My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
r/TheDonald wasn't nuked because of "inconvenience", but rather because the mods were unable or unwilling to control hate speech, threats of violence, and other abusive behavior. Nor was there a "long track record" -- it was one of about 2000 subs that were nuked in one major purge (many of them were inactive). As for "back in the days", Reddit still bans such behavior.
Lets people forget, theDonald created entirely new ways of trolling r/all and by extension everyone who never wanted anything to do with them.
This included having multiple posts trend one beneath the other to let people know what they thought.
This is ignoring the stuff that happened within the subreddit. When they got booted and went to whatever the other site was they were overrun with hate speech so bad that even their own mods had to reintroduce bans.
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
Autoban? I thought they have whitelists of accounts it leaves alone, for this exact reason.
It's possible, of course, but taking anything Meta says at face value is very naive IMO. It's just as possible that they let it be banned and then measured the response, to determine if they continue the ban
Time and time again we see cases of non-aligned targets of censorship as some sort of autoban or technical issue. It's a lie and repeating it only help the liars.
To be clear I totally think we should demand better off their automated systems. Just because they made a robot do things and the robot did it wrong doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. They just are too cheap to pay enough actual people to be in the loop of automated decisions or quickly reviewing them.
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
It's not weird at all, it's pointing out most free speech absolutists just mean speech for themselves and their friends. Musk will be silent about this.
The most famous free speech absolutist is Elon Musk and he’s not only not a critic of the Trump administrations lawlessness but a direct participant in it. Also censors a lot of shit on Twitter that he doesn’t like.
I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN. It's not because of flamewar in the comments section, is it? The upvotes/comments ratio looks normal to me. Can someone explain? In any case, thanks to the OP for the link.
My guess: Bots paid by those supporting the current administration are brigading these threads, and flagging the threads.
One theory I've seen over and over again, as to why the current admin is cozying up with Russia, is that their bot farms and influencing campaigns are very good at what they do, and aligned enough to keep them up and running - purely out of self interest.
> I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN.
YC is a fairly pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian organization and the in-group protects itself.
See: funding flock (and dozens of other authoritarian-adjacent surveillance/defense companies), YC CEO Garry Tan's recent political advocacy history, etc.
You don't say "We need more billionaires" unless you are pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian (or unless you are ignorant of history and fundamentally don't understand how inevitable it is that unaddressed extreme wealth inequality always leads to oligarchy and authoritarianism).
Because this is just a thread for people to whine about Meta with no real solutions. Most threads about Meta have nothing constructive or insightful to say at all.
And, in this case, it lasted all of 90 minutes and speaks of a typical autoban ML feature. This happens all the time. False positives are going to happen constantly with a company that literally has 4 billion people use.
Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country's election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.
Meta said the technical issues cited in the report were already public and the conversations it referenced related solely to the severity of the issues, not political interference. "Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false," it added in a statement
I doubt it is a moderation decision. But there are plenty of people in big-tech here that have flagging powers and there are also plenty of people who may decide it doesn't belong here. HN has a strange relationship to politics. On the one hand HN wants to be an a-political safe space where you can discuss technology without politics and without considering the political ramifications of various actions, on the other it is abundantly clear that many of the people active here have a direct effect on the outcome of some of this stuff, either because they are employed with the companies (and by the people) that do so, because they invest in them or because they are big names when it comes to technology. It takes - by my estimate - about 40 flags to push an article with this many upvotes off the homepage.
The hypocrisy is - to me, at least - evident: you can't claim to be 'improving the world' according to your own vision of what that world should look like without serious consideration of the political angle. At the same time this is precisely the fig leaf many of the biggest politically influential companies hide behind. Flock, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and many others make their bread and butter out of various aspects of the surveillance state and they wield their political clout like every other weapon in their arsenal. Having a forum like HN question your choices in life can't be easy. So the flag button is a simple way to get rid of any personal doubts.
edit: I just re-read that thread, it is really interesting to do so in the light of the present day political climate and the upcoming elections. Also interesting how the view on Elon Musk changed over the years.
What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
I agree with you but I also understand your peer group.
WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.
Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.
iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
It's fine if people don't care about the federated aspect but I don't think we can rely on a corporation to solve this problem. Even a small one. Federation solves a real technical problem whether end users care or not.
We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.
> According to the organizers, Meta failed to respond to their team for approximately 90 minutes while the account was offline during the peak of their national day of action and livestream.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.
