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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't understand, it's different. Back then, it was the bad guys being censored, so it was a good thing. Now it's the good guys being censored, so it's a bad thing.
When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
"created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election"
The way you phrased this made it seem like the candidate didn't exist. The candidate was a real person, but just wasn't well known or polling very well before winning.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
If you read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, you'll learn that this isn't the first time they've done something like this. I left WhatsApp after reading that book in protest (I already left FB and Instagram many years ago) and don't miss it.
My entire family uses WhatsApp. I held off for years because of that.
After reading this book, I decided that I couldn't keep supporting this company and told them that I'm leaving WhatsApp and that they can text me if they want to chat.
They were all not only more than fine with the move but actually helped me recreate the chat groups we had before!
So if you really want to go cold turkey on Meta products, going scorched Earth might not scorch as much as you think it will!
They did the same thing in India/ There were student protests that were widely covered by Western media (and the students did have a valid concern, I dont want to downplay that)
The problem is when Indian Prime Minister posted a video asking for calm, that was blocked by Meta.
Pushing one side/narrative is something western media companies like BBC and CNN do a lot, and now it seems Meta has joined the party.
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.
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?
It’s why democracy as a concept is an illusion, a utopian concept, a naive wishful thinking, humanity never had it and never will. Whoever controls the information and the money, control the results, it is very easy to manipulate the public, one time you scare them to do/don’t do something, other times you promise a reward for that, coupled knowing the majority of people lack critical thinking, you can do anything if you control the information feed conduit and have enough money to pump it.
> fascinatingly softened description of both, particularly Lula. Something related to his tacit support for violent far-left terrorism, vote buying or corruption would have trumped "doddering" for me.
My macroexpansion is: he is a democrat, and sound on the environment. But he has done precious little to unleash growth or restrain spending. He has failed to push economic reforms, bar a sales-tax simplification, and calls fiscal discipline “nonsense”. His government is on course to end the term with the largest public-debt-interest bill in a quarter of a century.
> They asked Rubio if Trump’s administration would commit to respecting Brazil’s electoral process and requested a response by 1 October. The state department has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Completely meaningless. Of course the US (my country) will interfere. And the people doing so will have absolutely no shame about it.
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/LGBTQXXX.. 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.. so what it might take would be the anti-other to first reach entente with the LGBTQ/left-identitarians/feminists/antiZionists, that is, recognizing "institutional-AI" as a bigger threat than "patriarchy"
Btw.. HN feels to me like Thiel-like (in methods, not stance) propagandists for the Convivial-Institution weaponizing their growing hoard of humane but "incidentally" individualist stories. (Because fun details about bureaucracy are structurally rare in comparison)
Friendly, knowledgeable oldbeards (men) finding their energetic curious young "broccoli haired" successors, to make this sound more... Immunogenic ;)
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...
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
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
Of course, and the people need understand every angle , if you think the company a is good or governor b ia good you is been manipuladed, i very dislike this censorship over lula, but need understand this is retalation over governor try regulamented somes aspects of the world
This thread is quicky suggests that Brazil should just ban Twitter/FB/What'sUp.
And as matter of fact Brazil did that couple of times.
As for today Brazil orders ISPs to block ~15k sites. Mostly gambling. However plenty of sites in the lists are political in nature.
Another argument, that blocking is not doing any good to the citizens. See Russia where FB/Linkedin and many other sites are blocked. That's not helping democracy at all.
But the most important sad realization that besides the USA there is NO other country where one can host and run even slightly popular forum site. Even forum related to stamps or railway models. The regulatory burden and the harassment from government agencies makes the exercise impossible to execute. HN front page had a plenty of examples of the niche forums/sites shutting down in UK/Germany because of the regulatory risks.
Think for a second, Brazilian candidate complains that the private USA company blocked him. Bu the problem is that Brazilian elites made Internet regulations so hostile that there is absolutely no open platforms do discuss political mattes there, thus even those elites have to rely on US-based platform. And they do, with all that hipocricy, i.e. advertise there then in benefits them, ban quickly once not.
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...
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.
And Meta (or the US government) seems determined to prove him right
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.
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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.
https://tenor.com/pt-BR/view/e-o-pt-e-o-lula-pt-lula-gif-174...
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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.
You don't understand, it's different. Back then, it was the bad guys being censored, so it was a good thing. Now it's the good guys being censored, so it's a bad thing.
When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.
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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.
That would require that Meta is carrying water for Trump. I don't think I see that as very likely.
"Likely" or not has nothing to do with it, it's well documented. https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-mil...
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If the title of this article is not sufficiently eloquent, the photo should finish the job
https://www.wired.com/story/tech-ceos-donald-trump-white-hou...
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.
What universe have you been in for the past decade? Meta is hand in glove with authoritarian interests, including in the US.
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.
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.
> Can't we just ban Facebook everywhere?
That's not that EU asks. EU asks to have a direct interface to delete posts EU elites don't like.
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They changed their name to "Meta" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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.
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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.
No thanks, I’ll use Facebook
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Careless people, the book talks about it too.
