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Why meta is not fully banned in the EU is beyond me :)
I know banning or forcing meta to obey laws in the US is impossible due to bribes (political contributions), but in the EU I would think meta could at the very least be reined in.
We just need to start pirate streams of football games and it will be gone within the week.
I'm not saying it's not bad in the USA (because it is) but if you think there's no corruption or bribing in EU politics then I don't know what to say.
Although both continents are presently losing themselves to fascism, quantity still has a quality all its own.
You're on the right track but instead of losing themselves to fascism what you should more accurately be pointing out, in my opinion, is that in general societies are becoming a lot more open to authoritarian ideologies, whether that's communism, fascism, or similar.
This actually is a result of Meta being forced to obey EU law. Not sure why the article didn't explain things at all, but Regulation (EU) 2024/900 greatly restricts political advertising with typical vagueness, so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.
Information like this should be front-and-center. Call it malicious compliance if one wishes, but if there is one thing that is clear, Meta does not do anything (besides try and make money) without being forced to. A blanket ban on anything political does indeed mean a ban on all sides of an issue, even ones many would agree is positive.
The comment you’re responding to and that you want front and center is plainly wrong. The regulation is about transparency and restricting targeted advertising technics for political advertising. That has nothing to do with the situation at hand, it is meta doing something on their own.
And your point about Meta being forced to act is also wrong, companies aren’t just passive institutions that only react to regulations, they constantly take decisions and actions, and regularly manufacture that type of situation as a way to lobby regulators
The answer is right in front of your eyes: theguardian.com
No, showing ads for feminism or social issues related plays is not illegal in Europe. Nor fined. And it is practically practiced all around the Europe.
This strategy of "we will lie about what the law enforces, so that we can blame the regulator instead of the company" is getting old.
No. Meta enforces a broad ban because they don't want EU to regulate them, so they drag their feet and create the most possible "unwanted collateral damage" so people will get upset at the regulation instead of the company. So, pieces like this from The Guardian are surely needed.
Other examples of this bullshit being cookie consent dialogs and Apple acting like a victim for being forced to open their platform a bit.
It doesn't ban political advertising, it requires labeling/transparency, and prohibits targeting without consent or based on categories like race or religion.
It also defines political ad narrowly as placed by a political actor or campaign, or intended to influence some part of the political process, like voting, legislation, or regulatory action.
If that were the case, we wouldn't have far right AI generated political ads everywhere in Facebook. Just one example from France this week[1]
I don't know what motivation Facebook has to automatically limit certain political advertising and not other, but it certainly has nothing to do with EU regulation
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/09/19/the-lucr...
are the things that you linked to adverts? as in, someone paid facebook to promote them in the ad bit? or are they just regular content.
How is a Virginia Woolf play "political advertising"?
the law came into effect due to widespread advertising campaigns on facebook by someone (often thought to be russian government based) for both sides of any culture war topics, presumably to drive division. Things like simultaneously advertising BLM/ACAB + thin blue line.
Like they've famously obeyed GDPR?
Meta aren't 'forced' to do anything other than treat the fines imposed by their lack of adherence to the laws of the territories they operate in as a BAU cost. Meta's profits run roughly the same as the GDP of Paraguay ($60.46 billion in 2025) - i.e. that Country's total value added by an economy through wages, profits, and taxes. Their revenue is on track to exceed the Ukrainian GDP next year.
This year Meta will pay up to $16.7bn to settle landmark US legal actions as result of not obeying US law, reporting $2.4 billion in legal fees in Q2 alone.
The sum total of the EU fines issued (read: appealed and not collected) likely won't even exceed Metas legal fees for the 2026 calendar year; i.e.:
* April 2025 - €200m (DMA "consent or pay" advertising model)
* November 2024 - €797.72m (Antitrust re:Facebook Marketplace)
* September 2024 - €90m (Storage of user passwords in plaintext)
* May 2023 - €1.2b (Unlawful EU-U.S. user data transfers)
* January 2023 - €390m (Forcing personalized ads via terms of service)
* December 2022 - €251m (2018 data breach and system design lapses)
* November 2022 - €265 (Inadequate protection against data scraping)
* September 2022 - €405m (Instagram children's privacy)
that _really_ doesn't seem what is happening
an AD for a theater play is by no standard political advertisement
Political advertisement in the regulations context is reasonable clearly defined.