The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!
It was literally today that we heard about TikTok banning the account for the Musk movie because it’s politically inappropriate. This is hardly coming out of nowhere.
lol. 16 years after the first protests started being coordinated over social media, Meta, the largest social media company in the world whose tech folks are probably paid in the millions at the highest level, still hasn't figured out a way to avoid trampling over legitimate dissent for purely 'innocent, technocratic reasons'?
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
They do, but I stopped subscribing to the just world hypothesis a couple of decades ago. There is just too much broken and money has too much power to be reined in by justice.
They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
No matter what side you're on in a given issue there's a clear problem with certain platforms having things taken down but god help you if you report something horrible, it will never be removed
This is especially bad with Facebook (properties). Everyone else is really bad about various aspects, but only Zuck has as much contempt for people as he does
There was an episode where Google was asked to remove Pirate Bay from search results and they declined to do so. Facebook blocked it - even in private messages
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
It's not your fault but we're too far down the rabbit hole of The United States of Incorporation. A company is not the Government. Intentionally so. But it's all fucked through money influence. So no, a company will never have your public interest in mind. By design.
I still refuse to sign up for it so long as they have their "Fuck you, logged-out user" popup
It's not because of 'scraping'. They literally just want user count
People loved IG pre-FB acq. Then Zuck had his "IG can hurt us" emails, other private messages with one of the IG co-founders ("Zuck will go into destroy mode") and now we have photography being gatekept
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
No one cares about these protests who isn't already voting blue. If anything it alienates the majority of people who find endless futile protests annoying. Shutting down the account intentionally is so extraordinarily stupid politically that it seems pretty plausible that it was algorithmically flagged.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?
Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.
Yeah and nothing convinces the undecided independents, who now are mostly paranoid schizophrenics, to vote for you like appearing to shut down free assembly
I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like
No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
The (only) part of this that I find rather ironic (and kind of funny) is that these idiotic companies never seem to learn a thing. Nearly every single time they take something like this down, it just draws even more attention to it (the Streisand effect).
90 minutes. Trump was kicked off social media for how long?
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side
This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
"Proven" is too strong, but some COVID experts now consider the lab leak hypothesis plausible. It used to be that you could get banned from social media (mostly Facebook and pre-Musk twitter) for promoting it.
Really? I missed the evidence that the vaccine was mind a controlled experiment linked to 5G funded by Bill Gates that killed everyone who had the vaccine within 6 months.
Come, come, my good sir! COVID conspiracy theorists proven correct? Did 5G phone signals activate tiny robots in the COVID vaccine? No. Does the COVID vaccine work? It's not 100% effective, but mortality data certainly shows that those vaccinated are less likely to die. Time to do some research, update your priors, my friend.
with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
It is pretty funny seeing the reaction to this considering what conservatives had to deal with for around 6 years and continue to experience on major platforms.
Maybe leftists should sit this one out and reflect on what they promoted during that time. A taste of one's own medicine is humbling from time to time.
Oh how the tables have turned! "It's a private platform, they can ban whomever they want" leftists chanted! "I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs leftist who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
I would be more suspicious if No Kings wasn't an equally shady/opaque organization actively working overtime to subvert real leftist movememts from gaining traction in the US.
Its just your typical dark money poltical antics, funded by questionable people. It came out of nowhere with hundreds of millions in nationwide funding with teams of publicists and graphic designers. You should always be suspicious of these well funded, spontaneous but benign political movements.
It's a cathartic ritual organized and funded by billionaires that acts as a quartely pressure valve for the working class during the Trump administration. It prevent frustrations from boiling over (like in France) here during this time so the ruling class can push forward with their agenda.
It hijacks all momentum from local political organizing that actually have teeth. It funnels the energy back to the Democratic party, who serves the billionaires just as much as the Republicans.
or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol
The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.
My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
r/TheDonald wasn't nuked because of "inconvenience", but rather because the mods were unable or unwilling to control hate speech, threats of violence, and other abusive behavior. Nor was there a "long track record" -- it was one of about 2000 subs that were nuked in one major purge (many of them were inactive). As for "back in the days", Reddit still bans such behavior.
The suspension that was public facing lasted 90 minutes, but they couldn’t log into the account for hours
See https://bsky.app/profile/ezralevin.bsky.social/post/3my43atj...
> like /r/TheDonald
Lets people forget, theDonald created entirely new ways of trolling r/all and by extension everyone who never wanted anything to do with them.
