Comment by abroszka33
1 month ago
I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
1 month ago
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.
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
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Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations
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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.
It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.
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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.
I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.
> 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.
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.
https://www.studytogether.com/discord
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This is less like censoring the internet and more like banning lead-based paint.
Hahahaha I like this framing
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.
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.
This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.
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.
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And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy
how do you block access to it without going to TCP/IP level? And when governments do that, everything goes to shit
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Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.
it's a part of internet. To properly block it, you need to block it on the IP level
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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.
> Fight fire with fire.
How would you go on a ad campaign against Facebook, using Facebook ads, where Facebook have already blocked your ads?
I don't know the exact media landscape of this world any more, but I can say I don't personally own a TV and can't even remember when I last watched live, and given all the TVs in stores sell themselves on how "smart" they are and which streaming services they work with I don't want to guess what normal viewing habits are.
Similarly, the closest I get to radio ads are in podcasts. If I own a radio, it's been forgotten in the bottom of a box for years and at least two house moves.
I have no idea which companies are ultimately behind podcast ads.
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.
Appears is the key word as most have gotten around the ban while others move to other sites usually from China.
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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.
And can also criminally prosecute the individuals responsible for those decisions if the law says so.
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).
Just ban it and make your own social networks then? Surely it’s easy and straightforward to do.
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.
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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.
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.
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