An AD for a theater play is in general very clearly _not_ covered by it.
To add to it: Civil rights & feminism (in it's official non hijacked definition, aka. equal fair treatment of man and women) are fundamental rights in the EU, something the regulation very clearly states it doesn't want to impeach on. So arguments that you could accidentally misread the regulation to include banning _non-political advertisement about artistic work covering fundamental rights are a bit absurd_.
Anywhere here is the definition of political advertisement in given regulation:
(emphasis mine)
So to put it simple: Meta is engaging in censure.
Stretching the term political to include more or less everything (like any topic people have opinions about a politician might speak about) is IMHO a pretty dishonest misinterpretation, especially given that it isn't even everything, but "everything Meta doesn't want to get involved with due to the current political environment".
At best this misinterpretation is due to laziness, at worst pushed by malicious actors in the US.
Given that Meta is a US company and the currently people in power there find this topics quit unpleasant and Metas long history of not faithfully complying with law and allowing all kind of ADs this looks very bad for them.
Why do you think so many big tech companies are registering subsidiaries in Ireland? (Aside form the "Double Irish" mechanism that used to be in vogue more than a decade ago).
Plenty of hands seem to be well greased over there given how long it takes to issue fines for clear&cut violations of EU regulation.
So, Meta should be banned because it followed EU law to ban some things?
Wow, Europeans do have a penchant for recursively banning things :)
Neither feminism nor social issues are banned in European advertissements.
No. Supranational corporations will find any and all ways to be maliciously compliant and blame the EU.
It’s pretty simple - the EU is unable to produce alternatives. This is because they don’t have the software talent for it.
Any talent they do have immediately runs for the SF Bay Area of the United States at the first opportunity.
You want good alternatives to Meta’s products? Pay engineers a competitive salary.
And no, the lower cost of living doesn’t even remotely begin to make up for the difference in comp. Same with healthcare - it’s effectively free in the United States for people who have jobs, especially so for SWEs.
We don't have to put up with this. We simply choose to. But our laws could be whatever we want them to be.
Unfortunately, "we" is often those with the monetary means to make their voice heard.
Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.
Folks want Facebook or whatever to be regulated into some perfect idea they have in their heads of how it should work and how it should be regulated. Sorry, many people have many views on that, and you're never going to be happy with an outcome. Even this article - Facebook is complying with EU rules/regulations and now you're not happy that your voice isn't heard through your preferred form of political activism. If Facebook allows this content, they break EU laws, or they have to allow some content you disagree with and now you're mad.
I don't know why people, right, left, or sideways keep putting up with this stuff.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the EU regulation that requires to label political ads and restricts targeting technics
Yes it does. You're using the product and seeing the ad. You and others are mad that the product is complying with the regulation in a way you don't prefer. Stop using the product, and no ad is there to be seen and none of this matters.
I don’t use meta’s products. The issue has absolutely nothing to do about an ad ban. There is no ban of political advertising in the EU.
Ban/regulation, whatever. It's in the article and comments. Whatever you want to call that.
That’s Meta response. There is no mention of any regulation in that article.
Same here - idk why are people jumping on the wagon of attributing the restriction to EU regulation. Looks to be a US compliance banning social topics that Trump administration is pursuing (but again, idk if that's the case)
I don't have any of those but I do need one messenger to communicate with my buddies in the EU. As I'm a "fuck the Zuck" person and an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), Telegram is my poison.
I don't have any doubt: I know it's not E2EE (and I doubt that one-on-one encrypted communication --it's a setting you MUST turn on-- in Telegram is actually really E2EE).
But Telegram is neither from the Zuck nor from Microsoft, so that's a big win for me.
Also basically everyone in the EU has Telegram now.
There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement. While I am a person who doesn't use those services (and recently stopped using reddit), a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.
Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them.
Individual boycotts rarely work, even ones that attract attention from a good number of people, companies are better at waiting than individuals seem to be. Political action has a much higher likelihood of success when driven by smaller motivated groups.
Good, I am pro-privilege and support being privileged. I'm not sure how and why we came to the point in our society where if someone says "hey these products suck and I'm not going to use them", someone has to come along and attempt to guilt them into using them? You want me to create a Facebook account and post pictures of funny cats because Joe and Sally podcaster need eyeballs for their rage-bait podcasts or quirky coffee mug they drop-shipped from China?