This included having multiple posts trend one beneath the other to let people know what they thought.
This is ignoring the stuff that happened within the subreddit. When they got booted and went to whatever the other site was they were overrun with hate speech so bad that even their own mods had to reintroduce bans.
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
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Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.
Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.
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you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
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Yes, no matter what happened Meta are responsible and should provide answers.
There’s still an important distinction to make though: if it was automated then the No Kings page was not deliberately targeted for political reasons.
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Meta put it's thumb in the scale against Lula in Brazil. Why would this be any different?
What evidence do you have that it was an autoban?
Autobans happen to ad accounts on FB all the time.
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Autoban? I thought they have whitelists of accounts it leaves alone, for this exact reason.
It's possible, of course, but taking anything Meta says at face value is very naive IMO. It's just as possible that they let it be banned and then measured the response, to determine if they continue the ban
Perhaps, but why were the owners of the account then unable to sign into it after it was restored?
Time and time again we see cases of non-aligned targets of censorship as some sort of autoban or technical issue. It's a lie and repeating it only help the liars.
Why should we doubt it's an auto ban?
To be clear I totally think we should demand better off their automated systems. Just because they made a robot do things and the robot did it wrong doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. They just are too cheap to pay enough actual people to be in the loop of automated decisions or quickly reviewing them.
Hopefully it's a lesson learned by those involved.
Don't use platforms like this to organize in the future.
Don't use the only platforms that have millions of people on them to organize millions of people in the future?
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Don’t use JUST platforms like that. Use Instagram, but also have a dedicated website
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Logic failure. There is no reason to use fewer channels.
Come on. You’re not going to organize a political movement over RSS in 2026.
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I wonder if these free-speech absolutists will rail about this? Something tells me probably not.
I condemn deplatforming regardless of who it's being done to.
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
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what about child porn distributors, they get to stay too?
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I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
> there is no in between
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
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> We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
huh, but everywhere in the world where they put value on having free speech, the situation is "somewhere in between"
You probably shouldn't be able to threaten somebody or direct people to kill somebody, so I guess by your definition, I don't believe in free speech.
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So are you saying free speech doesn't exist? What's your point by casting this in absolute terms?
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Should you be able to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theater as a prank?
Your hunch is right because most of them are frauds who only support free speech if that speech is the kind they agree with.
Kind of a weird comment to make. Are you admitting they were right, or are you supporting the right for platforms to censor?
Or are you trying to elicit emotions?
It's not weird at all, it's pointing out most free speech absolutists just mean speech for themselves and their friends. Musk will be silent about this.
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I condemn all forms of censorship.
Right winger and free speech absolutist here. I do condemn it. The fact that it was only for 90 minutes does somewhat lessen the blow, though.
The irony of your comment getting immediately flagged.
What tells you that? Do you have evidence? Or just a vague sense that no one actually has any principles?
My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.
The most famous free speech absolutist is Elon Musk and he’s not only not a critic of the Trump administrations lawlessness but a direct participant in it. Also censors a lot of shit on Twitter that he doesn’t like.
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I'd fall into this bucket. I both disagree with much of what people consider wokism and think Trump is a gigantic ass hat.
Why would pro free speech people be right wing?
Because for the last 10 years anyone who was pro free speech was called a fascist in the US.
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Well when you put it like that, were right wing folks ever really pro free speech?
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[flagged]
I think you two are saying the same thing.
Elon (and others) will stay silent unless pressed on the issue, and even then it’s betting odds.
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Not a single pro free speech right source will say anything negative about this.
The roles reversed? I'm not following.
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Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams was a great read, highly recommend
Also Dark Money by Jane Mayer
I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN. It's not because of flamewar in the comments section, is it? The upvotes/comments ratio looks normal to me. Can someone explain? In any case, thanks to the OP for the link.
My guess: Bots paid by those supporting the current administration are brigading these threads, and flagging the threads.
One theory I've seen over and over again, as to why the current admin is cozying up with Russia, is that their bot farms and influencing campaigns are very good at what they do, and aligned enough to keep them up and running - purely out of self interest.
I flag some of these, I'm not a bot.
There must be some law on the internet that states something like : Anything I don't agree with or can't explain must be bots on the internet.
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It'd be nice if HN made the flagger specify a reason (or select a previously specified reason), and then display these tallies to all users.
