Meta repeatedly snubs EU body over Facebook and Instagram user bans
bbc.com
bbc.com
Yup, "victim" of exactly that here. Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page, as bunch of people find new places that way apparently, maybe 20-30% of the people we talked to found us via those properties, so hard to just give up even if you disagree, unless you're in a really great location already, which we weren't.
At one point, our Instagram page was banned, no reason provided, and impossible to reach a human, the Facebook page continued working without issues. Must have reached out and "appealed" like 10 times, eventually we gave up and the page seems to remain banned today still.
But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.
The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost. That would be something. Everyone gets a homepage for free, say, one business per EU citizen. Why is the system screwing us over to depend on US companies here?
(Not that I think it's a good suggestion, but this is a bad reason not to do it).
Especially since it might not work. Right now everyone (unfortunately) is on existing networks and if you're a business that's what matters.
Everytime I’ve gotten actual numbers from people the total tax burden has been roughly equivalent between the US and the EU, but people confuse the different buckets it comes from as the EU has taxes like VAT and the US will be split between federal,state,local,property,sales, etc
I don't know if you work in HR but if you compare Canada and US taxes Canadian taxes are clearly higher... but when you look at cost of hiring the multiplier companies pay to provide a given level of effective income to employees it is far lower in Canada. While the taxes we see are higher, the taxes the US invisibly foists on individuals end up adding up to a much larger number (as well as the US engaging extensively in employer-side taxation which "hides" the tax bill).
It wouldn't hurt, either, to tone down the hyperbole.
the benefit to the business is not that they have a homepage. its that facebook/instagram bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to the page that otherwise would not see it.
The only way I've seen around the impenetrable US social media network effects is to isolate your people either through restricting access or naturally occurring low bilingualism.
The western world speaks English online, so the latter is unlikely to happen and the former would be a final admission that our cultural values mean nothing in practice.
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
How would an EU organization have less ties to EU businesses than a US corporation that has already demonstrated that it doesn’t care about small EU businesses?
For example: the DMA was passed in 2022 and the commission took a full year to designated the first six gatekeepers, and two more years to identify two further gatekeepers. So that's the EU directly interacting with 2.5 companies per year. In comparison the EU has about 33.5 million companies.
On the other hand, there is stuff like this where they created another arbitrary "voluntary" mechanism to punish the companies for banning too much. I think ultimately the EU just wants a set of rules to use as a pretense to levy fines on big tech.
I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.
When it comes to aiming for maximum extraction from big tech, yes.
This is just an uninformed EU rant.
I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?
Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? The EU budget is hundreds of billions of Euros. Even the largest fines so far would be a drop in the bucket compared to that. But more importantly it's the individual member states that invoke those fines (like Ireland with the €1.2B GDPR fine on Meta) not the EU itself.
Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?
Whether it is desirable censorship or not is generally a separate issue from whether or not it is censorship, unless, for example, you have previously adopted a rule that the particular actor committing the censorship shall not engage in censorship at all, in which case they are, of course, inherently the same question. (Where this gets hairy is when one likes to pretend that one has such a rule for a particular actor, but actually really would prefer that actor to censor certain things, which sometimes occurs with modern liberal democratic regimes, and especially frequently occurs with a particular North American one which has what superficially looks like a very strong restriction in that area in its Constitution.)
@JudiciaryGOP has been investigating European censorship since the EU tried to silence President Trump last August. In February, we subpoenaed tech companies for their communications with foreign censors in Europe and around the world. Today, we’re releasing a report with preliminary findings about the EU’s censorship regime. The EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), requires platforms to censor so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech,” even when the content “is not illegal.” New documents obtained by the Committee show that European regulators distort these terms to require censorship of legitimate political discourse that is neither harmful nor illegal. In May, the EU hosted a DSA-focused “workshop” where platforms were asked to consider hypothetical “scenarios” involving hate speech online. Unlike other EU “workshops” with tech, the public was NOT allowed to watch this one. And the EU told the platforms to NOT share the “scenarios” with the public. What were they trying to hide? Turns out, the EU wanted to hide what it defines as “illegal hate speech” that must be censored: tweeting ordinary political rhetoric like “we need to take back our country.”
https://x.com/jim_jordan/status/1948730617803296910
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
The only question is "who gets to draw it"?
Why should it be foreign oligarchs and not our own democratic representatives?
To do so, ironically, constitutes "taking back our country" from autocrats abroad.
The arrogance of the House GOP trying to tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful is grating. You're not our colonial administrators. Abide by our rules or get out.
