Thread

Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

471 points · 303 comments · rbanffy

abroszka33 · 1790500847 · focus · HN ↗
I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
1. tryauuum · 1790501518 · focus · HN ↗
  nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
  1. ben_w · 1790502510 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    bakugo · 1790504733 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    ModernMech · 1790505301 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    bakugo · 1790506015 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    ModernMech · 1790506324 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    rpgbr · 1790507542 · focus · HN ↗
    Are you aware that US laws don't apply in other countries?
    ericmay · 1790508620 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    megous · 1790506715 · focus · HN ↗
    "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.
    <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1981" rel="nofollow">https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1981
    phatfish · 1790508882 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    icantevenhold · 1790510733 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re inventing a person that thinks COVID censorship was good and this censorship is bad and then you are getting mad at this fictional person (which might just as well exist but no one here made that argument)
    Sounds to me like you just want to be mad
    yostrovs · 1790513997 · focus · HN ↗
    You are erasing a real person, with real lived experience, that exists by the count of millions.
    bakugo · 1790540524 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, if any of the people commenting on this post calling it censorship also believe Trump getting banned from Twitter was censorship, they're free to reply to me stating so, proving me wrong in the process. Nobody has done so, because I'm right.
    catlifeonmars · 1790513967 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re assuming that the people in this thread made a different argument about platform censorship before and therefore hold a double standard. May I suggest you stop arguing against the straw man you put up?
    tryauuum · 1790504824 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    ---
    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
    vincnetas · 1790505396 · focus · HN ↗
    "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.
    brookst · 1790514296 · focus · HN ↗
    Not coincidentally, there’s a word for the consolidation of government and corporate power.
    [deleted] · 1790508431 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    LtWorf · 1790508462 · focus · HN ↗
    Facebook has to follow the law like everyone else… I know they don't like to but…
    hvb2 · 1790514963 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    rbanffy · 1790517090 · focus · HN ↗
    And right now the election court in Brazil is headed by two justices named by Jair Bolsonaro mostly for how loyal to him they’d be.
    owebmaster · 1790519437 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a plain big lie. There was no court order to ban Lula's account.
    hvb2 · 1790529382 · focus · HN ↗
    I was referring to normal business operations in the US.
    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
    BLKNSLVR · 1790509492 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    vinyl7 · 1790520567 · focus · HN ↗
    The US Government is the military branch of American Corporations. The US govt doesn't have much autonomy outside of what the oligarchs demand
    anhner · 1790522237 · focus · HN ↗
    "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"
    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.
    ben_w · 1790551691 · focus · HN ↗
    Meta's specific goal is to have conversations go through them. They want to have the benefits of free speech without the obligations to support it, and use their power and influence to campaign to maintain both aspects of this.
    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.
    [deleted] · 1790514158 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]

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