https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...

The Fermi probability that you'll be ingested and inferenced by this network on any given day is incredibly high, even if you never buy a Meta product and never create an Instagram account.

It's hideously dystopian and you cannot opt out.

Maybe that's why the Muse avatar is a cute and cuddly Teletubby.

The US government is much more likely to act against their interest than the Chinese.

I just remember that Mariott employee got fired for liking a tweet thanking the chain for having Tibet in a dropdown menu.

https://onemileatatime.com/marriott-fired-employee-for-likin...

> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”

"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.

Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.

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...

https://tenor.com/pt-BR/view/e-o-pt-e-o-lula-pt-lula-gif-174...

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.

https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...

And here's the thing, I'm sure there are meaningful differences. But then again there's also loads of similarities. A similar thing on the geopolitical stage is the status of Kosovo. The moment it was accepted as a separate entity you opened a floodgate. President of Croatia had a very nice clip about it a while ago, basically accepting both things to be true at once: Kosovo is a state that we need to accept but we also need to admit it was illegally taken from Serbia. This sort of duality (what Nader called being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, although for a completely different situation, I forget what the topic was) is very rare.

On HN i made the mistake of defending, for lack of a better word, a certain tech oligarch who shall not be named where I eventually made a similar point to yours and got downvoted to oblivion.

I could understand the framing being: all censorship is bad (even though I suppose this view would be called childish by some). I could also understand the framing that there is too much concentration of power in the hands of these corporations (and then the inevitable cries to break them up or nationalize them). But, for example, just pointing out that nobody was against these same practices when they were aimed at the other end of the political spectrum (SF billionaires were the darlings of the Democrat and not Republican establishment) causes such outrage from what I would guess are generally well meaning and intelligent people, that it boggles the mind.

It really seems to be something in our species that turns us into crusaders for certain topics. I can very well imagine that this same biological(?) impulses, where you are incredibly convinced in your own morality, must have led to the spread of early christianity (and then to the same or even larger degree, Islam). And it has to come from a place of conviction because otherwise u cant explain the zeal. And anybody who isn't as convinced (maybe partially agreeing) gets dealt with viciously. I'm making Tom Hollands point (in a very erratic manner), that what we consider modern universalism (aka wokeness) is a natural continuation of christianity. I would just go further and say that I think there is something in us all (to varying degrees) that we want to spread a certain gospel of what it is to be a moral person. And if someone disagrees they are not moral.

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?

US companies can meddle as much as they want in US affairs, I don't care. But not in the country I'm in.

Can you show us which court order Meta is following to ban Lula's page? Please.

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

The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219634

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

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.

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

And Meta loves it. People can ‘not use Facebook’ while living on WhatsApp and Instagram.

There’s some effect of corporate name changing in order to have a reputational reset. I’m opposed to that.

Real people OTOH I’m happy to call them whatever they wish

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...

Pretty much every time somebody backs up these kinds of claims it shows something else.

1) posts going out 500 times a day in all caps (who is arguing you can’t suppress spam?)

2) the post that you read and so clearly wasn’t suppressed.

3) they’re linking to a low scoring comment

If you don't want that, no editorialising, let people see just the people they follow or what their friends share and that is it.

Can't have it both ways.

Nobody is going to want to use a platform with spam.

I don't know you, this is not a social. If we were friends and you did that I'd unfriend you and be done.

The alternative being having human moderators, which socials don't want to have because it costs money.

You may not feel that way and thats fine. Just like people think the world is flat. Nothing you do is going to be affected by that ignorance.

Words change around you. Much like how Republican doesn’t mean fiscal responsibility or small government for many decades.

Personally I think making them public square is probably the only real solution if you want to keep social media and avoid this drama, or make them liable as publishers and these platforms will disappear overnight (maybe the best result?!?)...

This carries over into LLMs I presume, which have bias and I assume are not being sued for the content the publish? I'm not really sure about how it applies to LLMs to be honest.

