Meta == US gov. It’s another tool in their toolbox. You shouldn’t trust US tech any more than Chinese tech. If anything, probably should trust it less than Chinese tech.

"Likely" or not has nothing to do with it, it's well documented. https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-mil...

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...

Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?

What universe have you been in for the past decade? Meta is hand in glove with authoritarian interests, including in the US.

Zuckerberg started pandering to the Trump admin mere months after he took office, publicizing "evidence" consisting of a few emails from Biden admin officials as proof of widespread government manipulation of tech platforms that Trump rightly put a stop to in the name of free speech.

At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.

> Can't we just ban Facebook everywhere?

That's not that EU asks. EU asks to have a direct interface to delete posts EU elites don't like.

Was the name change related to publicity from that? My memory is that it was part of an attempt to be the new Second Life. But on the other hand I tend to be naive.

If they changed their name to “Flobular” it wouldn’t change a thing.

They’re Facebook in many people’s minds.

“Meta” doesn’t convey the same meaning that “Facebook” does. And it’s also squatting on an important term in English. Mets is used all over the language, like metaphysical.

No thanks, I’ll use Facebook

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Facebook is not the internet.

Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.

Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.

This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.

> 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.

Usually. Because usually it's governments that are censoring specific people to push a certain narrative. This time it's Facebook censoring specific people in order to push a certain narrative.

But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

That was true before social network corporations started agressively manipulating opinion. If anything social networks could be considered a nuisance

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.

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

They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.

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.

Ok? Then how about "nothing good comes out of foreign corporations controlling speech"?

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.

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.

And yet this is somehow better?

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

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).

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.

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

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

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

"created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election"

The way you phrased this made it seem like the candidate didn't exist. The candidate was a real person, but just wasn't well known or polling very well before winning.

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

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

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.

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

My entire family uses WhatsApp. I held off for years because of that.

After reading this book, I decided that I couldn't keep supporting this company and told them that I'm leaving WhatsApp and that they can text me if they want to chat.

They were all not only more than fine with the move but actually helped me recreate the chat groups we had before!

So if you really want to go cold turkey on Meta products, going scorched Earth might not scorch as much as you think it will!

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.

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

It was pretty great until around 2010 when it was still a social network rather than social media.

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

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

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 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).