How would you go on a ad campaign against Facebook, using Facebook ads, where Facebook have already blocked your ads?
I don't know the exact media landscape of this world any more, but I can say I don't personally own a TV and can't even remember when I last watched live, and given all the TVs in stores sell themselves on how "smart" they are and which streaming services they work with I don't want to guess what normal viewing habits are.
Similarly, the closest I get to radio ads are in podcasts. If I own a radio, it's been forgotten in the bottom of a box for years and at least two house moves.
I have no idea which companies are ultimately behind podcast ads.
"Properly" is not that important. First, most people are both lazy and also non-technical. Second, ban business relations with them suddenly they get no ad revenue, ban schools and governments from using them as well as businesses and people have to connect with everyone besides friends by non-Facebook means (or non-Meta depending on details).
Maybe not when internet was an open platform. Now it is controlled by a few American billionaires that love they have a US Gov administration that thinks the same way as them.
Eh, as a staunch free speech advocate, I absolutely want Meta and X banned from Canada. That doesn't stem free speech at all, and is akin to banning a propaganda arm of a hostile foreign government.
They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).
> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.
Conflating "the internet" with "~Trillionaire owned, oligarchy controlled, American social media" is certainly a choice.
I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.
Usually. Because usually it's governments that are censoring specific people to push a certain narrative. This time it's Facebook censoring specific people in order to push a certain narrative.
Brazil can very easily block FB from operating there, but FB is a private American company and it can do what it wants on its own platform - it can allow or disallow any content as it sees fit. If Brazil doesn’t want to deal with this then… ban FB. IP block it. But they won’t, because they’re cowards with no local alternative (just like the Europeans with their technology).
Europe has many of the same issues, and they should do the same - ban FB/ban twitter/ban Google etc. but they never do lol.
But no it’s not an attack on Brazil’s ‘sovereignty’. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazil’s court: just ban it. But they won’t because just like Europe all the Brazilians can do is cry and complain but they don’t ever actually build anything themselves. It’s extremely frustrating because we all know what the American big tech firms are at this point, and yet the only viable alternatives seem to be from - hilariously - the Chinese. Absolute shit show all around.
What you call "leaching" we call "comparative advantage" on good days, and "dear god just ban it all already" on bad days.
What you call "I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development", Trump calls "a trade deficit" and tries to stop.
(The "deficit" becomes almost, not perfectly but relatively, neutral if you include the digital stuff like FB).
I hate Meta/Facebook with passion and will never use their services. That being said, they can choose to host whatever they want on their property. Your little corporation with a fancy flag and its “sovereignty” isn’t scaring anyone.
I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?
A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.
- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.
- The account has been reestablished already
This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?
“Vamos trabalhar com o presidente Trump para pressionar os governos ao redor do mundo que estão perseguindo empresas americanas”, afirmou Mark Zuckerberg.
Trump will pull his favorite move a fake promise of cold hard cash to vote for his preferred candidate bc he's the least America First president there ever was
I'm watching out for right (anti-other, ancaps) and left (anti-status quo, ansocs) getting together to fight the centrists.
(Eg Bannon+Sanders against AI, but led by much younger people including women/LGBTQ.. strangely, this might happen in Japan/US/LA first not EU/EA because urban youth are more polarized in the earlier set?? The ancap against AI angle is particularly interesting-- YC already has some of it)
I was writing a long post, but I just deleted the comment. I disagree with what you just said, but my reasoning feels a bit contrary to Hacker News, so...
There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
A few years ago, in NL they banned a campaign from the Brandwondenstichting (foundation for treating burn victims) because it used photos from actual burn scars to warn the public. Ostensibly, because it upset their delicate eyes -- which was the entire point of the campaign. The campaign itself was not political, but Facebook choosing to apply their weak US sensibilities to a Dutch campaign surely was a political act.
He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.
Meta == US gov.
It’s another tool in their toolbox. You shouldn’t trust US tech any more than Chinese tech. If anything, probably should trust it less than Chinese tech.
It's a two-edged sword. Compared to other governments your own government when good is the best to promote your good. But when bad, it is by far the worst abuser.
It's not so much a matter of thinking one is "better" (for whatever definition of "better") - it's that the Chinese tech and Chinese government are so obviously coupled at the hip while American tech continues to claim independence (all the while paying billions in bribes directly to Trump's family and vanity projects).
I don't trust the Chinese government but i do trust that they're disinterested in me and don't have much agency over me. My own government is more trust worthy, but have interest and agency in me, so it could be said I trust the Chinese government more.
