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.
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.
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.
Indeed it seems that they only have problems with censorship when their team gets censored but they secretly enjoy their opposition getting censored. As it is the Lula admin mandated that X suppress the speech of about 600 opposition candidates.
The creator of this website, derechadiario, is in jail for murder attempt, corruption, fake news and bot manipulation. It seems his minions are also working here.
I think it does when you don't see the same level of rage when its exactly the same thing. Its called polorization. If you accepted it the first time you've all ready approved it universally.
I think if you are a partisan you're always going to find differences in the two scenarios which are meaningful enough to explain to yourself and others why your outrage (or lack of it) is warranted.
And here's the thing, I'm sure there are meaningful differences. But then again there's also loads of similarities. A similar thing on the geopolitical stage is the status of Kosovo. The moment it was accepted as a separate entity you opened a floodgate. President of Croatia had a very nice clip about it a while ago, basically accepting both things to be true at once: Kosovo is a state that we need to accept but we also need to admit it was illegally taken from Serbia. This sort of duality (what Nader called being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, although for a completely different situation, I forget what the topic was) is very rare.
On HN i made the mistake of defending, for lack of a better word, a certain tech oligarch who shall not be named where I eventually made a similar point to yours and got downvoted to oblivion.
I could understand the framing being: all censorship is bad (even though I suppose this view would be called childish by some). I could also understand the framing that there is too much concentration of power in the hands of these corporations (and then the inevitable cries to break them up or nationalize them). But, for example, just pointing out that nobody was against these same practices when they were aimed at the other end of the political spectrum (SF billionaires were the darlings of the Democrat and not Republican establishment) causes such outrage from what I would guess are generally well meaning and intelligent people, that it boggles the mind.
It really seems to be something in our species that turns us into crusaders for certain topics. I can very well imagine that this same biological(?) impulses, where you are incredibly convinced in your own morality, must have led to the spread of early christianity (and then to the same or even larger degree, Islam). And it has to come from a place of conviction because otherwise u cant explain the zeal. And anybody who isn't as convinced (maybe partially agreeing) gets dealt with viciously. I'm making Tom Hollands point (in a very erratic manner), that what we consider modern universalism (aka wokeness) is a natural continuation of christianity. I would just go further and say that I think there is something in us all (to varying degrees) that we want to spread a certain gospel of what it is to be a moral person. And if someone disagrees they are not moral.
It is clear that we do not see all communication. Governments become increasingly deceitful and secretive - the US government is the best example, but the same applies to other governments (just look at the garbage produced by the russian government, they almost outperform the current US administration with total crap, like what Lavrov recently babbled about - what pile of nonsense). And companies - they are alo secretive. So which conspiracy exactly is meant here? It's not that I disagree with your prior statement, but I want to know which conspiracy you assume to be here to exist, or to NOT exist. Because what you wrote is very unspecific - you insinuate that there may not be a conspiracy. How do you conclude that?
I concur with Levitz's statement too, with regards to conspiracy or "inventing" one - so, which specific conspiracy was meant?
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: yes please, as usual, keep downvoting factual information.
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”?
Why is this action by a private company now considered censorship but wasn’t back then?
Moreover why are people not complaining about Lula mandating the censorship on X of about 600 opposition leaders? Why is that not called out? Oh, they like that censorship.
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.
Ok, but here we have people not from Brazil claiming that a private company is guilty of censorship but also was not guilty of censorship when government "embeds[1]" in the US would flag what they labeled disinformation and blocked discussion on Covid, Covid origins, laptops with evidence, suspended political accounts in the US, etc. So, it seems people want to have it both ways -essentially they want to censor things they disagree with and also don't want censorship of things they agree with.
[1] Of course, that was plainly censorship with a veneer of plausible deniability (it assumed those embeds could only be truthful and unbiased and in no way politically motivated).
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.
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
American terrorists cry wolves about election interference in their country during election period. But the real fact is they interfere in democracy and democratic process across every part of the world. This is to help bolsenaro and destroy BRICS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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)
You’re assuming that the people in this thread made a different argument about platform censorship before and therefore hold a double standard. May I suggest you stop arguing against the straw man you put up?