Ideally that'd expose lazy flagging as well as cut down on these inevitable "why was it flagged?" threads.
The moderators have previously addressed this question many, many times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818
Thank you for that link. That absolutely makes sense. I'll not complain again :)
You can vouch for flagged comments but not for flagged posts.
The flagging system makes it easy for any sort of coordinated brigading or organic dislike to hide posts that some people don’t want seen
> I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN.
YC is a fairly pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian organization and the in-group protects itself.
See: funding flock (and dozens of other authoritarian-adjacent surveillance/defense companies), YC CEO Garry Tan's recent political advocacy history, etc.
You don't say "We need more billionaires" unless you are pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian (or unless you are ignorant of history and fundamentally don't understand how inevitable it is that unaddressed extreme wealth inequality always leads to oligarchy and authoritarianism).
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1942992514954224025
Threads like this always get flagged as soon as they gain any sort of traction. Free speech for me, but not for thee.
Because this is just a thread for people to whine about Meta with no real solutions. Most threads about Meta have nothing constructive or insightful to say at all.
And, in this case, it lasted all of 90 minutes and speaks of a typical autoban ML feature. This happens all the time. False positives are going to happen constantly with a company that literally has 4 billion people use.
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Strange how this keeps happening to Meta:
"Meta employees said Lula's accounts were hindered during Brazil election, Folha reports" (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...)
This post is 100% relevant to hacker news. Why is it flagged? Who is flagging these posts? Do we have a Russian bot problem?
The moderators have previously addressed this question many, many times, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46378818
You realize HN is a Y Combinator project, right? It is functionally run by Big Tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
Posts critical of oligarchy often shoot to number 1, then magically disappear from the homepage. It's a moderation decision.
"The revolution will not be televised."
I doubt it is a moderation decision. But there are plenty of people in big-tech here that have flagging powers and there are also plenty of people who may decide it doesn't belong here. HN has a strange relationship to politics. On the one hand HN wants to be an a-political safe space where you can discuss technology without politics and without considering the political ramifications of various actions, on the other it is abundantly clear that many of the people active here have a direct effect on the outcome of some of this stuff, either because they are employed with the companies (and by the people) that do so, because they invest in them or because they are big names when it comes to technology. It takes - by my estimate - about 40 flags to push an article with this many upvotes off the homepage.
I wrote about it in 2017:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14468554
The hypocrisy is - to me, at least - evident: you can't claim to be 'improving the world' according to your own vision of what that world should look like without serious consideration of the political angle. At the same time this is precisely the fig leaf many of the biggest politically influential companies hide behind. Flock, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and many others make their bread and butter out of various aspects of the surveillance state and they wield their political clout like every other weapon in their arsenal. Having a forum like HN question your choices in life can't be easy. So the flag button is a simple way to get rid of any personal doubts.
edit: I just re-read that thread, it is really interesting to do so in the light of the present day political climate and the upcoming elections. Also interesting how the view on Elon Musk changed over the years.
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Meta is also influencing Brazil's election: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l... - other social networks as well.
I'm literally begging people to start using the Fediverse at this point.
It doesn't have what people want (an audience)
And we replace one tyrant for dozens. It's not much of an improvement.
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What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
You are asking for too much sadly.
I agree with you but I also understand your peer group.
WhatsApp solves so many communication problems. It's a single protocol that can do text, audio and video calling. It works on low- and high-bandwidth connections. Everybody already has it, so it's functionally as ubiquitous as the phone itself.
Signal also has the "it's another app" problem. WhatsApp didn't have this problem initially because it was cheaper than texting in its heyday. Thus, having it on your phone made a lot of sense. Now that texting and video calling are functionally free and WhatsApp is ubiquitous, getting people onto something else is much more of an investment.
iMessage + FaceTime will be the next big platform if Apple decides to make it work across the pond. It has everything WhatsApp has while being disassociated from Meta.
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
Fediverse is fine, are there any other platforms that work around such censorship?
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.
It's fine if people don't care about the federated aspect but I don't think we can rely on a corporation to solve this problem. Even a small one. Federation solves a real technical problem whether end users care or not.
We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.
> According to the organizers, Meta failed to respond to their team for approximately 90 minutes while the account was offline during the peak of their national day of action and livestream.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.
Ok, so what is the actual reason it was suspended?
Edit: They hit a rate limit and tripped an automated suspension.
The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!
It was literally today that we heard about TikTok banning the account for the Musk movie because it’s politically inappropriate. This is hardly coming out of nowhere.