I think this is something many people tend to miss. The Chinese might spy on you, or steal your data when you use their devices. But for the _majority_ of people living the west, the odds of that actually being used against them are small.
The US government is much more likely to act against their interest than the Chinese.
> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”
"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.
Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.
Comparing the two like this is interesting but there are fundamental differences. The US today could not delete tech companies, or the people who run them, the way China can its industries—and, crucially, the people who run them. The US’s version is personalist and would not survive even changing to another person other than Trump, not even going as far a a political party shift, which is possible in America.
20 million people wearing facial recognition glasses in public, always-on, networked and geolocated, with a Muse agent monitoring the feed, would 1000x the domestic surveillance capacity of current Flock, Ring, Tesla and CCTV cams.
The Fermi probability that you'll be ingested and inferenced by this network on any given day is incredibly high, even if you never buy a Meta product and never create an Instagram account.
Isn’t Brazil the country where the gov’t told X to censor their opposition recently?[1]
Also, isn’t Facebook the same place that people said “when it’s a private company it’s not censorship” when it came to Covid and other contentious issues that were censored at the request of Biden “embeds” in Twitter, FB and other social media?
There is actually a very popular meme in Brazil for what you just did, where a character appears out of nowhere to ask, "What about Lula?" — meaning that if one can find any act (or accusation) of malice from Lula or his party, anything bad the other side does is justifiable and Lula (or his supporters) can't complain.
It's called "whataboutism" in general. The word is used to easily wave away criticism of the other side of the argument without actually addressing it.
Complaining about whataboutism can be its own kind of whataboutism. I wish people I politically sympathize with would stop giving their enemies good points.
Yes, it’s not whataboutism if it’s part of a discussion about bipartisan corruption, for instance. Or when discussing the causes of conflict between two countries. It’s a problem when it is used without context to deflect from the bad actions of one actor or one “side”.
I think there is a difference of a country governing who can say what in that country vs. a foreign company. I don't care if you call it censorship or whatever, it's foreign companies meddling in political affairs.
US companies can meddle as much as they want in US affairs, I don't care. But not in the country I'm in.
By "the government", you mean "courts"?. I understand you may be confused as Trump imagines the law bends to his will, and you never heard of separation of powers.
Can you show us which court order Meta is following to ban Lula's page? Please.
Meta restored Lula's FB account hours after it got flagged for content that as posted on their page. That is a pretty weak basis for a conspiracy theory.
One paper that really hammers this point: Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness [1]
The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.
donating money to the president and their party is something nearly every national corporation does. Using their corporate power to do political favors is not. those are two very different things.
That's not a campaign donation, this is straight up a gift to show loyalty to the new guy, after he won the election. But that's not the only thing, for just one more example, look at Zuckerberg getting on Joe Rogan weeks after the election to praise "masculine energy", wearing a ridiculous haircut and necklace, just to pander to the Right.
Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?
Zuckerberg started pandering to the Trump admin mere months after he took office, publicizing "evidence" consisting of a few emails from Biden admin officials as proof of widespread government manipulation of tech platforms that Trump rightly put a stop to in the name of free speech.
At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.
The same old cool-aid: the label on bottle reads "freedom". But if you look at the ingredients: greed, gluttony, looting, bullying, spread american culture, slavery, surveillance - the full nth-amendmend package. Dosages may vary.
If those countries worried for real they would have built open platforms themselves. In reality they are making running any social platform next to impossible operate legaly.
Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,and not an arm of the American state whipping up hatred, spreading misinformation, and interfering with elections?
To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.
Careless People (the book) is a great study on how Facebook ran out of growth in western territories (due to market saturation), combined with a callous disregard for the consequences to regular people - led to an ever increasing willingness to deploy political levers in order to keep the hyper growth train running...
I genuinely cant remember that - maybe there was a golden age before it went international but I pretty much used to use fb only for consuming political rage bait (luckily i stopped many years ago)
In the same way USA is realising “holy crap all our stuff is made in China”, every non-US company is realising “holy crap, all our news and information runs through a couple of American web sites”
Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)
But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.
The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.
The big difference is that the US shared institutions and common frameworks with democracies, they weren't supposed to be used as deliberate tools for misinformation.
In an ideal society, I think you just tax digital ads to help compensate for the damage from this attention economy. Maybe even use that money for education?
I'm against government building a scaffold to be able to block selective parts of the Internet because the block list always expands and never retracts.
You have to understand the president position is extremely weak, since he’s a centrist posing as left wing, there’s a lot of scrutiny on all his actions and he has very little support in congress, since it’s a very conservative country politically dominated by evangelicals and big farmers.