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.
No, it’s not different now because you’re conflating two different things. One is the first amendment cited in Twitter case. The other is free speech cited here.
Did Twitter violate the principles of free speech by shutting Trump down? Well he was using his speech to foment an insurrection and caused a mob to sack the Capitol so yes, Twitter, within the bounds of the first amendment, for an eminently justifiable reason (to preserve democracy), attacked Trump’s speech, which is against free speech, yet preserves free speech, because the alternative was allowing insurrection to continue. The first amendment cannot hold under a dictatorship, as we are seeing right now as all press are (were? Are they complying with the order?) illegally banned from the White House.
The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.
> 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.
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.
And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.
Ok so sanction and fine their ass until they start behaving. If we can sanction north korea for having an ideology we don't like, surely brazil can sanction meta's ass for trying to blatantly meddle in another state's affairs. Bar every employee from traveling there. Freeze any assets. Use diplomacy to pressure the US to press charges. Make them come to heel for chrissake
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.
Not supporting the idea, but this feels like the traditional technical details vs practical real world solution.
Rather than banning individuals right to access a site, and then playing technical whackamole, you make that company's ability to operate in a country illegal. this puts the incentives and the technical onus where it belongs.
Again not saying they should or I support the notion of banning a site. Just that there are practical legislative solutions.
Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?
I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
That’s my point. The Europeans heavily rely on America for all sorts of shit, but all the Europeans do is whine and complain about literally everything. I’m no trump or Facebook/zuckerberg fan, nor do I even live in America.
But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).
Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
> But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t stfu with their whining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.
> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
No it’s not. There are several European efforts to develop AI, they just aren’t good at it and it isn’t anywhere near frontier level. The analogy is that the Europeans are trying to make their own cigarettes but can’t do it as well as the cigarette makers they are criticising and fining constantly.
Actually, elections in Brazil are highly regulated and rules are enforced in the name of fairness. If Meta/Facebook want to keep serving the Brazilian public, they need to abide by local laws.
Brazil is not a "little corporation with a fancy flag". Brazil is a democratic republic. The largest in Latin America, and one of the largest in the world.
You are conflating the (insignificant) entity that controls the Brazilian state with the 214 million people that live on the territory of Brazil, so yes, some degree of misunderstanding.
That entity is the democratic representation of those two hundred million people. What you are suggesting is nothing less than colonial disenfranchisement of Latin America. I guess it wouldn't be the first time?
The economic value seems literally negative and the influence on the discourse massive and much too unpredictable.
The recent Romanian election where a focused botnet created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election _and got him elected president_ should really be proof enough that the state of things is unnatural.
People in Iran or China don't rely on Facebook and Instagram.
Before Facebook penetrated Europe in ~2010, each local market was dominated by copycat services like StudiVZ or Hyves, which then vanished within 2 years.
When the US floated the idea of banning TikTok, some people felt compelled to download Chinese social media apps.
If a country was to ban Facebook from operating in their country, people would be on an alternative 2 weeks after.
There are reasons why a Facebook ban would be hard to enact, but dependence on the product is not one of them
I think you’re not aware how deeply engrained WhatsApp and instagram are in Brasil.
I think dependence is definitely a problem because everyone would get mad at you for having to switch. Sure in the long run it wouldn’t be an issue but immediately you will lose some voters
This may sound weird, but: Alternatives will appear, just like how Chinese people have been able to live their lives without access to Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. The alternatives may not be good -- I'd argue the Chinese version of Google (Baidu) is quite a lot worse in many ways -- but they work and are good enough for most people.
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.
Exactly 48 hours (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. It's the silence period.
Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.
Speech is already not entirely free and it works fine. You can’t scream “murder all the X” in a theatre. It doesn’t break the concept of freedom to have regulations, and assuming nothing can be regulated just leads to governance by corporation.
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.
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.
Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.
Brasil is never block Facebook at all, WhatsApp is the most used app and Instagram too, only TikTok is relevant competitor, but recent the brazil governor block meta from try control payments like eu did with Gatekeeper rules, sorry but yes this is right vs left but is lot more is about civ social and work class fight, the social media is the New press and society is manipuled
No one used to care about elections in other countries, but it seems political polarization is truly globalized now. An election in one country seems to carry such heavy stakes for citizens elsewhere. Why? Transnational disinformation? Sad time.