Regardless, other countries will have different laws, that have different takes on censorship and what private companies are responsible for.

I don’t see this as a problem. They could just as easily have changed their business model and invested more heavily in content moderation. Maybe it wouldn’t have been as profitable, but profit is a great motivator to do bad things.

[1] Of course, that was plainly censorship with a veneer of plausible deniability (it assumed those embeds could only be truthful and unbiased and in no way politically motivated).

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

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

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.

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

---

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

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.

So if someone thinks this is illegal, it's only illegal until a court says so. It can be in clear violation of the law but until a judge says it is they can pretend they 'interpret' things differently

Sure mate, disregard the fact that some companies make more money than half the countries in the world and are actively trying to undermine democracies, but yeah it's the government's fault for trying to protect the citizens.

To borrow the EU's language, Meta is a "gatekeeper".

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

You misunderstand: I do not claim they owe us anything. At least, not in this regard.

What I claim is that nobody owes them anything either.

They want to be the platform? Then speech occurring on it is not theirs.

They wish to perform acts of censorship? Then they cannot be "the platform". With emphasis on "the", because if they were simply "a" platform this wouldn't be any bigger a deal than a newspaper picking a side.

I don't actually know if Meta is close to being a monopoly in Brazil, that's just kinda an assumption on my part owning to the other legal cases against them for knowingly making their products addictive.

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?

Sounds to me like you just want to be mad

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.

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.

Not really. Let's say Meta banned all blacks from advertising on facebook tomorrow. That would run against federal law.

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.

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.

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.

First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.

Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.

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

How would you go on a ad campaign against Facebook, using Facebook ads, where Facebook have already blocked your ads?

I don't know the exact media landscape of this world any more, but I can say I don't personally own a TV and can't even remember when I last watched live, and given all the TVs in stores sell themselves on how "smart" they are and which streaming services they work with I don't want to guess what normal viewing habits are.

Similarly, the closest I get to radio ads are in podcasts. If I own a radio, it's been forgotten in the bottom of a box for years and at least two house moves.

I have no idea which companies are ultimately behind podcast ads.

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.

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.

And it wasn't that long ago.

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.

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.

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).

What you call "I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development", Trump calls "a trade deficit" and tries to stop.

(The "deficit" becomes almost, not perfectly but relatively, neutral if you include the digital stuff like FB).

If the social networks provide no value then ban them. And if they do but they are so harmful then create your own.

A tri polar world technologically would be great.

https://xkcd.com/793/

AKA everything looks easy when it isn't your field.

But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.

Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).

Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.

That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.

> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.

That would be stuff like this, in order to give the legal cover needed to resist counterclaims by the USA: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...

Brazil is not a "little corporation with a fancy flag". Brazil is a democratic republic. The largest in Latin America, and one of the largest in the world.

Do I misunderstand, or are you calling Brazil, the nation whose population is around 214 million, a "little corporation"?

Apologies for the crude joke, but 9 out of 10 people enjoy a gang rape.

"Democracy", whatever its shape, is just a consensus mechanism, not a representation of people. I don't see what this has to do with colonialism.

My advice is to look carefully at the brand of propaganda you consume, it might not benefit you personally.

If you become something like public infrastructure you have to act like one or reduce your importance

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.

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

So, very approximately, ban fyp.

The real way out of it is education. Educating people about algorithms, social engineering, the harms of misinformation etc?

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 everyone currently in power has used it to get there

why would they block their best weapon?

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 think dependence is definitely a problem because everyone would get mad at you for having to switch. Sure in the long run it wouldn’t be an issue but immediately you will lose some voters

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

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

Brazil will never fully block Facebook. WhatsApp and Instagram are the most used apps, with TikTok being their only relevant competitor. However, the Brazilian government recently blocked Meta from controlling payments, similar to the EU's Gatekeeper rules. While this is certainly a right-versus-left issue, it is about much more than that—it is a struggle involving civil society and the working class. Social media is the new press, and society is being manipulated.