Blocking Facebook would be deeply damaging for him, they would quick him out even before the election
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] threadZuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".
Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?
Imagine living through a genocide in Gaza right now.
Read up on the Nakba, if you have time.
It will serve you well.
More to read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
These included:
* Hassan Mahmoud Siam: Hamas commander. Participated in Oct. 7 and involved in holding four Israeli hostages.
* Adham Sohbi Salim Ziara: Hamas operative. Planned shootings and explosives against Israeli forces.
* Jabr Moqbel: Hamas financier. Ran a money-exchange network funding Hamas operations and infrastructure.
* Hasan al-Batta: Hamas sniper involved in planning attacks.
* Ibrahim Fawzi Ismail Mohsen: Platoon commander in Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force, involved in planning attacks.
* Mohammed Kamel Suleiman Mohsen: Hamas operative involved in planning attacks and rebuilding military capabilities. * Muhammad Abu Alwan: Senior Hamas financial official involved in transferring large sums to Hamas.
* Mahmoud Abd al-Fattah Awad: Hamas commander involved in holding seven Israeli hostages and planning attacks.
They’re Facebook in many people’s minds.
“Meta” doesn’t convey the same meaning that “Facebook” does. And it’s also squatting on an important term in English. Mets is used all over the language, like metaphysical.
No thanks, I’ll use Facebook
And Meta loves it. People can ‘not use Facebook’ while living on WhatsApp and Instagram.
Liberals in general are terrible people and I wish for them to really live in the place they desire, on a little island somewhere, where it won't affect the normal people.
Pretty much every time somebody backs up these kinds of claims it shows something else.
1) posts going out 500 times a day in all caps (who is arguing you can’t suppress spam?)
2) the post that you read and so clearly wasn’t suppressed.
3) they’re linking to a low scoring comment
If you don't want that, no editorialising, let people see just the people they follow or what their friends share and that is it.
Can't have it both ways.
Nobody is going to want to use a platform with spam.
I don't know you, this is not a social. If we were friends and you did that I'd unfriend you and be done.
The alternative being having human moderators, which socials don't want to have because it costs money.
You may not feel that way and thats fine. Just like people think the world is flat. Nothing you do is going to be affected by that ignorance.
Words change around you. Much like how Republican doesn’t mean fiscal responsibility or small government for many decades.
Personally I think making them public square is probably the only real solution if you want to keep social media and avoid this drama, or make them liable as publishers and these platforms will disappear overnight (maybe the best result?!?)...
This carries over into LLMs I presume, which have bias and I assume are not being sued for the content the publish? I'm not really sure about how it applies to LLMs to be honest.
Regardless, other countries will have different laws, that have different takes on censorship and what private companies are responsible for.
That's not that EU asks. EU asks to have a direct interface to delete posts EU elites don't like.
But this case is something else entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Exactly 2 days (before and on the day of election), banning electoral advertising is the right thing, gives voters the mental space to make up their own decision.
Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.
Social media is too powerful and influential to be allowed continue unchecked. Falsities, defamation cases all take too long for the election cycle. So you get garbage in, and then you get a populist TV show host as president who doesn't understand economic interests rates, international trade, pain points of international war.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
Free speech only applies to the government. A private corporation has the right to restrict speech on their own platform at their discretion.
Or at least that's what I was told every time an online platform censored the right in the past. Is it suddenly different now that the shoe's on the other foot?
Plus a number of folks use the universality of their preferred politics when another country does something they like or don’t like. “International law”, “rules-based order”, those sorts of things. It’s pretty common to see.
Not really. Let's say Meta banned all blacks from advertising on facebook tomorrow. That would run against federal law.
Sounds to me like you just want to be mad
But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange
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Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations
They're not necessarily in conflict, though. In the United States, the government and corporations are currently in bed together.
So if someone thinks this is illegal, it's only illegal until a court says so. It can be in clear violation of the law but until a judge says it is they can pretend they 'interpret' things differently
Meta can do whatever they want, but so can a sovereign nation if they deem Meta was actively subverting their democratic process.
> Governments are still more powerful than corporations
Corporations aren't all equal. And Meta is one of the most unequal. Add to that the relationship with Trump's government, and your 'corporations' argument is meaningless.
If it were some other mutli-national that doesn't have its own massively popular news platform, I'd be much more likely to agree.
Sure mate, disregard the fact that some companies make more money than half the countries in the world and are actively trying to undermine democracies, but yeah it's the government's fault for trying to protect the citizens.
