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Comment by hunterb123 | Hacker News Reader

FB should call their bluff and tell them to spin up a version of China's great firewall and try to block people then.

I guess UK does already have a firewall with it's nanny-state porn filters though.

I can see it now, "All of UK blocked FB today because of meme gif service purchase" Great headline, wonderful use of regulation /s

Meanwhile you have actual problems going on and a crashing economy, but at least we prevented a meme service from being bought!

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Meta also has offices and thousands of employees in the UK. Presumably the UK government could ban them from operating in the UK completely which would be a pretty big hit to those employees and all the teams that are based there.

The question is if the UK wants to really destroy thousands of jobs over a gif service acquisition, especially in this economy.

I would hope they wouldn't do that to their own people. You're not really hurting FB, you're hurting your own citizens.

Is that really the best use of regulation, political power, etc?

Can FB buy Tenor then? Is any gif service off limits?

Who can buy Giphy? Any other social media?

Someone's clearly not familiar with the UK government's approach to jobs and the economy

Boris "Fuck Business" Johnson was only recently PM - https://www.ft.com/content/8075e68c-7857-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...

The UK doesn't need to block Facebook, they can just ban advertisers from buying any ad space on there. FB could still provide a service in the UK but it wouldn't make them any money.

> they can just ban advertisers from buying any ad space on there

So for example, Apple US couldn't buy ads on Facebook, because it shows ads to UK users? How do you envisage this working?

The idea would be to prevent UK residents from purchasing ads or other products and services from Meta. There are various ways of enforcing that.

> FB could still provide a service in the UK but it wouldn't make them any money.

I was replying to this. If they can still show non-UK ads to UK residents then they can still make money.

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