Sorry, not buying it. Don't like the products? Stop using them. Reliant on them? Go complain to regulators. Not my monkeys, not my circus.
If your business requires the use of one of these platforms in order to exist I would question its viability. Willingly giving a single company that much power over you is a horrible position to be in. Maybe it does put food on the table this month, great! But what happens if Zuck (or a piece of dumb automation) decides next month to boot you?
"If your business requires the use of the biggest companies, specifically advertising companies with access to billions of people your business must not be legitimate"
Do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth? If an LLM said this we'd call it a stochastic parrot that just put words together without any deeper understanding.
You mean 'influencers'?
Nothing of value has been lost.
Please can you provide an example. I can't say I've ever experienced such a thing (and would never GDPR opt-in to such data sharing even if the opportunity was there).
"We" is a massive group of people who all have wildly different ideas. Saying "laws could be what we want them to be" is highly subjective depending on who the "we" is at that current time.
Yea, people use We as the royal we quite often. What "people" miss about the royal we is it works much better when you have lots and lots of money.
At this point, I suspect that comments like this one are part of an astroturfing campaign by the ruling class.
It’s the same bullshit as “we could stop climate change if only we bothered to bring cloth bags to the store instead of picking up a disposable plastic bag each time”.
“We” don’t have any power. And once you accept that, you can stop blaming yourself and your neighbors for the world you live in, and direct your anger where it belongs.
“We” do, we could, if organized. Per your first point, that is the problem today - agreeing on a shared goal rather than infighting about all the peripheral issues.
What looks like a peripheral issue to you is somebody else's central goal. And vice versa.
Whos "We"?
I would hazard a guess theres stuff that I don't agree with you on, and we would want certain laws written differently. Its important to remember that we all vote for what we think is right, based on a system evolved over thousands of years to cater for human fallibility. The modern rhetoric of "us against the billionaires" is simply not how the world works, despite how much people want it to.
<Ned Flanders' father>: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!
People who say this have never tried, do nothing themselves to contribute to improving the problem or to convince others or the government to improve the problem besides perhaps complaining on the internet in a bubble of likeminded people who don't need their minds changed.
What is the problem?
There are many of them, whatever it is you feel needs improvement.
I'm pretty much fine, thank you. And I am pretty sure that is true for most HN users. Most of us are not hungry. The rest is a bunch of first-world problems.
Where does it belong?
Their argument is so generic they would probably say something equally as generic and useless like 'The billionaires"
The power is with the people. It only takes about 1/4th of a community enact massive change.
Your take is exactly what keeps people apathetic and reliant on others.
"It's someone else's fault and someone else's responsibility" is what you're saying.
It relieves the individual of the outcome of their actions. 8 billion people matter.
If I were an abuser, I would LOVE to hear my victims say they are powerless. Think about that.
I doubt that even 8,000 people “matter” in the sense of having meaningful power.
Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left).
And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
"Please ignore the person above, they are a child abuser and you can look up evidence of it online (posts list of crusty questionable sites that seemingly popped up out of nowhere). Chneu, when did you stop abusing your wife? When did you stop posting racist remarks on reddit on anonymous accounts? Why are you a member of the communist party. Why do you support trans rights? Why do you support the gays. Why do you hate the gays. Why do you hate minorities. Why do you support illegal immigration"
The above is just a tiny sample of what will happen to you when you start challenging people with power. You see, powerful "bad" people don't care how many accusations you make against them. They will flood the field with noise so people just ignore it. Now you, because you're a good guy have to be the most perfect little angel or all your followers will run away in disgust.
You know nothing about power and how to wield it. There better not be any skeletons in your closet because I will surface them. Hell, it doesn't even matter, I will plant them there.
Of course all the above is fictional, I'm not going to do these things to you because I'm not a person with millions of dollars threatened by your actions. But don't think threatening people with billions of dollars comes without cost.
it's the opposite? the person you're replying to is exactly correct... the giant delusion that sustains this whole shitty thing is the public's disenchantment with politics; everything feels bad but no one seems to believe in "passing different laws" as the method of changing it so instead they just vent their frustrations in hopes that someone who already has power will by the goodness of their heart decide to do a better job. when in fact the lever fox fixing things, democracy, still (for the most part) exists, but almost nobody is coordinating to pull it.
causally I think this is because we all grew up watching government operate glacially and so nobody really believes there's an alternative... but I eagerly await the day that millennials realize they can just win every election and fix everything that sucks about their world by basically trying really hard and coordinating with each other.