It's also ridiculous to claim that censoring the very desire to reclaim one's country, is reclaiming one's country, by virtue of who is doing the secret censoring.
> Who do House Republicans think they are that they can tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful? Abide by our rules or get out.
As a European I am very grateful to the Republicans for exposing how my own supranational rulers are controlling me, something which, again, they tried to keep secret, while preaching about "democracy".
Edit as reply:
> So your definition of "taking back our country" is... Americans telling us what we can and can't do in the best interest of their owners?
They're not telling us what we can and can't do. They're telling us what our rulers are keeping secret from us.
> Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts
I repeated how they kept the nature of censorship secret three times. You don't get to talk about "open, public courts".
> If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed.
I will. But many won't, because they are being deceived by the EU regarding how the legislation works. How democratic is it when governments lie, and people vote based on those lies? And for some strange reason, none of the many misinformation watchdogs picked up on this misinformation.
Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts, thanks to our actually functioning separation of powers. That is the beauty of democracy.
If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed. You're never going to be able to control what's going on in your country if you give away power to wannabe colonialists abroad.
Yeah, that's called censorship. It's exactly the same thing everyone you accuse of censorship does. There is exactly zero difference beyond your support of the views/people being censored (and sometimes not even that).
>Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
Yes. Yes.
>If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?
Well in my country that line has been drawn. It's just recurring and persistently ignored by the state, the justice system, and private entities.
When a constitution says explicitly "no type or form of censorship is permitted", that's pretty clear what it means. You ignoring it doesn't make that line less clear.
Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.
We aren't raised in "fear" of anything. We are raised to reach our potential, not depend on a nanny state or the USA. (which the EU does, you conveniently omit)
Good, just don't expect others to do so.
But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.
Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.
The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.
At the core, what the difference is is how "free speech" is interpreted. In the US? Unless you literally fake-call "fire" or call for Luigi'ing someone, it's protected free speech, even if it's a bunch of Nazis holding tiki torches and showing the Hitler salute [1].
In Europe? We have been through 1933-1945. Almost every country in continental Europe was either occupied by Hitler's Germany or lorded over by one of his allies (e.g. Spain's Franco, Ante Pavelic in what would be Yugoslavia or Mussolini in Italy). An awful, awful lot of people died thanks to these regimes, and our collective learning from that history is to either ban such speech entirely or at the very least ostracize its followers. The Eastern Bloc countries who had been occupied by authoritarian pseudo Communism in the decades after WW2 added the Communist symbols (e.g. Red Star) for the same reason. Generally, we do not want a repeat of these eras.
Now with social media, we saw Americans (and people of other non European countries, but mostly Americans) openly post symbols we see as symbols of hate, we saw them call for a repeat of what happened between 1933 and the 1990s, and US platforms did barely anything against that. We tried the soft way as we almost always do, announced "hey we don't like that", platforms didn't get it under control (and some, like post-Musk Twitter, openly announced they DGAF)... and similarly to GDPR or USB-C, we acted.
What are you smoking? Any fines against these megacorps are at best a tiny fraction of their quarterly profits. They get booked as cost of doing business.
On the first day Meta banned the account for impersonation. Protest was closed automatically within a hour with the usual "sorry you aint happy with this but the ban stands" response.
There was no way to contact a human about this... unless you buy meta premium support or whatever that is called. That will give you a human handler to contact!
This person asked for a paper work to verify. Next day after receiving the paper work, account was unbanned. For 15 minutes. It was then banned automatically for impersonation.
At this point the handler suggested not naming the account after politician but instead making it "Fans of the Jane Doe " page or something like that.
My understanding is that this was then escalated to one of ministries who did reach out Meta in Poland with request for explanations, after which account was unbanned and flagged as verified by Meta to exclude it from future automatic bans.
Sorry, but if it wouldn't have been banned then there would be 1000x legitimately looking fake BOT accounts impersonating every politician in Europe, which IMHO is a lot worse considering the disinformation campaigns of trolls and foreign adversaries, so of course Meta would err on the side of caution here and assume every account of a politician is 99,9999% gonna be a bot and just ban it instantly.
The only correct solution is META having human support staff on call for such situations which i thought they did in Dublin, at least last time I checked ~8 or so years ago.
https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/launchpad/location/#TRPL...
The idea is that users can send moderation actions to be reviewed to an independent body. Users pay 10% to 20% of the cost and the platform pays the remainder.
The out of court settlement body then reviews the case, and provides a verdict.
This way there is actually an avenue of recourse that isn’t just the platform, and its external review.
I do not believe there are any penalties that can be issued.
