There is a huge difference between "the government of Brazil denying everyone the freedom to communicate the way they want" and "facebook not auto-linking to a competitor's site in a chat program." You're comparing a government making communication through a specific (and popular) channel illegal, and a company not providing a link to a website as they send your message to your recipient.

I know Hacker News enjoys getting riled up at Facebook, but come on. You're not comparing apples to apples, you're not even comparing food to food, it's like saying this rock isn't like this sandwich.

Facebook/WhatsApp is trying to have it both ways. Either it's a for profit private company (and it can do things like that), or it's an important communication medium for a democracy (and access should be open).

When it comes to blocking telegram, Facebook/WhatsApp wants to be the provate for profit company. When some judge blocks WhatsApp, suddenly they're an important service for a democracy.

Facebook refuses to cooperate with German authorities when it comes to investigating and prosecuting death threats through their platform, while at the same time, they want to do advertising business in Germany. They'd simply like to have all the money and none of the responsibility and accountability.

> Either it's a for profit private company (and it can do things like that), or it's an important communication medium for a democracy (and access should be open).

Blocking telegram is classic bone-headed stupidity. It's like an invitation for government lawyers to burrow under your skin and lay their eggs.

But inconsistency only shows that one of their positions is wrong, and it's that one.

Paying an appropriate amount of tax in the countries in which it operates might be another. All that democracy stuff costs money and has to be paid for somehow.

It isn't a company's job to pay more taxes than it owes, it's a country's job to set sensible taxes.

Stop trying to tax "corporate income" for multinational entities that can trivially shift profits into other countries, and instead tax the thing they actually do in your country.

And if they don't actually do anything in your country, what makes them owe you anything?

But Facebook can't have it both ways. They can't pay almost no tax and then call themselves defenders of democracy.

I think it is a fair comparison. Facebook isn't for free expression, they are for their business. The Brazilian Gov can be questioned in the Justice System, but doing so against "Freedom". Facebook dubious position about the right to be informed and the desire to control the information we access is a greater menace to freedom of expression than any ignorant Brazilian lower judge.

Every business is there for themselves. But laws or rulings blocking access to any business are anti-freedom. It's pretty simple.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons that overcome that. But not with a simple communication channel.

I don't know in which country you live, but I am very happy we have rulings here in Germany blocking access to businesses if those businesses are not following the law. WhatsApp, even if a US based company, is defacto providing a service in Brazil, it means they have to follow Brazilian laws. Dura Lex Sed Lex. You have more context on the other submission[0] showing that WhatsApp had way enough time to take the requests of the judge into account and act on them. They preferred to go the "we are too big to be shut down" way, which is not the way the law works and then complain about freedom and democracy.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11614116

Blocking access should be a last resort, for businesses that are doing something extremely harmful. It's a consumer protection measure, not a punishment. If a business is breaking the law, you punish them with fines and the police, not by redirecting the mail/phone/packets directed at them.

The citizens are the ones initiating contact with WhatsApp servers. They're the ones really being blocked here. Even though they've done nothing wrong.

> WhatsApp had way enough time to take the requests of the judge into account and act on them.

Sure they had time, but the request was physically impossible. What is supposed to happen if a judge demands a picture of you eating breakfast 8 days ago?

>Sure they had time, but the request was physically impossible. What is supposed to happen if a judge demands a picture of you eating breakfast 8 days ago?

You go to court and explain it's impossible. Sticking your fingers in your ears and singing is a poor strategy and deserves to be punished.

If you've never been to the country, ignoring a court summons sounds like a sane idea to me.

This may work well in Germany, but here in Brazil everything government does we feel it's due to corruption or incompetence - and most of the time, it is.

Here in Brazil, if you have a store, you can't refuse to sell to me because I'm gay, black, woman or any other motive. Business aren't entitled to do everything that are better for their business.

> Facebook isn't for free expression

That is literally the opposite of what Zuck, the founder and CEO of Facebook said in this article: "the idea that everyone in Brazil can be denied the freedom to communicate the way they want is very scary in a democracy"

For an apple to apple comparison, how about last year when Facebook promised to help Germany censor any criticism of their immigration policy under the guise of 'stopping Hate Speech'?

Facebook aren't taking a stance against censorship here. They are taking the same stance they always did: Pro-Facebook.

Hate speech has always been a violation of Facebook's ToS. The "deal" with Germany was simply that Facebook agreed to be better at actually enforcing their own terms.

You ignored the actual argument, that political policy was being falsely labeled as hate speech.

I have no idea if it's true or not, but that's what you need to address if you want to discuss the nature of the deal.

> I have no idea if it's true or not

Of course it's not, it's an absurd claim. There's a very clear distinction between political argument and, well, this:

http://www.dw.com/en/pegida-founder-lutz-bachmann-found-guil...

