Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
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
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.
Facebook marked a video where a famous Italian author was saying what he was going to vote and why as "fake news". Of course he's opposing the current right wing pro-USA government.
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.
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.
The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.
In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
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?
You’re conflating the first amendment with free speech generally. They are different (related) concepts. The person you’re replying to did not appeal to the first amendment.
I'm not conflating anything, I'm simply repeating what I was told hundreds of times in the past by others in their defense of social media censorship, such as when Twitter banned Trump. So, is it different now?
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.
Well sometimes they do. Plus if another country is regulating or doing something to a company from your country I think it’s fair to have an opinion about it.
Plus a number of folks use the universality of their preferred politics when another country does something they like or don’t like. “International law”, “rules-based order”, those sorts of things. It’s pretty common to see.
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
"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.
All the more reason to ban Meta. If Meta are actively taking sides in Brazilian elections, then the site _should_ be banned, even if it's temporary for the lead-up to the election.
Meta can do whatever they want, but so can a sovereign nation if they deem Meta was actively subverting their democratic process.
Governments are still more powerful than corporations
Corporations aren't all equal. And Meta is one of the most unequal. Add to that the relationship with Trump's government, and your 'corporations' argument is meaningless.
If it were some other mutli-national that doesn't have its own massively popular news platform, I'd be much more likely to agree.
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.
Ok so sanction and fine their ass until they start behaving. If we can sanction north korea for having an ideology we don't like, surely brazil can sanction meta's ass for trying to blatantly meddle in another state's affairs. Bar every employee from traveling there. Freeze any assets. Use diplomacy to pressure the US to press charges. Make them come to heel for chrissake
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe not when internet was an open platform. Now it is controlled by a few American billionaires that love they have a US Gov administration that thinks the same way as them.
Eh, as a staunch free speech advocate, I absolutely want Meta and X banned from Canada. That doesn't stem free speech at all, and is akin to banning a propaganda arm of a hostile foreign government.
They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).
nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.
Conflating "the internet" with "~Trillionaire owned, oligarchy controlled, American social media" is certainly a choice.
I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.
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?
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.
- 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?
There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
I guess the challenge comes in even defining "political" ads. Is an ad about expensive gas prices or egg prices political? Unless you put such a huge ring fence around any topics of economy, immigration, law, crime, etc; I can think of a number of effective messages that aren't inherently political, but would activate an audience aligned with a political affiliation.
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.
He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.
Isn’t Brazil the country where the gov’t told X to censor their opposition recently?[1]
Also, isn’t Facebook the same place that people said “when it’s a private company it’s not censorship” when it came to Covid and other contentious issues that were censored at the request of Biden “embeds” in Twitter, FB and other social media?
You don't understand, it's different. Back then, it was the bad guys being censored, so it was a good thing. Now it's the good guys being censored, so it's a bad thing.
When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.
Indeed it seems that they only have problems with censorship when their team gets censored but they secretly enjoy their opposition getting censored. As it is the Lula admin mandated that X suppress the speech of about 600 opposition candidates.
It is clear that we do not see all communication. Governments become increasingly deceitful and secretive - the US government is the best example, but the same applies to other governments (just look at the garbage produced by the russian government, they almost outperform the current US administration with total crap, like what Lavrov recently babbled about - what pile of nonsense). And companies - they are alo secretive. So which conspiracy exactly is meant here? It's not that I disagree with your prior statement, but I want to know which conspiracy you assume to be here to exist, or to NOT exist. Because what you wrote is very unspecific - you insinuate that there may not be a conspiracy. How do you conclude that?
I concur with Levitz's statement too, with regards to conspiracy or "inventing" one - so, which specific conspiracy was meant?
I think it does when you don't see the same level of rage when its exactly the same thing. Its called polorization. If you accepted it the first time you've all ready approved it universally.
The creator of this website, derechadiario, is in jail for murder attempt, corruption, fake news and bot manipulation. It seems his minions are also working here.
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.
This may sound weird, but: Alternatives will appear, just like how Chinese people have been able to live their lives without access to Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. The alternatives may not be good -- I'd argue the Chinese version of Google (Baidu) is quite a lot worse in many ways -- but they work and are good enough for most people.
People in Iran or China don't rely on Facebook and Instagram.
Before Facebook penetrated Europe in ~2010, each local market was dominated by copycat services like StudiVZ or Hyves, which then vanished within 2 years.
When the US floated the idea of banning TikTok, some people felt compelled to download Chinese social media apps.
