At this point?
Over the last decade, they've had like a dozen major scandals (hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext, cambridge analytica, etc.).
They've never worried.
Anyone that remembers the Graffiti Wall knows the real thing that was lost here. It had it's issues (Farmville was the worst / most annoying version of Harvest Moon ever made) but it was worth saving.
It was also worth building the infrastructure required to make it function, because it ultimately damaged Facebook in ways I don't think they really still understand. Their abortive attempt to build a metaverse or a Twitter that feels more like a prison, vs successful, beautiful, creative, wild interpretations of a metaverse that lead to things like Minecraft and Bluesky. They simply won't succeed a these endeavors without meaningful third party access. Improving upon that problem might be a more productive use of their time than kissing political butts if they want to actually succeed in this space.
Frankly, can’t really judge them. That is probably the optimal thing to do in the current business environment.
And yes its the right "business move" but I have plenty of hate left in my heart for buisnessmen.
Overall though, I feel like if I'm going to single anyone out, its those with the most power and those benefiting the most.
This is not true and you'll never understand politics if you think this.
(What actually happens is that being in Congress is such a horrible job that only insane people would want to do it, so the people with money find congresspeople who /already agree with them/ and are trying to keep them from leaving for a less stressful normal career.)
I think it might be OpenSecrets' fault. They're great and all, but they report donations from employees of companies as if they're from the companies themselves, which produces nonsense like "health insurance companies donated to Bernie Sanders". No they didn't!
(Yeah, deleted FB almost a decade ago. I had tried to convince myself Instagram was different somehow.)
for that crowd, this a puff piece.
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/263390265553560?id=43...
I find it very doubtful that post-election Meta policy had anything to do with this.
It would appear the posts were OK after all.
> You certainly don’t see almost anything about other prescription meds.
I get pretty much non-stop Ozempic ads on Facebook.
> "Aid Access, one of the largest abortion pill providers in the United States, said some posts were removed on its Facebook account and blurred out on its Instagram account since November, with more posts blurred in recent days. The abortion pill service said it has been blocked from accessing its Facebook account since November, and its Instagram account was suspended last week, though it has since been restored."
You don't think the November timing is the slightest bit suspicious?
To regard it as suspicious I would have to know:
- Has this happened before? - are they actually compliant with the rules? Or are they being banned and then unbanned because we’re sympathetic to them? - was anyone mass reporting them? Was this human or automatic? - how often are these things banned?
It’s really a miracle most of these outfits are operating at all. In most cases we’re talking about filling out an anonymous form to get prescription medication. It’s not legal. Some of them try to provide a form of legality as a cover (“we definitely have a doctor review your anonymous form”) but not anything that would hold up to scrutiny. It’s not surprising that very few of them are likely following Facebooks rules on top of that.
Of course maybe they should be legal and the situation should be totally different, but Facebook banning grey market prescription drug sellers that almost certainly violate their rules is not surprising. It’s also not surprising they ease up when the NYT asks about it even if there are rule violations because I doubt Meta wants any part of this debate.
Best of luck shipping pills to "nobody".
Again, I am not saying things should be this way, but we're talking about black/grey market prescription drug suppliers mailing prescription drugs to people pseudonymously/anonymously, usually/sometimes in violation of US law and almost certainly nearly always in violation of the FB rules I posted above.
If this was literally any other prescription drug, nobody would find this result surprising.
NB: In contradiction to one of your downthread posts, very few of these places are taking insurance information. (Maybe even "none", but I am willing to believe someone does.) Usually one of their selling points is that it is "private". The article for example cites Aid Access, which does not. Neither do any of the sites in the downstream commenter I clicked on. I encourage you to actually look at these sites and see how easy it is. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, but clearly it is not aboveboard.
> The Instagram account of Hey Jane, another abortion pill provider, was recently invisible in Instagram search, said Rebecca Davis, who leads marketing at Hey Jane.
Takes government insurance. Telehealth appointment.