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.
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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.
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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...
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Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?
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
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I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
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.
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If a company openly acts as an enemy of the democratic process, I'm not sure it's the same as censoring a random porn site.
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> 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.
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.
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> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.
Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.
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.
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.
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.
And it wasn't that long ago.
But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?
Facebook is not the internet.
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This is less like censoring the internet and more like banning lead-based paint.
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That was true before social network corporations started agressively manipulating opinion. If anything social networks could be considered a nuisance
Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.
They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.
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This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.
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Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.
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Right, don't ban them that's bad for free speech, just impose huge fines on Facebook to bankrupt them.
Depends on who the government is. You can’t realistically give anyone full write access to your populace.
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.
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.
Then they should go wild on a governmental campaign about how FB is bad for mental health with daily TV, radio ads etc. Fight fire with fire.
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Ok? Then how about "nothing good comes out of foreign corporations controlling speech"?
Facebook is not the internet. If anything, their existence is a net negative for the internet.
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.
Actually, the Australian government censored the internet for children and it appears to be working out as being good.
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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.
But what good comes from a channel for misinformation and bot networks?
And yet this is somehow better?
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).
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Feels like the future of the internet is every country having their own internet stuck within their own national firewall
In terms of internet hygiene, a better solution might be to just exclude the USA from the existing network.
Yeah, me too, but he’s a coward. I wish there would be an actual leftist running for president this year.
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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.
> Your little corporation with a fancy flag and its “sovereignty” isn’t scaring anyone.
Do I misunderstand, or are you calling Brazil, the nation whose population is around 214 million, a "little corporation"?
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Corporations can host whatever they want and governments can ban them for it.
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If you reach a certain market power it isn’t so easy anymore.
If you become something like public infrastructure you have to act like one or reduce your importance
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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).
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I mean … that would have large large costs when the Americans retaliate. I don’t think this is the easy call you claim it is for Europe.
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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.
I can't find the postmortem. Do you know where the posted it?
I don't understand why countries don't simply block facebook, instagram, etc. There's zero upside to allowing them.
I'm just as confused as you are.
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.
I hadn’t heard of this, so here’s more context [1] for the curious.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/articles/cqx41x3gn5zo
"created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election"
The way you phrased this made it seem like the candidate didn't exist. The candidate was a real person, but just wasn't well known or polling very well before winning.
Because western democracies are about freedom of speech and access to information ?
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> why countries don't simply block facebook
because everyone currently in power has used it to get there
why would they block their best weapon?
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.
The people rely on them too much, sadly
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
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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.
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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?
people would not vote for someone who took away their doom scrolling addiction dealer, that’s why.
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
Brasil pretty much runs on WhatsApp and instagram - they are by faaaaaar the most popular communication platforms. It’s cooked.
But many countries do: China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, [...].
Do you think it is aspirational to join that club? Because I don't think so.
Because people cry "censorship" — just like we are seeing here in the comments.
Well, with all due respect, fuck them. If they’re so desperate, let them use VPNs.
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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.
According to Google, Meta restored their account within hours after it got flagged for some content.
This happens all the time on these social media websites. Automatic flagging of content, human reviewers restore it.
Including accounts of public officials? I thought they were treated differently. Like manual review before any action.
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.
I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.
But this case is something else entirely.
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.
Saying "no political expression this week" is a political expression that usually favors the status quo.
I think you're taking it too far.
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.
That's simply not true though. There are cases when no answer is an answer. But this is simply not participating. As they shouldn't.
Many countries already have electoral silence (but it's limited to one or two days usually).
Define political expression.
The law isn’t code. It doesn’t require formal definition of all boundaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
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It can be worked out. It does not need to be perfect. I see no need to start an endless discussion on it here.
If you read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, you'll learn that this isn't the first time they've done something like this. I left WhatsApp after reading that book in protest (I already left FB and Instagram many years ago) and don't miss it.
I wish I had your discipline regarding Whatsapp. I have quit Facebook and Instagram but quitting Whatsapp has been tough.
My entire family uses WhatsApp. I held off for years because of that.
After reading this book, I decided that I couldn't keep supporting this company and told them that I'm leaving WhatsApp and that they can text me if they want to chat.
They were all not only more than fine with the move but actually helped me recreate the chat groups we had before!
So if you really want to go cold turkey on Meta products, going scorched Earth might not scorch as much as you think it will!
Whether you're for or against Lula, the only logical position is to oppose censorship. Eventually the tool gets used against you too.
If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.
Anyone familiar, to comment?
Pretty much the opposite, influencers depend on it and have a disproportional "influence" and audience given by Meta to keep pushing their agenda
They did the same thing in India/ There were student protests that were widely covered by Western media (and the students did have a valid concern, I dont want to downplay that)
The problem is when Indian Prime Minister posted a video asking for calm, that was blocked by Meta.
Pushing one side/narrative is something western media companies like BBC and CNN do a lot, and now it seems Meta has joined the party.
Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.
The problem is that US needs subservient explorable countries for its resources, and that's exactly what the other candidate will drliver.
exploit and explore are the same word in Portuguese.