They came into existence about a year or two ago, so they are pretty new, so room for improvement exists.
Seems unless you have enough followers to make the news cycle you're SOL when it comes to fighting those bans.
I don't think Meta crates economic civic value.
The time spent away from Meta would be better used for almost any other purpose.
Feels 'authoritarian' but the same reason FB/IN is bad for teens is the same reason it's bad for regular people.
I mean, obviously we can't go around banning companies, but still ... it would be good.
'Because Advertising' has to be the worst reason imaginable to keep a system in place.
Without Meta - people would spend their time doing other things - and your ad-volume in those other areas of attention would increase.
Also - Meta is grabbing your profits.
They have more market power than you - they force you to compete for attention on their platform, they skim all the surplus.
Advertising is ruthlessly inefficient, and the way Google/Meta do it is much worse.
1) targeting / relevance is poor 2) ads are poorly designed with bad messaging 3) powerful value chain actors (Meta, Google, YouTube) disintermediate and consume all of the value of a given activity, which is probably not an efficient distribution of power.
I searched for 'Midjourney' and the first placement says 'Midjourney' right on the title of the link and then on the landing page it says 'Midjorney' - alas, that was not my 'Midjourney' account from 6 months ago
In a weakened state of mind, just trying to get some 'other thing done' I fell down the path of 'legal and supported deception'.
All of that is gigantic waste - it's a 'lose-lose' war over attention like nations fighting over scarce resources.
And because it generates money it 'looks like' economic productivity, in the way that 'massive healthcare expenditures' and even 'wartime economy' seem positive for the GDP but they might be signs of civic degradation.
> All of that is gigantic waste - it's a 'lose-lose' war over attention like nations fighting over scarce resources.
Maybe for others, for us it was quite literally "When we put photos of our food, others who didn't know about our restaurant will see it, and some of those come to our restaurant", not more or less than that, no "wars about attention" or what not, just "look at pretty photo, come eat if you want".
I understand and agree there is a larger conversation to be had about all of this too, I'm just failing to see how it's related to Meta banning our account and ultimately not letting us get access to the account again, as we couldn't talk with a human at Meta.
Plenty of options for chat apps where your account is essentially your phone number. People would quickly organize around one of the options.
The features of 'WhatsApp' should be a standard or de facto standard, that comes with every plan globally.
WhatsApp only exists because Carrier incumbents are unwieldy and stupid - I worked with them for years, they're incapable of an ounce of innovation, and tried to control the entire mobile web.
If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.
They fought desperately to control every inch, the iPhone broke their control, it would have been slow moving without Jobs breaking their hold, now Apple has a similar control, ableit much more capable.
Honestly, I'm glad. The less involved telcos are in my instant messaging, the better. Using my phone number as a universal identifier is bad enough.
I feel like we peaked with XMPP in the early 2000s (federated, end-to-end encrypted, not phone-number-based) and are now just regressing into various silos.
> If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.
I'm alive enough to experience 10 cent calls and texts to neighboring countries right now.
Alright, so given this is your belief, why wouldn't you think that this has already been done, if it's possible? No one felt like buying the EU until in the future? Or maybe, it might actually be harder than you think?
However, laws, politics and more is slightly different in the EU and Europe, hence you can't just wave money and get your wave, unlike the US currently.
I don't use Facebook so no idea if this is true or not personally, but ChatGPT seems to think this isn't true and that if it does happen it's probably a mistake?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/11/m...
Please don't do this.
Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~hallucinating~ bullshitting.
This goes double when dealing with such an emotive subject.
What authoritative source did the parent post for their assertion?
Meta is a garbage company. An absolutely fetid cancer on humanity that offers zero good and all bad.
Most companies have good and bad. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and so on. They have the things that should be criticized, but have some good they bring to the world. Meta -- just a malignant, cancerous venue for stupidity. An organization that exists on the backs of scammers, cons, hate, disinformation, and so on. Like use Instagram for a day and it's just amazing that this hive of villainy and scum hasn't been banned every country worldwide but the one where the plutocrats run the country.
What do we want from companies? Companies tied to a real identity, social networking. You want a way for people to message you -
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
...oops https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger...
...and a way to see people's status updates.
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
Seriously has any CEO of a tech company been caught doing what MZ has done? Oops. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122)
"We won't remove this because it doesn't violate our content policy - just block the user if you don't like it".
Yeah just seen someone's head cut off with a machete. Not even joking. That'll stay with me forever.
Don't judge, the friend is interested in the way they find interesting solutions to bypass censorship, more than the content. Or so he says. And LOL, no, I'm not "the friend".