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lol. 16 years after the first protests started being coordinated over social media, Meta, the largest social media company in the world whose tech folks are probably paid in the millions at the highest level, still hasn't figured out a way to avoid trampling over legitimate dissent for purely 'innocent, technocratic reasons'?
I don't know if you remember the inauguration photograph but it is pretty clear that this is one big family now.
To save you some searching:
https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto's/guests-includ...
How weird still that that is the world we live in now. I would have never predict that photograph 1 year before it was taken.
You should read A People's History of the United States!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Un...
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Well yeah, Donald Trump was threatening to imprison Zuck a year before it was taken
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It was always this world. Except there were no pictures and definitely no social media back then. Welcome to reality.
Why ?
Loss of accountability and deregulation leads to oligarchy. If we are lucky, this will take decades to clean up.
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
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I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
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They do, but I stopped subscribing to the just world hypothesis a couple of decades ago. There is just too much broken and money has too much power to be reined in by justice.
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There are lots of people in SF that belong in prison.
What law do you believe that they have broken?
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hn is becoming reddit every day
There is a thread about about why posts like this get flagged...
This thread is the reason, it's like people off meds posting here about unrelated topics, crazy town.
I've been seeing variations of this stupid comment for like 15 years on this site.
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They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Party.html?id=v7fSD...
Is it surprising? Zuckerberg kissed the ring, did he not?
Zuckerberg is the ring.
If Instagram is not a platform but instead an arbiter of speech they should be held legally liable what is said on the platform.
They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.
> Free speech for me but not for thee
Tiktok banned the account promoting a Musk documentary too. Oh how the cookie crumbles!
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013453/tiktok-bans-alex-gibne...
In case people don't click the link:
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
From Indivisible [0]
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
[0]https://indivisible.actionkit.com/mailings/view/127823
No matter what side you're on in a given issue there's a clear problem with certain platforms having things taken down but god help you if you report something horrible, it will never be removed
This is especially bad with Facebook (properties). Everyone else is really bad about various aspects, but only Zuck has as much contempt for people as he does
There was an episode where Google was asked to remove Pirate Bay from search results and they declined to do so. Facebook blocked it - even in private messages
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
Yes, yes I do. that should be the standard.
should
It's not your fault but we're too far down the rabbit hole of The United States of Incorporation. A company is not the Government. Intentionally so. But it's all fucked through money influence. So no, a company will never have your public interest in mind. By design.
We're talking about the dorm room project of a rich kid who stole the idea from his friends and thinks his users are "dumb f**s".
There's really no reason to expect anything from Meta except for it to do what's best for Zuckerburg.
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From the wayback machine, I could not get into the linked article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20261018012124/https://meidasnew...
Instagram is trash. Stop wasting your time.
I still refuse to sign up for it so long as they have their "Fuck you, logged-out user" popup
It's not because of 'scraping'. They literally just want user count
People loved IG pre-FB acq. Then Zuck had his "IG can hurt us" emails, other private messages with one of the IG co-founders ("Zuck will go into destroy mode") and now we have photography being gatekept
Mundus Sine Caeasaribus. https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/mark-zucke...
Reddit astroturfing seems to have spread here
Oh well. I've heard this on Reddit for years: "̶̶̶̶̶̶̶ Meta can ban whoever they want, they are a private company". Just a hint of schadenfreude.
there's some pretty impressive delusion in this thread, but thinking reddit is going to astroturf hacker news i think wins the top prize
We have other options, yet we still keep using Meta. They're tied to all sorts of unethical stuff. Why. Stop using Meta.
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
No one cares about these protests who isn't already voting blue. If anything it alienates the majority of people who find endless futile protests annoying. Shutting down the account intentionally is so extraordinarily stupid politically that it seems pretty plausible that it was algorithmically flagged.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?
Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.
Yeah and nothing convinces the undecided independents, who now are mostly paranoid schizophrenics, to vote for you like appearing to shut down free assembly
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I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like
No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
that's absolutely not what hanlon's razor says. it's an epistemological rule of thumb, not a moral argument.
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Marx’ counter-Razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.
marx's ideas famously have never missed
I'm fairly certain that page is AI-written - see the paradium link in the footer
product liability means the product is the liability
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
> Maybe this is who they always were
Absolutely. But they were super good at getting smart people to pull their carts.