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.
Interesting
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.
Actual link: https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-blocks-president-...
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?
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...
The good ole "If it fits my agenda it's true" test
Calculated & orchestrated I believe.
It’s why democracy as a concept is an illusion, a utopian concept, a naive wishful thinking, humanity never had it and never will. Whoever controls the information and the money, control the results, it is very easy to manipulate the public, one time you scare them to do/don’t do something, other times you promise a reward for that, coupled knowing the majority of people lack critical thinking, you can do anything if you control the information feed conduit and have enough money to pump it.
What if we get rid of the money
Brazil is turning its back on the future. Its next president will either be a vengeful nepotism-baby (Bolsonaro) or a doddering leftie (Lula).
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> fascinatingly softened description of both, particularly Lula. Something related to his tacit support for violent far-left terrorism, vote buying or corruption would have trumped "doddering" for me.
My macroexpansion is: he is a democrat, and sound on the environment. But he has done precious little to unleash growth or restrain spending. He has failed to push economic reforms, bar a sales-tax simplification, and calls fiscal discipline “nonsense”. His government is on course to end the term with the largest public-debt-interest bill in a quarter of a century.
Meta and Mark are the new Murdoch.
Evil always finds new acolytes.
The US empire at work. Luckily for all of us its 1955 and the empire is on its last legs.
why is it 1955? Do you see parallels between how trans people are treated today and the start of the civil rights movement?
No, the British Empire, the one dominating before the US, finally ended in 1956. We'll see if the Russian empire collapses before the US one.
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> They asked Rubio if Trump’s administration would commit to respecting Brazil’s electoral process and requested a response by 1 October. The state department has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Completely meaningless. Of course the US (my country) will interfere. And the people doing so will have absolutely no shame about it.
Last time I looked, Lula was favored, but this time it seems he's about even with the far-right opponent, Flávio. How do you think it'll turn out?
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/LGBTQXXX.. 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.. so what it might take would be the anti-other to first reach entente with the LGBTQ/left-identitarians/feminists/antiZionists, that is, recognizing "institutional-AI" as a bigger threat than "patriarchy"
Btw.. HN feels to me like Thiel-like (in methods, not stance) propagandists for the Convivial-Institution weaponizing their growing hoard of humane but "incidentally" individualist stories. (Because fun details about bureaucracy are structurally rare in comparison)
Friendly, knowledgeable oldbeards (men) finding their energetic curious young "broccoli haired" successors, to make this sound more... Immunogenic ;)
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...
Flavio is the favorite on exchange betting markets. Not by much though... he's rated a 57% chance to win the presidency.
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
The US proves "every accusation is a confession" and "accuse them of what you do and call them what you are".
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
Did you understand what you wrote here?
Of course, and the people need understand every angle , if you think the company a is good or governor b ia good you is been manipuladed, i very dislike this censorship over lula, but need understand this is retalation over governor try regulamented somes aspects of the world
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Waiting for people to realise that this is not a recent Facebook specific development.
This thread is quicky suggests that Brazil should just ban Twitter/FB/What'sUp. And as matter of fact Brazil did that couple of times. As for today Brazil orders ISPs to block ~15k sites. Mostly gambling. However plenty of sites in the lists are political in nature.
Another argument, that blocking is not doing any good to the citizens. See Russia where FB/Linkedin and many other sites are blocked. That's not helping democracy at all.
But the most important sad realization that besides the USA there is NO other country where one can host and run even slightly popular forum site. Even forum related to stamps or railway models. The regulatory burden and the harassment from government agencies makes the exercise impossible to execute. HN front page had a plenty of examples of the niche forums/sites shutting down in UK/Germany because of the regulatory risks.
Think for a second, Brazilian candidate complains that the private USA company blocked him. Bu the problem is that Brazilian elites made Internet regulations so hostile that there is absolutely no open platforms do discuss political mattes there, thus even those elites have to rely on US-based platform. And they do, with all that hipocricy, i.e. advertise there then in benefits them, ban quickly once not.
Lula is a horrific monster, good for Meta.
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)
It was pretty great until around 2010 when it was still a social network rather than social media.
> Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,
No. I tried it for a week, 20 years ago. Fb bastards still have my info, but I am not signing in ever again.
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.)
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"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"
They never said "Don't do evil".
Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".
Sadly he wasn't, and still isn't, wrong.
Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.
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.
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)
Here we go again
Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?
Trump is friends with Bolsonaro.
It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".
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Have you not have picked up a newspaper in a few years, I suppose?
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
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How is that remotely similar? Trump was banned for condoning political violence after losing an election
I guess you should zoom out a bit then and understand the abstract of what i said ;)
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are they even allowed to do that, damn
Trump approves this message
Much ado about nothing:
- 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?
Pretty damming quote from Zuckerberg tho:
“Vamos trabalhar com o presidente Trump para pressionar os governos ao redor do mundo que estão perseguindo empresas americanas”, afirmou Mark Zuckerberg.
True, at this time (not that it was ever better) we can't expect anything but this kind of attitude from him
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.