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".

Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?

The law isn’t code. It doesn’t require formal definition of all boundaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

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?

In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.

Free speech only applies to the government. A private corporation has the right to restrict speech on their own platform at their discretion.

Or at least that's what I was told every time an online platform censored the right in the past. Is it suddenly different now that the shoe's on the other foot?

It feels like your treat the facebook as some common good, and censorship made by it thus preposterous, something which should be punished

But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange

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Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations

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.

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.

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...

A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.

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

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

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.