Soon they won't need to bother convincing people to work on their software, or at least that's the dream.
The (only) part of this that I find rather ironic (and kind of funny) is that these idiotic companies never seem to learn a thing. Nearly every single time they take something like this down, it just draws even more attention to it (the Streisand effect).
The balls on this Zuck, I tell ya ... grinds my gears.
90 minutes. Trump was kicked off social media for how long?
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.
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Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
A judge in Brasil read the situation differently than you, it appears:
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins...
and Meta employees have commented also:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
According to Meta their account was deactivated "for just over 1 hour" before being restored https://about.fb.com/br/news/2026/10/a-meta-nao-esta-interfe...
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
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The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
0: https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/28/facebook-blocks-lulas-cam...
> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
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It was an account with a few thousand followers. Nobody I know (in Brooklyn) follows the account.
I've seen more coverage of a brief 90-minute ban than I have of the protests themselves.
Trump and the Republicans are as unpopular as ever, but I don't think the No Kings protests are moving the needle right now.
> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
You're not comparing like with like.
Today's protests seem aimed around GOTV, rather than opposing specific policies. It makes sense that they wouldn't have the same draw.
The main organising IG account for the protests is https://www.instagram.com/50501movement, with almost 900k followers.
Patriot. God bless, Mr. Zuckerberg.
Frankly I'm not sure why they would bother.
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
Ask Ceausescu.
Ceausescu was ousted by a permitted street protest that lasted a few hours as scheduled and then everyone went back to brunch?
you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side
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This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
> This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country.
Like what happened in 2024?
About 2,000,000 less people voted in 2024 than in 2020. Those 2 million could have changed the results
> I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
The thing is that they are also dragging many other countries into that misery. Just look at here at Latin America.
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I'm sorry what⁉ what covid conspiracy theory has been proven correct?
"Proven" is too strong, but some COVID experts now consider the lab leak hypothesis plausible. It used to be that you could get banned from social media (mostly Facebook and pre-Musk twitter) for promoting it.
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Really? I missed the evidence that the vaccine was mind a controlled experiment linked to 5G funded by Bill Gates that killed everyone who had the vaccine within 6 months.
Being dead would explain why I feel a bit tired lately.
Come, come, my good sir! COVID conspiracy theorists proven correct? Did 5G phone signals activate tiny robots in the COVID vaccine? No. Does the COVID vaccine work? It's not 100% effective, but mortality data certainly shows that those vaccinated are less likely to die. Time to do some research, update your priors, my friend.
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with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
It is pretty funny seeing the reaction to this considering what conservatives had to deal with for around 6 years and continue to experience on major platforms.
Maybe leftists should sit this one out and reflect on what they promoted during that time. A taste of one's own medicine is humbling from time to time.
If by "conservatives" you mean hate speech and vaccine conspiracies, then sure.
If by "conservatives" you mean conservative political speech, I'd love to see some examples.
The good news is that the protests are working. Number of kings holding steady at zero.
What is the value on trolling like this?
what is the value of asking the value of trolling, you have a downvote
Oh how the tables have turned! "It's a private platform, they can ban whomever they want" leftists chanted! "I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs leftist who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.
I would be more suspicious if No Kings wasn't an equally shady/opaque organization actively working overtime to subvert real leftist movememts from gaining traction in the US.
I'm genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?
Its just your typical dark money poltical antics, funded by questionable people. It came out of nowhere with hundreds of millions in nationwide funding with teams of publicists and graphic designers. You should always be suspicious of these well funded, spontaneous but benign political movements.
It's a cathartic ritual organized and funded by billionaires that acts as a quartely pressure valve for the working class during the Trump administration. It prevent frustrations from boiling over (like in France) here during this time so the ruling class can push forward with their agenda.
It hijacks all momentum from local political organizing that actually have teeth. It funnels the energy back to the Democratic party, who serves the billionaires just as much as the Republicans.
or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol
It's weird to me to protest no kings now when 2020-21 is still so fresh in the mind. The circumstances of today pale in comparison.
I have no idea what you are trying to dog whistle
its not a dog whistle if you just state your belief openly like this person did
The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
> If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government
They favour themselves. And if to best position themselves they must suck up to the government then that's what they'll do. Every time.
> rather than their customers
Who do you think their customers are? They aren't the users. The users are the product, the cattle farmed by social media companies.
The customers are the advertisers. Advertisers don't want filthy protesters tarnishing their shiny brands.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.