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
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)
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?
Not surprising - Suckerberg is one of the BigBro oligarchs running the USA right now. I think the bigger issue is that so many people helped empower these dictator-like corporations in the first place. That is actually a big problem, that the society world-wide depends on these private companies so much. Why do we not have working alternatives here that are decoupled from these corporations? (I could add US-centric corporations, but let's be honest - other companies as big may behave in the same way. It is also clear that current legislation is ineffective; Suckerberg should be held accountable and be in jail, without way to buy himself out here.)
Disgusting. They bent over 5x backwards not to meddle in election politics for Trump (that is: in the era after they banned him for violating policies)
- 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.
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.
I guess the challenge comes in even defining "political" ads. Is an ad about expensive gas prices or egg prices political? Unless you put such a huge ring fence around any topics of economy, immigration, law, crime, etc; I can think of a number of effective messages that aren't inherently political, but would activate an audience aligned with a political affiliation.
Yes, but it puts friction on it. Perfect vs good etc.
For example, you can't advertise overtly for political candidates or parties. You can't advertise if you are a political party or an org that has candidates for election. Of course they will then use supposedly independent orgs who are totally not affiliated with the party, but again it's some friction.
In Hungary, since Fb banned political ads in the EU, the previous governing party had a much harder time in advertising themselves, they tried but didn't manage to go around the rules at scale.
> defining "political" ads
Yes, and people will also complain that you now suppress serious conversations about people's lives and want them to live in some rose tinted walled garden where they can only post wholesome sanitized corporate friendly content etc.
And anyway in the last decade or more, there was a big push to say that "everything is political", you must always speak up for your ideas even in unrelated venues and spaces, etc., so yes it becomes very hard to delineate this because again, realistically, the problem is not political vs not political but my side vs their side.
And also you can masquerade political ads as ads for a newspaper article, for example: "Governor A opens a new school" or "Party A declares amazing plans for next 5 years" (actually done here by ruling party, to work around election ad laws and limitations).
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, the reason given was that 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...
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.
https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
And here's the thing, I'm sure there are meaningful differences. But then again there's also loads of similarities. A similar thing on the geopolitical stage is the status of Kosovo. The moment it was accepted as a separate entity you opened a floodgate. President of Croatia had a very nice clip about it a while ago, basically accepting both things to be true at once: Kosovo is a state that we need to accept but we also need to admit it was illegally taken from Serbia. This sort of duality (what Nader called being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, although for a completely different situation, I forget what the topic was) is very rare.
On HN i made the mistake of defending, for lack of a better word, a certain tech oligarch who shall not be named where I eventually made a similar point to yours and got downvoted to oblivion.
I could understand the framing being: all censorship is bad (even though I suppose this view would be called childish by some). I could also understand the framing that there is too much concentration of power in the hands of these corporations (and then the inevitable cries to break them up or nationalize them). But, for example, just pointing out that nobody was against these same practices when they were aimed at the other end of the political spectrum (SF billionaires were the darlings of the Democrat and not Republican establishment) causes such outrage from what I would guess are generally well meaning and intelligent people, that it boggles the mind.
It really seems to be something in our species that turns us into crusaders for certain topics. I can very well imagine that this same biological(?) impulses, where you are incredibly convinced in your own morality, must have led to the spread of early christianity (and then to the same or even larger degree, Islam). And it has to come from a place of conviction because otherwise u cant explain the zeal. And anybody who isn't as convinced (maybe partially agreeing) gets dealt with viciously. I'm making Tom Hollands point (in a very erratic manner), that what we consider modern universalism (aka wokeness) is a natural continuation of christianity. I would just go further and say that I think there is something in us all (to varying degrees) that we want to spread a certain gospel of what it is to be a moral person. And if someone disagrees they are not moral.