Of course, people need to understand every angle; if you think Company A or Governor B is entirely good, you are being manipulated. I strongly dislike this censorship surrounding Lula, but it's important to understand that this is retaliation for the government attempting to regulate certain global aspects.

But this case is something else entirely.

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.

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

You actually can.

[Edit:] Oh you’re quite right. In the USA that’s legal sometimes. Where I live that would be seen - reasonably enough to us - as a call to violence.

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.

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

Evil always finds new acolytes.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.

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.

Eg Bannon+Sanders against AI, but led by much younger people including women/LGBTQXXX.. strangely, this might happen in Japan/US/LA first not EU/EA because urban youth are more polarized in the earlier set?? The ancap against AI angle is particularly interesting-- YC already has some of it.. so what it might take would be the anti-other to first reach entente with the LGBTQ/left-identitarians/feminists/antiZionists, that is, recognizing "institutional-AI" as a bigger threat than "patriarchy"

Btw.. HN feels to me like Thiel-like (in methods, not stance) propagandists for the Convivial-Institution weaponizing their growing hoard of humane but "incidentally" individualist stories. (Because fun details about bureaucracy are structurally rare in comparison)

Friendly, knowledgeable oldbeards (men) finding their energetic curious young "broccoli haired" successors, to make this sound more... Immunogenic ;)

Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".

Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.

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...

Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672461

its funny how the tables have turned

To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.

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

Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.

I wonder why?

Imagine living through a genocide in Gaza right now.

Read up on the Nakba, if you have time.

It will serve you well.

More to read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

These included:

* Hassan Mahmoud Siam: Hamas commander. Participated in Oct. 7 and involved in holding four Israeli hostages.

* Adham Sohbi Salim Ziara: Hamas operative. Planned shootings and explosives against Israeli forces.

* Jabr Moqbel: Hamas financier. Ran a money-exchange network funding Hamas operations and infrastructure.

* Hasan al-Batta: Hamas sniper involved in planning attacks.

* Ibrahim Fawzi Ismail Mohsen: Platoon commander in Hamas’s elite Nukhba Force, involved in planning attacks.

* Mohammed Kamel Suleiman Mohsen: Hamas operative involved in planning attacks and rebuilding military capabilities.

* Muhammad Abu Alwan: Senior Hamas financial official involved in transferring large sums to Hamas.

* Mahmoud Abd al-Fattah Awad: Hamas commander involved in holding seven Israeli hostages and planning attacks.

- 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?

“Vamos trabalhar com o presidente Trump para pressionar os governos ao redor do mundo que estão perseguindo empresas americanas”, afirmou Mark Zuckerberg.

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

Completely meaningless. Of course the US (my country) will interfere. And the people doing so will have absolutely no shame about it.

Another argument, that blocking is not doing any good to the citizens. See Russia where FB/Linkedin and many other sites are blocked. That's not helping democracy at all.

But the most important sad realization that besides the USA there is NO other country where one can host and run even slightly popular forum site. Even forum related to stamps or railway models. The regulatory burden and the harassment from government agencies makes the exercise impossible to execute. HN front page had a plenty of examples of the niche forums/sites shutting down in UK/Germany because of the regulatory risks.

Think for a second, Brazilian candidate complains that the private USA company blocked him. Bu the problem is that Brazilian elites made Internet regulations so hostile that there is absolutely no open platforms do discuss political mattes there, thus even those elites have to rely on US-based platform. And they do, with all that hipocricy, i.e. advertise there then in benefits them, ban quickly once not.

My macroexpansion is: he is a democrat, and sound on the environment. But he has done precious little to unleash growth or restrain spending. He has failed to push economic reforms, bar a sales-tax simplification, and calls fiscal discipline “nonsense”. His government is on course to end the term with the largest public-debt-interest bill in a quarter of a century.

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!

The problem is when Indian Prime Minister posted a video asking for calm, that was blocked by Meta.

Pushing one side/narrative is something western media companies like BBC and CNN do a lot, and now it seems Meta has joined the party.