That article doesn't say anything about Facebook deleting posts of his. And the only thing he's specifically listed as doing, calling specific groups cattle/scum/trash, well, Facebook sure doesn't seem to delete similar language in general. "It's against the rules" does not imply that enforcement is fair if enforcement is highly biased and ignores 99% of cases.

It is in large part speculation and conjecture. The evidence I thought I had doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

All the same, if you don't support the right of horrble people to say horrible things, you don't actually support free speech.

Different different but same.

Countries generally can ban certain forms of communication. To contrieve a couple of examples you can have freedom of speak and still not be allowed to shout outdoors at night in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Or send smoke signals there.

And Facebook don't have to prioritise ads from competitors (I think).

That said, banning certain, non-harmful links in user-to-user communication or a whole class of non-disturbing communication comes off as extremely bad form to be.

So, IMO pointing out Facebooks hypocrisy is well justified and doesn't mean we agree with Brazil.

  That said, banning certain, non-harmful links in user-to-user communication or a whole class of non-disturbing communication comes off as extremely bad form to be.

For me it's one of the main reasons, why I refuse to use Facebook

Facebook is openly supporting government censorship, too. The only reason WhatsApp didn't comply is that they couldn't, because they really don't have the data, as others pointed out. Facebook/WhatApp aren't the good guys here.

Facebook does much more then that... they also hide information by using their "smart" sorting algo of stories/posts, for example.

The API is open for everyone. If you want a feed with each and every post from your friends and the pages you follow, you can build one yourself.

Why can't you sort news by "newest first" then?

Either this options has become very well hidden, either it has totally disapeared. Either way, I cannot find it.

Also, don't forget that this didn't actually show all of the news. Just the news that passed the timeline algorithms in the chronological order (instead of just putting them all over the place). That's why nobody complained when it got removed, it just wasn't doing what it was supposed to do when it was there.

Mark Zuckerberg "urged" Brazilians to tell Congress to "ban bans of online services" in the name of democracy.

Am I an irrational nationalist for believing he shouldn't get into the politics of any country (especially outside of the US)?

Last time someone tried to help us (Brazilians), we got a military dictatorship.

Oh but this isn't even the first time.

See this: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/5/9099897/facebook-india-inte...

Facebook put up a banner for Indian users to try to influence the passing of a law to allow Facebook to break net neutrality in India.

Acts like these aren't limited to communications companies though. American multinationals have a tendency to exploit poor underdeveloped countries, like Papua New Guinea, and countless African countries.

It's part of the reason why China takes a highly protectionist stance especially with regards to foreign internet companies.

It's not just Indian users neither. Once an Indian user saw that banner and signed it, every single one of his friends got a notification about it. In fact, that chained reaction somehow ended up in my notifications too by one of my friends signing it. I was furious!

See: https://twitter.com/r3bl_/status/679093130080161792 (notice the checkmark that's checked by default).

In my opinion, they managed to accomplish exactly what they wanted to with this campaign: make the whole online call for discussion by the India's regulatory authority meaningless.

I think that this is your congress not the US Congress but I get your point and I'd be offended and irritated if someone special interests driven like Zuckerberg stuck his nose in our politics and internal affairs like this.

Also, I wouldn't rule out that Zuckerberg could resort to astro-turfing tactics and fund those "internet freedom" groups in Brazil to do his bidding. Unfortunately, Zuckerberg turned his tech empire into a big political machine and started to influence or subvert (However you choose to view his actions) politics in foreign countries and should be treated as such not just some harmless business.

Well, last time it was US's CIA. Facebook isn't comparable neither on resources, nor on competence.

They'd better not relate themselves with our Congress, but it's for their own good, not our :)

> Facebook is not a democracy and they can block and censor pretty much any message they like, but now they go on to tell Brazil how it should run its judicial system

Yeah, Facebook is a company - not a country. You can't compare apples to oranges.

Facebook can do whatever it want and people are free to chose to use it service or not. Brazilians had no choice on this case.

Brazilians can use other apps if they want them too. I don't see your point of freedom to communicate being blocked. You're complaining as tcp/ip would've been blocked and it's not. The point here is Whatsapp is not cooperating with authorities, and surely that's not remotely plausible in a state government. I'm not saying they have to weak encryption or putting backdoors, but a reasonable way to help any government with investigations which hurt society in general.

'I'm not saying they have to weak encryption or putting backdoors, but a reasonable way to help any government with investigations which hurt society in general.'

What is it with the "I'm not saying they should have a backdoor, but there should really be [some rhetorically obfuscated equivalent to a backdoor]"?