> The Instagram accounts of other abortion pill providers, including Women Help Women and Just the Pill, were also suspended in recent days.
Telehealth, looking to take Medicaid. Specific states only, presumably due to it being properly regulated.
They’re going after the prescribing docs now. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr8jv2yjz9o
> Telehealth, looking to take Medicaid.
"Looking to take Medicaid" is a strange way of saying they currently do not accept any form of insurance.
Hey Jane is the only one I have seen thus far. And of course, there's a reason why they also accept eg. Cashapp rather than just taking CC/debit cards - they expect most of their customers will not want them to have any actual information on them.
And again, any prescription med promotion, including 100 legit prescription meds, require some byzantine bureaucratic process with FB themselves - not just being legal or de facto legal.
And you have to pick it up.
If my address was listed next to my posts on Reddit, I would not feel super anonymous.
One of the first results in Google is https://www.plancpills.org/abortion-pill/california#pharmaci...
Listed there I checked some of their recommended stores. The first that I clicked accept Bitcoin payment and require no insurance details (medside24). It does look like it's possible to do this fully anonymous without much hassle. I have no problem with that by the way.
Bitcoin is absolutely not anonymous. To believe otherwise is a grave error.
You may not agree with the current administration, but they won the popular vote. What would you rather them do, defy the current administration? Sounds pretty anti-democratic to me. Am I missing a deeper principle here or is it just a matter of "companies should do what I think is right"?
As opposed to "unaccountable billionaires" or whatever?
Any scenario in which a billionaire, with all their power and resources, is deeply scared of pissing off the President - to the point of doing a public 180 on everything - is one in which us much less powerful regular people should be very scared.
defying an administration that you disagree with, within the rule of law, is just about the most American and democratic thing I can imagine.
this is a corporation, not an arm of the government.
Purdue Pharma caused the opioid crisis which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. State and federal governments thinks it's liable for billions in damages. Perdue disagrees and is fighting it tooth and nail in the courts, which is within their rights. Would you characterize this as "the most American and democratic thing I can imagine"?
I'm not arguing they shouldn't have the right to defend themselves in court, only that most people wouldn't think that as being "patriotic". It's also not hard to find people characterizing Citizens United v. FEC as "undemocratic", even though it theoretically emobies the democratic principles of free speech and the supreme court acting as a check.
If the reason for the takedown is that the popular will of the people, as manifest in the preferences of the current President, deems this thing bad, and therefore we're taking it down, then that's a) inaccurate and b) deeply out of step with American tradition, principle, and governing philosophy.
Is the implication here that any sort of proactive action by companies to dodge enforcement actions a bad thing? For instance, if after Biden appointed Lina Khan to the FTC, and M&A firms suddenly stopped doing deals out of anti-trust concerns, is that bad? Or is it somehow only limited to advertising?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/business/media/paramount-...
FTA:
> Now Mr. Trump is back in the White House, and many executives at CBS’s parent company, Paramount, believe that settling the lawsuit would increase the odds that the Trump administration does not block or delay their planned multibillion-dollar merger with another company, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
In general, if an incoming administration signals a change in regulatory priorities or interpretation, and that causes businesses broadly to adjust their business plans, I think that's a reasonable reflection, after a relatively long chain and with all the caveats of the US electoral system, of the "people's will" as expressed in governance after an election. Lina Khan indicated that the FTC was going to take a much closer look at mergers with a renewed eye towards competition, not just consumer wellbeing, and that broadly changed the math on whether companies expected their mergers to go through. That's what I would expect - that's the point of government and regulation here, and the change in those priorities following an election fits broadly into "the government as the people's tool for constraining powerful actors."
However, a company changing its policies or plans specifically because it is concerned about the whims and wills of the president - in other words, companies specifically attempting to curry personal favor with the president to get better treatment - is not that. If Paramount was worried that recent changes to the law or changes to how the FCC or FTC interpreted regulations affected their chances of winning the lawsuit or getting the merger through in the same way that, say, NBC would be worried about it, that's normal. Paramount is worried that the president is angry at them and they are going to be specifically targeted, and so they're going to give the president a large cash settlement so he'll instruct the FTC to let them complete their merger. That's not normal - or at least, it's not good.
