Trump approves this message

"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"

Calculated & orchestrated I believe.

They never said "Don't do evil".

Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".

Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.

It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".

the pay-to-play claim is wrong, the issue is the ban threshold itself, post certain topics from the "wrong" political side and you get banned almost instantly, the same ideas posted repeatedly from the other prefered side of the us gov face no consequences on especially meta and twitter

They changed their name to "Meta" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

During Covid I was told that when Meta censors speech it’s not censorship because it’s a private company -despite much of the contentious censorship at that time being precipitated by Biden admin “embeds”?

Why is this action by a private company now considered censorship but wasn’t back then?

Moreover why are people not complaining about Lula mandating the censorship on X of about 600 opposition leaders? Why is that not called out? Oh, they like that censorship.

https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...

Speech is already not entirely free and it works fine. You can’t scream “murder all the X” in a theatre. It doesn’t break the concept of freedom to have regulations, and assuming nothing can be regulated just leads to governance by corporation.

It can be worked out. It does not need to be perfect. No need to start an endless discussion on it here.

Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?

I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.

https://www.studytogether.com/discord

It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.

I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.

But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?

No, it’s not different now because you’re conflating two different things. One is the first amendment cited in Twitter case. The other is free speech cited here.

Did Twitter violate the principles of free speech by shutting Trump down? Well he was using his speech to foment an insurrection and caused a mob to sack the Capitol so yes, Twitter, within the bounds of the first amendment, for an eminently justifiable reason (to preserve democracy), attacked Trump’s speech, which is against free speech, yet preserves free speech, because the alternative was allowing insurrection to continue. The first amendment cannot hold under a dictatorship, as we are seeing right now as all press are (were? Are they complying with the order?) illegally banned from the White House.

It’s not straightforward but it’s consistent.

Are you aware that US laws don't apply in other countries?

"A private corporation has the right to restrict speech on their own platform at their discretion."

Not really. Let's say Meta banned all blacks from advertising on facebook tomorrow. That would run against federal law.

"Governments are still more powerful than corporations" at this point i would not be so sure anymore. especially when some of corporations have full weight of us goverment behind them.

And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.

And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy

Not supporting the idea, but this feels like the traditional technical details vs practical real world solution.

Rather than banning individuals right to access a site, and then playing technical whackamole, you make that company's ability to operate in a country illegal. this puts the incentives and the technical onus where it belongs.

Again not saying they should or I support the notion of banning a site. Just that there are practical legislative solutions.

Make it illegal. Make it illegal for local advertisers to do business with them. Sanction individuals that cannot be locally prosecuted. Sanction the company.

It's already a requirement that to operate in Brazil they need local representation. Someone local who can be prosecuted, even if it's just a proxy - I'm hazy on the details but I remember reading about this at one point when they went after Twitter.

Is it going to fully stop Brazilians from using the service? Most likely not, but it will almost certainly reduce their usage, and the remaining users become a less profitable product to Meta, since they're not going to see ads for companies they can actually spend money on.

This changes incentives and may well be enough to make Meta rethink their policies. Or not, but then its effects can be measured and adjusted.

Yes, this would be a better outcome. Or at least make it illegal for politicians to use facebook / TikTok

From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.

Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.

Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.

And it wasn't that long ago.

But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?

Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.

Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.

Private companies are censoring the internet right now to interfere with democracy.

This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.

The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.

Right, don't ban them that's bad for free speech, just impose huge fines on Facebook to bankrupt them.

You don't need to censor access to the platform itself. Just declare the group for what it is: a criminal cartel. Then just make it illegal to do business with criminal organizations: no Brazilian ads on Facebook anymore.

This is less like censoring the internet and more like banning lead-based paint.

nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet

First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.

Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.

Then they should go wild on a governmental campaign about how FB is bad for mental health with daily TV, radio ads etc. Fight fire with fire.

Actually, the Australian government censored the internet for children and it appears to be working out as being good.

Depends on who the government is. You can’t realistically give anyone full write access to your populace.

Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.

If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?

This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...

I can't find the postmortem. Do you know where the posted it?

Here we go again

Much ado about nothing:

- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.

- The account has been reestablished already

This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?

Last time I looked, Lula was favored, but this time it seems he's about even with the far-right opponent, Flávio. How do you think it'll turn out?

And also you can masquerade political ads as ads for a newspaper article, for example: "Governor A opens a new school" or "Party A declares amazing plans for next 5 years" (actually done here by ruling party, to work around election ad laws and limitations).

Yes, but it puts friction on it. Perfect vs good etc.

For example, you can't advertise overtly for political candidates or parties. You can't advertise if you are a political party or an org that has candidates for election. Of course they will then use supposedly independent orgs who are totally not affiliated with the party, but again it's some friction.

In Hungary, since Fb banned political ads in the EU, the previous governing party had a much harder time in advertising themselves, they tried but didn't manage to go around the rules at scale.

defining "political" ads

Yes, and people will also complain that you now suppress serious conversations about people's lives and want them to live in some rose tinted walled garden where they can only post wholesome sanitized corporate friendly content etc.

And anyway in the last decade or more, there was a big push to say that "everything is political", you must always speak up for your ideas even in unrelated venues and spaces, etc., so yes it becomes very hard to delineate this because again, realistically, the problem is not political vs not political but my side vs their side.

And Meta (or the US government) seems determined to prove him right

Pointing out an issue with one action doesn't mean approval of other actions. You don't have to invent an conspiracy.

Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,and not an arm of the American state whipping up hatred, spreading misinformation, and interfering with elections?

To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.

Disgusting. They bent over 5x backwards not to meddle in election politics for Trump (that is: in the era after they banned him for violating policies)

In the same way USA is realising “holy crap all our stuff is made in China”, every non-US company is realising “holy crap, all our news and information runs through a couple of American web sites”

Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)

But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.

The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.

Interesting

Waiting for people to realise that this is not a recent Facebook specific development.

Meta and Mark are the new Murdoch.

Evil always finds new acolytes.

The people rely on them too much, sadly

I'm just as confused as you are.

The economic value seems literally negative and the influence on the discourse massive and much too unpredictable.

The recent Romanian election where a focused botnet created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election _and got him elected president_ should really be proof enough that the state of things is unnatural.

why countries don't simply block facebook

because everyone currently in power has used it to get there

why would they block their best weapon?

How is that remotely similar? Trump was banned for condoning political violence after losing an election

Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.

No one used to care about elections in other countries, but it seems political polarization is truly globalized now. An election in one country seems to carry such heavy stakes for citizens elsewhere. Why? Transnational disinformation? Sad time.