If a country was to ban Facebook from operating in their country, people would be on an alternative 2 weeks after.
There are reasons why a Facebook ban would be hard to enact, but dependence on the product is not one of them
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.
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.
Not surprising - Suckerberg is one of the BigBro oligarchs running the USA right now. I think the bigger issue is that so many people helped empower these dictator-like corporations in the first place. That is actually a big problem, that the society world-wide depends on these private companies so much. Why do we not have working alternatives here that are decoupled from these corporations? (I could add US-centric corporations, but let's be honest - other companies as big may behave in the same way. It is also clear that current legislation is ineffective; Suckerberg should be held accountable and be in jail, without way to buy himself out here.)
Brasil is never block Facebook at all, WhatsApp is the most used app and Instagram too, only TikTok is relevant competitor, but recent the brazil governor block meta from try control payments like eu did with Gatekeeper rules, sorry but yes this is right vs left but is lot more is about civ social and work class fight, the social media is the New press and society is manipuled
are they even allowed to do that, damn
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".
Sadly he wasn't, and still isn't, wrong.
Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.
Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.
Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?
Trump is friends with Bolsonaro.
It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".
Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?
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...
Facebook marked a video where a famous Italian author was saying what he was going to vote and why as "fake news". Of course he's opposing the current right wing pro-USA government.
I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.
But this case is something else entirely.
Define political expression.
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
Then people will carve around the edges. Also do you need to moderate every single post or comment by anyone? That's not free also.
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. I see no need to start an endless discussion on it here.
Saying "no political expression this week" is a political expression that usually favors the status quo.
I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
Facebook is not the internet.
Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?
I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.
https://www.studytogether.com/discord
That doesn't sound like studying.
If a company openly acts as an enemy of the democratic process, I'm not sure it's the same as censoring a random porn site.
It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.
Surely meta sides on the side that's more willing to pay them. While this is in line with "democracy" it seems distinctly bad
The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.
I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.
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.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
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?
You’re conflating the first amendment with free speech generally. They are different (related) concepts. The person you’re replying to did not appeal to the first amendment.
I'm not conflating anything, I'm simply repeating what I was told hundreds of times in the past by others in their defense of social media censorship, such as when Twitter banned Trump. So, is it different now?
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?
Well sometimes they do. Plus if another country is regulating or doing something to a company from your country I think it’s fair to have an opinion about it.
Plus a number of folks use the universality of their preferred politics when another country does something they like or don’t like. “International law”, “rules-based order”, those sorts of things. It’s pretty common to see.
"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.
You are right, and it's the reason Meta and all the other American billionaire owned platforms need to be null routed outside of the US.
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
"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.
Facebook has to follow the law like everyone else… I know they don't like to but…
All the more reason to ban Meta. If Meta are actively taking sides in Brazilian elections, then the site _should_ be banned, even if it's temporary for the lead-up to the election.
Meta can do whatever they want, but so can a sovereign nation if they deem Meta was actively subverting their democratic process.
Corporations aren't all equal. And Meta is one of the most unequal. Add to that the relationship with Trump's government, and your 'corporations' argument is meaningless.
If it were some other mutli-national that doesn't have its own massively popular news platform, I'd be much more likely to agree.
This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.
And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.
Ok so sanction and fine their ass until they start behaving. If we can sanction north korea for having an ideology we don't like, surely brazil can sanction meta's ass for trying to blatantly meddle in another state's affairs. Bar every employee from traveling there. Freeze any assets. Use diplomacy to pressure the US to press charges. Make them come to heel for chrissake
And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy
how do you block access to it without going to TCP/IP level? And when governments do that, everything goes to shit
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.
So actual government censorship.
Yeah, like the US government already does with about 10 countries on this planet.
Better than Facebook censorship. I can vote for my government. I have no control over the whims of Zuck (or the US Gov).
They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.
Yes, this would be a better outcome. Or at least make it illegal for politicians to use facebook / TikTok
From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.
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.
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.
Appears is the key word as most have gotten around the ban while others move to other sites usually from China.
Laws can be iterated on.
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.
Maybe not when internet was an open platform. Now it is controlled by a few American billionaires that love they have a US Gov administration that thinks the same way as them.
Eh, as a staunch free speech advocate, I absolutely want Meta and X banned from Canada. That doesn't stem free speech at all, and is akin to banning a propaganda arm of a hostile foreign government.
They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).
wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.
Conflating "the internet" with "~Trillionaire owned, oligarchy controlled, American social media" is certainly a choice.
I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.
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?