> The company also described some of the incidents as “over-enforcement.”
They didn’t. They won 49.8%. But I’ve got to be honest, any logic along those lines rings very hollow these days. We’ve been told over and over about the “tyranny of the majority” being why a number of sparsely populated states get a disproportionate vote on the country’s destiny. To pivot just because the popular vote flipped to the other side (which, again, it didn’t) feels very… convenient.
And who is the arbiter of "right"? Does this boil down to just "I don't agree with what meta is doing"?
Ideally, each individual, with society deciding via laws and regulation when people disagree.
> Does this boil down to just "I don't agree with what meta is doing"?
No, this boils down to "it is bad for even billionaires to be terrified of opposing the new President". Who has, for the record, previously called for Zuck's imprisonment.
That's a total 180 from the OP and most of this comment thread, which was seemingly about excoriating meta/zuck's behavior.
I think him feeling like he has to be is terrifying.
It would be one thing if Meta content teams sat down, thought about it, and decided that abortion pills aren't something they're comfortable having on their platform. But then they wouldn't have restored accounts when the New York Times started asking. It looks a lot more like an unprincipled decision to make their lives a bit easier by putting their thumbs on the scale against views the government doesn't like. (It's not like they've never done that before!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=159&v=9tocssf3w80&feature=yo...
A republican candidate narrowly won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, a metric that has no value in our system of government. And somehow you think this factoid puts the current administration in a position where they dare not be defied? Give me a fucking break.
I can't tell whether you're trying to make a nitpicky point about how the president is elected, or you're trying to claim the concept of political legitimacy doesn't exist.
Overstating one’s narrow win as a giant mandate does too.
The "giant" part is inserted entirely by you. The point is that he's elected president, and the usual excuse about the popular vote doesn't apply.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/16/g-s1-38003/trump-mandate-pres...
> "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," he said.
Which given the maps at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_States_presidentia... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_presidentia... is just a dumb claim.
Does this concept of yours apply to, say, the Heritage Foundation, Musk's Twitter, Fox News, etc. during the Biden presidency?
The Heritage Foundation and Fox News are basically advocacy organizations so their remit includes criticizing the government. For that reason they get a pass. I don't know what you're referring to with "Musk's Twitter [...] during the Biden presidency", so you're going to have to elaborate.
Musk, as the owner of Twitter, opposed and frequently "defied" Biden and his policies.
Was that "anti-democratic", as your theory appears to assert?
> The Heritage Foundation and Fox News are basically advocacy organizations so their remit includes criticizing the government.
Everyone gets to criticize the government. That's how the First Amendment works. It's not restricted to advocacy organizations.
this is currently being tested, with Trump revoking student visas based on students criticizing the government.
Examples?
>Everyone gets to criticize the government. That's how the First Amendment works. It's not restricted to advocacy organizations.
Does this extend to "exxon hiring lobbyists to convince congress that climate change isn't an issue"?
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyers/in...
(Plus a couple hundred million dollars towards his opponent's campaign.)
> Does this extend to "exxon hiring lobbyists to convince congress that climate change isn't an issue"?
Yes, that was and is explicitly legal.
(Morally shitty. But that's freedom!)
The roles are entirely reversed here. Rather than the company voluntarily complying with the administration, musk alleges that biden administration officials illegally try to pressure twitter. I agree that if trump tried to illegally pressure zuck into censoring abortion pills, that would be improper on the part of trump, but at the same time I wouldn't fault zuck for caving.
>Yes, that was and is explicitly legal.
>(Morally shitty. But that's freedom!)
The question is whether it's "democratic", not whether it's illegal. The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
He is clearly caving to pressure, either present or expected.
> The fact that you think it's "morally shitty", suggests think that you agree it's antidemocratic.
No. Democracy and shittiness are not mutually exclusive.