Comment by philipallstar
4 hours ago
This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.
4 hours ago
This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.
Not opposite, a different problem.
If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.
The platform deciding to obey local laws is not "on the platform". It's on the local laws.
The choices between not operating in that jurisdiction, accepting the legal consequences that jurisdiction can enforce or obeying the laws in that jurisdiction is certainly on a choice of the platform. And the resulting product is their responsibility and a reflection on them for better or worse.
There have been numerous cases of companies ignoring local law for both good and bad.
Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).
The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.
Yep. The worst of both worlds..
1. Whatever the govt wants
2. Their own mods to max profit.
Corporations were conceived specifically to remove responsibility. They should not be this widely available.
Not sure what anyone expects Meta to do differently here. Meta has basically two choices: they can obey the local law in places where they operate, or they can choose to not operate there.
6 replies →
Force Zuck to take FB to a sole proprietorship
Only if we want a utopia
Agreed, the company chasing infinite growth convinces itself that it must work with these repressive regimes. How could we not acquire these users! We need to keep growing, and growing! It shows that under capitalism there are no morals, no humanity, only profit and growth. When push comes to shove human rights abuses are forgivable, failure to maximize profit is not.
> The private company would gladly connect everyone.
They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
So what? Very few organizations are morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. Especially in 2026 where political polarization is the norm.
Despite Meta's self serving actions here their morals are significantly better than those of Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Very few? Try none.
Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.
One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.
Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.
If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.
Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.
Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.
>The private company would gladly connect everyone.
they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.
Which viewpoints?
The ones that got a million Americans killed
the ones that corporate eunuchs had implicitly decreed to be banned.
> The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company.
Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
It's more complicated than that. The US government is currently at war with Iran, alongside UAE and the Saudis as allies. Meta is a US company.
I'd say the US government is more important to Meta than either the UAE or Saudi government. What do you think US government people are saying to Meta about this?
> Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
Those countries don’t allow Meta to operate at all.
> If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Large companies comply with the laws of countries they operate in. It’s not optional. If you have a presence there you either comply with their laws or they shut you down.
In some of these countries they might even arrest any employees of the company they can get their hands on to send a message, even if they didn’t have decision making authority. That’s not something you subject your employees to.
They can't operate there. AFAIK, that's the only difference.
A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
i dont think meta does business in those two countries?
thats not a very relevant comparison.
Does Meta do business in either of those jurisdictions?
If the answer is “No”, then it makes sense they would not follow laws they do not have to.
Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.
But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.