The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.
And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...
Are you doubting the power of cloth bags and reusable drinking straws? Ethical consumption matters! I only buy products with green colors and “natural” looking fonts, that way I know that I’m not contributing to climate change. (Oh and although I drive a Tesla, I bought it before Elon went crazy, tee-hee.)
If only everyone would round up to the nearest dollar at checkout, we could end poverty!
Sounds like malicious compliance, they should get a fine for that as well.
Maybe they should be forced to advertise "Careless People"
Probably got better publicity with this ban then if they actually showed the ads.
My money is that this is manufactured by some PR team.
Possibly the Ad's text was purposely inflammatory (something like "overthrow the patriarchy" or something) so that they can say it was banned.
Yes, Meta has consistently acted with integrity and has earned the benefit of the doubt in situations like these. It's safer to assume that the massive PR team working for this one-woman play in Spain has manufactured the whole thing, including the damning quotes, which the Guardian has somehow published without properly verifying.
The guy you’re responding to is acknowledging FB’s crap practices and is suggesting a PR team may be using that to their advantage for guerrilla marketing. Not an insane suggestion, actually savvy and common in our modern rage landscape.
Well now we know Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meta, apparently.
Appears to be a response to EU regulation in 2025 banning political/electoral advertising [1]:
I guess rather than micro-regulate what constitutes "designed to influence an election/referendum, voting behavior, or a legislative/regulatory process", they just decided to refuse to run ads for anything potentially politically or socially "sensitive".
I'm guessing that they also refuse to run ads for things that are less socially acceptable such as anti-feminism which I would say is a good thing.
[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
Where did you get this from? I don't see anything in the article mentioning that specific regulation
How is Meta supposed to police that line? In a democracy, influencing voting behavior is a key purpose of every “cause.”
Completely wrong.
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
Is this an EU or Spain issue? I regularly attend at a theatre in Chicago that has socially "sensitive" plays. I often see their ads on Facebook.
It’s a meta problem
Meta does not do this outside the EU. It's a EU problem, and was caused by the EU's TTPA enacted last year which imposes heavy bureaucratic compliance process on any advertising that touches on any social or political topics.
Meta doesn't do this outside the EU, and they didn't do this in the EU prior to the TTPA. Draw your own conclusions about whether this is a "meta problem."
It’s Meta lobbying against EU regulations that requires to restrict how targeted politics ads can be. Making it a Meta problem
Reading other comments in this thread it appears to be more of an EU rule/law. Can you elaborate on how this is 'on' meta?
It's a problem with EU over-broad regulation enacted last year that is nearly impossible to comply with, which is why most social media has just banned political or "cause"-centric advertising completely. Unfortunately "feminism" falls into that category.
As a Spaniard, neither is expected. The most censor-like behavior you get is a random mayor from a small town that decides to not support a particular artist of the opposite ideology for public funded shows and it goes viral.
This is meta's choice.
I wanted to parenthetically say that I recently saw Job, set in the Bay Area. The show was provocative and contemporary. I don't remember if I saw an ad for it...
"Jane, an employee at a big tech company, has been placed on leave after video of her emotional breakdown at work went viral. Her employers tell Jane she must be evaluated by crisis therapist Loyd before she can be reinstated to the job that gives her life meaning."
https://www.writerstheatre.org/events/job
This is a shitty article. It doesn’t mention that the ban on social ads in the EU is due to their anti-free speech rules rather than a Meta specific policy. Meta is in favor of social activism ads in general but restricts them in the EU: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...
Completely wrong.
As per Meta's own guidelines, they simply require increased authenticity and transparency to run social issue ads that seek to influence public opinion through discussion, debate or advocacy for or against important topics, like health and civil and social rights.
Meta literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - on Slide 6 as eligible to run in the EU.
https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...
The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."
It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.
Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.
This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.
Move along now, don’t make a racket, don’t do anything to disturb count Zuckerberg and his masters. Go away with your progressive ideas like… Allowing women to express themselves.