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.

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.

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

Imagine processing everything in life through Israel vs Palestine lens.

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

A one letter change gets you Faceboot, as in "a boot stamping on a human face - forever". Just sayin'.

Who are these "people"? I'm certainly not one of them, and I consider myself a progressive.

What people are objecting to is how this relates to facebook's recently stated principles. They'd said that things like deplatforming Trump were mistakes and that they won't do these sorts of things again. And then...

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.

edit: yes please, as usual, keep downvoting factual information.

You can’t scream “murder all the X” in a theatre

You actually can.

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

I think you're taking it too far.

Exactly 48 hours (before and on the day of election), banning electoral advertising is the right thing, gives voters the mental space to make up their own decision. It's the silence period.

Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.

That's simply not true though. There are cases when no answer is an answer. But this is simply not participating. As they shouldn't.

Many countries already have electoral silence (but it's limited to one or two days usually).

It's difficult to completely block all political expression, but I think it's a no brainer to simply not allow any political advertising money to be accepted. From the pacts or anyone. When you're taking money to promote a political opinion you've become part of that influence.

Social media is too powerful and influential to be allowed continue unchecked. Falsities, defamation cases all take too long for the election cycle. So you get garbage in, and then you get a populist TV show host as president who doesn't understand economic interests rates, international trade, pain points of international war.

That doesn't sound like studying.

Surely meta sides on the side that's more willing to pay them. While this is in line with "democracy" it seems distinctly bad

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?

Not coincidentally, there’s a word for the consolidation of government and corporate power.

Spoiler, they only follow court orders. You can violate the law as long as you want until there's a judge saying you do. This is just modus operandi for any big corp in America nowadays.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

Laws can be iterated on.

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

it's a part of internet. To properly block it, you need to block it on the IP level

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.

And yet this is somehow better?

Facebook is not the internet. If anything, their existence is a net negative for the internet.

But what good comes from a channel for misinformation and bot networks?

Yeah, me too, but he’s a coward. I wish there would be an actual leftist running for president this year.

Pretty much the opposite, influencers depend on it and have a disproportional "influence" and audience given by Meta to keep pushing their agenda

The good ole "If it fits my agenda it's true" test

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

Here we go again

True, at this time (not that it was ever better) we can't expect anything but this kind of attitude from him

Trump will pull his favorite move a fake promise of cold hard cash to vote for his preferred candidate bc he's the least America First president there ever was

Flavio is the favorite on exchange betting markets. Not by much though... he's rated a 57% chance to win the presidency.

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.

A few years ago, in NL they banned a campaign from the Brandwondenstichting (foundation for treating burn victims) because it used photos from actual burn scars to warn the public. Ostensibly, the reason given was that it upset their delicate eyes -- which was the entire point of the campaign. The campaign itself was not political, but Facebook choosing to apply their weak US sensibilities to a Dutch campaign surely was a political act.

For Brazilians and about half of HN readers Meta and Chinese companies are both foreign tech

Did they anticipate there would be large numbers of attempts to report the page and cause it to be automatically flagged and/or blocked?

I am sure the American president is target for such efforts as well and provides ample material for rules violations.

donating money to the president and their party is something nearly every national corporation does. Using their corporate power to do political favors is not. those are two very different things.

If the title of this article is not sufficiently eloquent, the photo should finish the job

https://www.wired.com/story/tech-ceos-donald-trump-white-hou...

The same old cool-aid: the label on bottle reads "freedom". But if you look at the ingredients: greed, gluttony, looting, bullying, spread american culture, slavery, surveillance - the full nth-amendmend package. Dosages may vary.

Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,

No. I tried it for a week, 20 years ago. Fb bastards still have my info, but I am not signing in ever again.

Careless People (the book) is a great study on how Facebook ran out of growth in western territories (due to market saturation), combined with a callous disregard for the consequences to regular people - led to an ever increasing willingness to deploy political levers in order to keep the hyper growth train running...

I genuinely cant remember that - maybe there was a golden age before it went international but I pretty much used to use fb only for consuming political rage bait (luckily i stopped many years ago)

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.

That's not weird at all. This is the very schumpeterian premise this forum is built on.

When WhatsApp was banned for a day, people immediately migrated to Telegram. This is not an excuse.

Didn't Brazil massively adopt Bsky as an alternative to X? And in a very short timespan too? Did they turn around on that?

I hadn’t heard of this, so here’s more context [1] for the curious.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/articles/cqx41x3gn5zo

Because western democracies are about freedom of speech and access to information ?

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?

Well, with all due respect, fuck them. If they’re so desperate, let them use VPNs.

Brasil pretty much runs on WhatsApp and instagram - they are by faaaaaar the most popular communication platforms. It’s cooked.

But many countries do: China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, [...].

Do you think it is aspirational to join that club? Because I don't think so.

In an ideal society, I think you just tax digital ads to help compensate for the damage from this attention economy. Maybe even use that money for education?

I'm against government building a scaffold to be able to block selective parts of the Internet because the block list always expands and never retracts.

You have to understand the president position is extremely weak, since he’s a centrist posing as left wing, there’s a lot of scrutiny on all his actions and he has very little support in congress, since it’s a very conservative country politically dominated by evangelicals and big farmers.

Blocking Facebook would be deeply damaging for him, they would quick him out even before the 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.)

Of course, and the people need understand every angle , if you think the company a is good or governor b ia good you is been manipuladed, i very dislike this censorship over lula, but need understand this is retalation over governor try regulamented somes aspects of the world

No, the British Empire, the one dominating before the US, finally ended in 1956. We'll see if the Russian empire collapses before the US one.

American terrorists cry wolves about election interference in their country during election period. But the real fact is they interfere in democracy and democratic process across every part of the world. This is to help bolsenaro and destroy BRICS.

The US proves "every accusation is a confession" and "accuse them of what you do and call them what you are".

According to Google, Meta restored their account within hours after it got flagged for some content.

This happens all the time on these social media websites. Automatic flagging of content, human reviewers restore it.

The problem is that US needs subservient explorable countries for its resources, and that's exactly what the other candidate will drliver.

Whether you're for or against Lula, the only logical position is to oppose censorship. Eventually the tool gets used against you too.