Pretty much the opposite, influencers depend on it and have a disproportional "influence" and audience given by Meta to keep pushing their agenda
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.
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?
There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
I guess the challenge comes in even defining "political" ads. Is an ad about expensive gas prices or egg prices political? Unless you put such a huge ring fence around any topics of economy, immigration, law, crime, etc; I can think of a number of effective messages that aren't inherently political, but would activate an audience aligned with a political affiliation.
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.
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.
He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...
And Meta (or the US government) seems determined to prove him right
Isn’t Brazil the country where the gov’t told X to censor their opposition recently?[1]
Also, isn’t Facebook the same place that people said “when it’s a private company it’s not censorship” when it came to Covid and other contentious issues that were censored at the request of Biden “embeds” in Twitter, FB and other social media?
[1] https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
You don't understand, it's different. Back then, it was the bad guys being censored, so it was a good thing. Now it's the good guys being censored, so it's a bad thing.
When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.
Indeed it seems that they only have problems with censorship when their team gets censored but they secretly enjoy their opposition getting censored. As it is the Lula admin mandated that X suppress the speech of about 600 opposition candidates.
https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
Pointing out an issue with one action doesn't mean approval of other actions. You don't have to invent an conspiracy.
Pointing out that these criticisms seem completely unprincipled is not inventing a conspiracy.
Which conspiracy exactly?
It is clear that we do not see all communication. Governments become increasingly deceitful and secretive - the US government is the best example, but the same applies to other governments (just look at the garbage produced by the russian government, they almost outperform the current US administration with total crap, like what Lavrov recently babbled about - what pile of nonsense). And companies - they are alo secretive. So which conspiracy exactly is meant here? It's not that I disagree with your prior statement, but I want to know which conspiracy you assume to be here to exist, or to NOT exist. Because what you wrote is very unspecific - you insinuate that there may not be a conspiracy. How do you conclude that?
I concur with Levitz's statement too, with regards to conspiracy or "inventing" one - so, which specific conspiracy was meant?
I think it does when you don't see the same level of rage when its exactly the same thing. Its called polorization. If you accepted it the first time you've all ready approved it universally.
The creator of this website, derechadiario, is in jail for murder attempt, corruption, fake news and bot manipulation. It seems his minions are also working here.
Not sure why you are being downvoted; It’s definitely not a trustworthy or neutral source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Derecha_Diario
Downvoted by the bots and people paid to spread lies
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.
I don't understand why countries don't simply block facebook, instagram, etc. There's zero upside to allowing them.
The people rely on them too much, sadly
This may sound weird, but: Alternatives will appear, just like how Chinese people have been able to live their lives without access to Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. The alternatives may not be good -- I'd argue the Chinese version of Google (Baidu) is quite a lot worse in many ways -- but they work and are good enough for most people.
That's not weird at all. This is the very schumpeterian premise this forum is built on.
People in Iran or China don't rely on Facebook and Instagram. Before Facebook penetrated Europe in ~2010, each local market was dominated by copycat services like StudiVZ or Hyves, which then vanished within 2 years. When the US floated the idea of banning TikTok, some people felt compelled to download Chinese social media apps.
If a country was to ban Facebook from operating in their country, people would be on an alternative 2 weeks after. There are reasons why a Facebook ban would be hard to enact, but dependence on the product is not one of them
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.
because everyone currently in power has used it to get there
why would they block their best weapon?
Because people cry "censorship" — just like we are seeing here in the comments.
I see most of the comments here being pretty critical of Metas intervention ... Back in 2021 though .. this post seemed to have the opposite effect ..
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672461
its funny how the tables have turned
How is that remotely similar? Trump was banned for condoning political violence after losing an election
I guess you should zoom out a bit then and understand the abstract of what i said ;)
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.
Not surprising - Suckerberg is one of the BigBro oligarchs running the USA right now. I think the bigger issue is that so many people helped empower these dictator-like corporations in the first place. That is actually a big problem, that the society world-wide depends on these private companies so much. Why do we not have working alternatives here that are decoupled from these corporations? (I could add US-centric corporations, but let's be honest - other companies as big may behave in the same way. It is also clear that current legislation is ineffective; Suckerberg should be held accountable and be in jail, without way to buy himself out here.)
Brasil is never block Facebook at all, WhatsApp is the most used app and Instagram too, only TikTok is relevant competitor, but recent the brazil governor block meta from try control payments like eu did with Gatekeeper rules, sorry but yes this is right vs left but is lot more is about civ social and work class fight, the social media is the New press and society is manipuled