It is clear that we do not see all communication. Governments become increasingly deceitful and secretive - the US government is the best example, but the same applies to other governments (just look at the garbage produced by the russian government, they almost outperform the current US administration with total crap, like what Lavrov recently babbled about - what pile of nonsense). And companies - they are alo secretive. So which conspiracy exactly is meant here? It's not that I disagree with your prior statement, but I want to know which conspiracy you assume to be here to exist, or to NOT exist. Because what you wrote is very unspecific - you insinuate that there may not be a conspiracy. How do you conclude that?
I concur with Levitz's statement too, with regards to conspiracy or "inventing" one - so, which specific conspiracy was meant?
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
edit: yes please, as usual, keep downvoting factual information.
Why is this action by a private company now considered censorship but wasn’t back then?
Moreover why are people not complaining about Lula mandating the censorship on X of about 600 opposition leaders? Why is that not called out? Oh, they like that censorship.
https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
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.
[1] Of course, that was plainly censorship with a veneer of plausible deniability (it assumed those embeds could only be truthful and unbiased and in no way politically motivated).
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 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.
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
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.
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?
Sounds to me like you just want to be mad
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.
Did Twitter violate the principles of free speech by shutting Trump down? Well he was using his speech to foment an insurrection and caused a mob to sack the Capitol so yes, Twitter, within the bounds of the first amendment, for an eminently justifiable reason (to preserve democracy), attacked Trump’s speech, which is against free speech, yet preserves free speech, because the alternative was allowing insurrection to continue. The first amendment cannot hold under a dictatorship, as we are seeing right now as all press are (were? Are they complying with the order?) illegally banned from the White House.
It’s not straightforward but it’s consistent.
Not really. Let's say Meta banned all blacks from advertising on facebook tomorrow. That would run against federal law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1981
First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.
Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.
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.
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.
Rather than banning individuals right to access a site, and then playing technical whackamole, you make that company's ability to operate in a country illegal. this puts the incentives and the technical onus where it belongs.
Again not saying they should or I support the notion of banning a site. Just that there are practical legislative solutions.
I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.
https://www.studytogether.com/discord
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://xkcd.com/793/
AKA everything looks easy when it isn't your field.
But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).
Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.
> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
That would be stuff like this, in order to give the legal cover needed to resist counterclaims by the USA: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...
Brazil is not a "little corporation with a fancy flag". Brazil is a democratic republic. The largest in Latin America, and one of the largest in the world.
Do I misunderstand, or are you calling Brazil, the nation whose population is around 214 million, a "little corporation"?
If you become something like public infrastructure you have to act like one or reduce your importance
The economic value seems literally negative and the influence on the discourse massive and much too unpredictable.
The recent Romanian election where a focused botnet created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election _and got him elected president_ should really be proof enough that the state of things is unnatural.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/articles/cqx41x3gn5zo
Do you think it is aspirational to join that club? Because I don't think so.
because everyone currently in power has used it to get there
why would they block their best weapon?
If a country was to ban Facebook from operating in their country, people would be on an alternative 2 weeks after. There are reasons why a Facebook ban would be hard to enact, but dependence on the product is not one of them
I think dependence is definitely a problem because everyone would get mad at you for having to switch. Sure in the long run it wouldn’t be an issue but immediately you will lose some voters
But this case is something else entirely.
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.
Exactly 48 hours (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. It's the silence period.
Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
This happens all the time on these social media websites.
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.
Anyone familiar, to comment?
Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".
Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.
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.
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...
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?
- 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.
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672461
its funny how the tables have turned
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
For example, you can't advertise overtly for political candidates or parties. You can't advertise if you are a political party or an org that has candidates for election. Of course they will then use supposedly independent orgs who are totally not affiliated with the party, but again it's some friction.
In Hungary, since Fb banned political ads in the EU, the previous governing party had a much harder time in advertising themselves, they tried but didn't manage to go around the rules at scale.
> defining "political" ads
Yes, and people will also complain that you now suppress serious conversations about people's lives and want them to live in some rose tinted walled garden where they can only post wholesome sanitized corporate friendly content etc.
And anyway in the last decade or more, there was a big push to say that "everything is political", you must always speak up for your ideas even in unrelated venues and spaces, etc., so yes it becomes very hard to delineate this because again, realistically, the problem is not political vs not political but my side vs their side.