This is cryptography, not politics. There's no middle ground here. You either have secure communications or you don't. If the data can be provided to the government, that also means it can be leaked, stolen, purchased, spied upon, etc.

Other apps with proper user-controlled encryption would also be blocked.

It is impossible to help the investigations in the way they were asked to while also having proper user-controlled encryption. You are asking for weaknesses or backdoors if you don't recognize that Whatsapp gave up all the information they had, which was nothing.

> Brazilians can use other apps if they want them too.

Having a country change like that does not do good for people. People using dumb phones might have WhatsApp, but not alternatives.

> Facebook can do whatever it want and people are free to chose to use it service or not. Brazilians had no choice on this case.

Fair enough. In which case Zuck should stop all the talk about "[denying] the freedom to communicate the way they want is very scary in a democracy", and just talk about share holder value and market share.

> Facebook can do whatever it want

As long as what they want to do is legal.

Sure they can.

If they don't mind to yell: WE ARE TOTAL AND UTTER HYPOCRITES! to the entire world.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

> Facebook is a company - not a country. You can't compare apples to oranges.

That is what I meant, Facebook is not a country and thus they can censor anything. Now, however, they are meddling with a country's government. I am not a big fan of an almighty government in general, but here I am going to take their side and argue Facebook has it too easy with the free beer and rallying people in their favor.

That's fucking dodgy/unacceptable. I know they did this for another site that gave money to people for spamming their connections with links to their website, which I guess is borderline acceptable. In the case of telegram though, there is no redeeming circumstance of any kind, they're just censoring for a business advantage [without it being directly visible to the user, which is even worse], and that's just really unacceptable for me

> censoring

Classifying a recipient receiving a message containing exactly what the sender sent as 'censorship' just because they don't auto-link it is taking the word to new heights of rhetorical meaninglessness. Dodgy and scummy, sure. Mildly inconvenient for the recipient, definitely. Censorship, no.

> just because they don't auto-link it is taking the word to new heights of rhetorical meaninglessness

Whatsapp not only blocks auto-linking, but they also prevent the link from being copied to the clipboard. "Censorship" sounds about right.

Am I missing something? Just tried it on my phone and it works fine in on my end, is this something that just doesn't get converted to a link on the other side? Not converting something to a link is a far cry from outright censorship, still pretty shady in a mostly meaningless way, though.

It doesn't convert to link and it doesn't allow you to copy the message.

Now, that's advanced instant messaging.

But wait, if WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, that failure to URL convert must be a local operation. And if it's a local operation, maybe there's a workaround. But maybe apps are locked down too tightly. In any case, going from telegram.org as text to https://telegram.org/ is not exactly rocket science, no?

Linking to telegram works just fine.

http://imgur.com/FOnR6ls

Just tried it with a couple of guys at the office, seems it is only blocked on Android. It works on WhatsApp web, Windows phone and on the iPhone.

I can't reproduce the censorship of telegram.org.

http://imgur.com/qUjmS2n

Last i checked Facebook does not have the authority to arrest, kill, put people in cages.. these are all things a governments do to citizen their violate their laws.

So no facebook censoring telegram is aboslutely nothing like a government doing anything.

It is extremely ignorant to ever compare a companies action to a government actions. A person can stop using (or never start like me) facebook, a person can not quit their government, or refuse their government ...

Maybe this is obvious, or that I'm wrong, but the issue in Brazil is that most Brazilians are left-wing conservatives AND within in recent past put the current government in power. Long term this is the issue, not these "cyber attacks" - which are to me very problematic, but only a symptom of the issue.

I'm not sure which "cyber attacks" you are talking about. It's about a judge ordering Whatsapp to be taken offline for 72 hours for not complying with a court order, or am I missing something?

Quotes infer that it's a hyperbolic metaphor - and is used to express the degree of my disgust for a country "legally" attacking itself without good cause.

__

* Hyperbolic metaphor: https://sesquiotic.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/can-a-metaphor-b...

What does "left-wing conservatives" mean?

I interpret it as socially conservative, but preferring strong state involvement in economy.

Personal liberty is not very important. There can be rich people, but they are to be humbled by a powerful government. A very extreme example of such a regime is the National Socialist Germany.

That description, and your example, are in no way "left-wing."

I think that "preferring strong state involvement in economy" is a very traditional "left-wing" policy.

Regarding social conservatism, even extreme left-wing governments have often been socially conservative in many issues, even if they wanted to shake power structures. Consider, for instance, how stalinist Soviet Union related to homosexuals.

maybe the same as right-wing liberals, that is, complete nonsense.

If you try to think out of the U.S. politics box where labels are strictly enforced, it make a lot of sense. The communist party in italy during the 60s and 70s was pretty much the epitome of left-wing conservatism.