To borrow the EU's language, Meta is a "gatekeeper".
> But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange
You misunderstand: I do not claim they owe us anything.
What I claim is that nobody owes them anything either.
They want to be the platform? Then speech occurring on it is not theirs.
They wish to perform acts of censorship? Then they cannot be the platform.
It's already a requirement that to operate in Brazil they need local representation. Someone local who can be prosecuted, even if it's just a proxy - I'm hazy on the details but I remember reading about this at one point when they went after Twitter.
Is it going to fully stop Brazilians from using the service? Most likely not, but it will almost certainly reduce their usage, and the remaining users become a less profitable product to Meta, since they're not going to see ads for companies they can actually spend money on.
This changes incentives and may well be enough to make Meta rethink their policies. Or not, but then its effects can be measured and adjusted.
From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.
And it wasn't that long ago.
Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.
Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.
This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.
The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.
First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.
Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.
How would you go on a ad campaign against Facebook, using Facebook ads, where Facebook have already blocked your ads?
I don't know the exact media landscape of this world any more, but I can say I don't personally own a TV and can't even remember when I last watched live, and given all the TVs in stores sell themselves on how "smart" they are and which streaming services they work with I don't want to guess what normal viewing habits are.
Similarly, the closest I get to radio ads are in podcasts. If I own a radio, it's been forgotten in the bottom of a box for years and at least two house moves.
I have no idea which companies are ultimately behind podcast ads.
They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).
wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.
I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.
Brazil can very easily block FB from operating there, but FB is a private American company and it can do what it wants on its own platform - it can allow or disallow any content as it sees fit. If Brazil doesn’t want to deal with this then… ban FB. IP block it. But they won’t, because they’re cowards with no local alternative (just like the Europeans with their technology).
Europe has many of the same issues, and they should do the same - ban FB/ban twitter/ban Google etc. but they never do lol.
But no it’s not an attack on Brazil’s ‘sovereignty’. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazil’s court: just ban it. But they won’t because just like Europe all the Brazilians can do is cry and complain but they don’t ever actually build anything themselves. It’s extremely frustrating because we all know what the American big tech firms are at this point, and yet the only viable alternatives seem to be from - hilariously - the Chinese. Absolute shit show all around.
What you call "I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development", Trump calls "a trade deficit" and tries to stop.
(The "deficit" becomes almost, not perfectly but relatively, neutral if you include the digital stuff like FB).
If the social networks provide no value then ban them. And if they do but they are so harmful then create your own.
A tri polar world technologically would be great.
Anyone familiar, to comment?
This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...
- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.
- The account has been reestablished already
This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?
“Vamos trabalhar com o presidente Trump para pressionar os governos ao redor do mundo que estão perseguindo empresas americanas”, afirmou Mark Zuckerberg.
(Eg Bannon+Sanders against AI, but led by much younger people including women/LGBTQ.. strangely, this might happen in Japan/US/LA first not EU/EA because urban youth are more polarized in the earlier set?? The ancap against AI angle is particularly interesting-- YC already has some of it)
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...
The US government is much more likely to act against their interest than the Chinese.
I just remember that Mariott employee got fired for liking a tweet thanking the chain for having Tibet in a dropdown menu.
https://onemileatatime.com/marriott-fired-employee-for-likin...
> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”
"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.
Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.
The Fermi probability that you'll be ingested and inferenced by this network on any given day is incredibly high, even if you never buy a Meta product and never create an Instagram account.
Also, isn’t Facebook the same place that people said “when it’s a private company it’s not censorship” when it came to Covid and other contentious issues that were censored at the request of Biden “embeds” in Twitter, FB and other social media?
[1] https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
https://tenor.com/pt-BR/view/e-o-pt-e-o-lula-pt-lula-gif-174...
US companies can meddle as much as they want in US affairs, I don't care. But not in the country I'm in.
Can you show us which court order Meta is following to ban Lula's page? Please.
I am sure the American president is target for such efforts as well and provides ample material for rules violations.
The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219634
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-ceos-donald-trump-white-hou...
At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.
To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.
No. I tried it for a week, 20 years ago. Fb bastards still have my info, but I am not signing in ever again.
Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)
But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.
The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.
Interesting
Evil always finds new acolytes.
because everyone currently in power has used it to get there
why would they block their best weapon?
Do you think it is aspirational to join that club? Because I don't think so.
Blocking Facebook would be deeply damaging for him, they would quick him out even before the election
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672461
its funny how the tables have turned