This to say, that they are absolutely not in control of their platforms, except for heavily political content, and speech-related content. Flash a vulva quickly enough by using smart lighting, and they won't catch it. I guess we'll still have that in our dystopian future.
Zuckerberg social medias are but a cancer to society. That has become fundamentally clear. They need to be so heavily regulated that they become unrecognizable, or they should be destroyed with all means possible (legally, of course).
I guess Zucki, Meta and SV folks (proofed on HN itself) just drunk too much "EU is declining because of regulation" and it will end like Lightning and Apple.
The US has squandered a massive amount of goodwill since the first Trump presidency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93European_Union_C...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Air_Programme
But ...
This whole "hate speech" is nothing but censorship. I understand that these greedy US giant corporations ruin a lot and abuse the heck out of everyone, but the EU is also incredibly incompetent here. What the heck is even "hate" speech? We are forbidden from criticism? The USA has the freedom of speech amendment. What's the EU solution here - arbitrary censorship? I totally disagree with that notion, and whether it is Meta or anyone else, this is a principle question. The EU should use all that money to invest into more important things than this fakeroy "hate" speech.
Meanwhile if you're even slightly dickish to one of these people you will get immediately warned or shadowbanned. Meanwhile the post, get notified 9 months later that they reviewed it and found it doesn't violate their terms of service.
You should be able to see criticism is fine, while calling people "stupid monkeys" is not.
But this isn't even about the EU's definition: Facebook & co have their own definition of hate speech, and they are not holding it up.
[0] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...
Pretending that hate speech isn’t a known term is being actively ignorant even though there can be real arguments about where the line is drawn.
>Under EU law, online platforms should "engage in good faith" with the body, but its decision is not legally binding.
It's fine if you just want to see Facebook suffer but let's not pretend they are breaking the law.
These social media companies have created an environment where they are the dominant, near-exclusive, medium for communication in our digital age. If you are running a consumer-facing business in 2026 you *must* be on these platforms.
Given that these companies have actively pursued these positions they now hold, do you not feel they have a responsibility to be fair, reliable and trustworthy? That they have some obligation to their users, paying or not. They are choosing to offer the service for free, and they do make money on you regardless.
Losing your business accounts on Meta or Tiktok or Youtube can have catastrophic real-world consequences. And mistakes happen all the time, so you can't realistically assume every ban or cancellation is justified or correct.
What an odd question. Of course not. You've built your business on their platform and you've (for lots of non-specific, general "you"'s) decided to cede your business to their whims. Plenty of businesses exist just fine with no social media presence and plenty of people are not too brain-rotted to find them.
But more to the point, I don't feel Meta has any responsibility to anyone. I feel the government in my country has a responsibility to regulate them and to levy devastating and potentially existential fines if they break those regulations. It's absurd to think these companies have any obligation to you (you in general, not you specifically) just because you can't figure out how to function without them.
Not if it's managed by a company, in which case it's a means to turn a profit. A common good needs to be managed by the community to which it's providing said good, or by an entity that's legally bound to ensure it remains "good" for the community.
Enough of the real world interfaces with online services that arbitrary bans cause actual damages, more harm than banning an annoying player from your obscure MUD.
Businesses can lose a lot traffic by not being present on Facebook and Instagram, so being unjustifiably banned is doing measurable financial harm in many cases.
Even as an individual it can be a huge pain to not have Facebook. The local individual sales market (e.g. classified ads) is dominated by Facebook Marketplace now, for example, and not having access to that market makes it difficult to sell things.
Meta has a responsibility to the community because of their position as the de facto platform for many activities. They've even intentionally positioned themselves to dominate. Having laws requiring them to act responsibly is totally justifiable.
And yet nothing came of it in probably the most visible case in recent history: Trump, president of the US, was banned by Facebook, Twitter in 2021. He sued, and nothing came of it, because the companies are private and it's perfectly fine for them to ban users as they see fit. He was unbanned 2 years later on the prerogative of the companies again, not because of legal proceedings.
There are essentially no cases out there where a company was forced to reverse a user ban. Unless it was regarding a breach of something explicitly in their terms or some other violation, but even those are extremely rare. Meanwhile there are numerous postings out there by people who got banned and are seeking some way to regain access, with success usually hinging on how much public support a given person can drum up for their case.
You should probably revise whatever sources you're getting your takes from, as they don't seem in line with reality.
- https://reason.org/commentary/social-media-companies-have-th... - https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1rx4rv6/banned_fr... - https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1moyxnm/my_facebo... - https://www.reddit.com/r/patreon/comments/1ser0cr/x_twitter_...