Vancouver strip club's Instagram taken down over sign featuring lake joke | Hacker News Reader

Vancouver strip club's Instagram taken down over sign featuring lake joke

vancouverisawesome.com

116 pointsanigbrowl54 comments

Right. Freedom of expression when MAGA, but not for others.

Who is the snowflake now?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the party of "fuck your feelings" and "humor is legal again..."

And please, no fake canned complaints about "politicizing." The story is nakedly political from top to bottom (no pun intended).

My intuition is you were among the crowd who cried “their company their rules” when same companies were taking down covid posts.

Your intuition is busted if you can’t tell the difference between a joke about frivolous naming, and managing a global pandemic.

You either have free speech or you have whatever party is in power controlling speech, be it a pandemic or a joke.

People don’t want free speech. They want free speech as long as it’s aligned with their little echo chambers where they feel all safe and fluffy.

Would be useful to know who gave the order (article doesn't say).

It could be an Insta mod messed up, a blame the AI situation, the company self-censoring, or maybe a threatening DM from the government. All of which have precedent.

Hard to have an informed opinion without more details.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

Incidents like this are common enough, that this is what the system does. If it’s AI, or rogue mods, or zuck himself, it doesn’t matter because this is what the system is doing - and if this wasn’t an acceptable outcome to meta the system would be changed.

How do you know it isn't being changed?

I don’t. But given it didn’t change the last n times it happened, i’m doubtful.

Whats makes you think it is being changed?

When you say "it", what are you referring to?

I don't know anything about the internal workings of meta to confidently state that situations like this do or don't cause internal change.

What I can say is scores of people on Meta's various platforms are saying very negative things about the US administration and are not being banned.

"it" = people being banned for innocuous things.

Just because you don't always get banned for political speech, doesn't mean random political speech bans don't have a chilling effect.

If the platform is filled with the same category of political speech, it directly flies in the face of the narrative that this type of political speech is being banned and that there's a chilling effect. You're taking a single anecdote that requires ignorance of all all surrounding evidence to prove a point that you want to prove.

You appear to have an overwhelming desire to see this obvious outlier as indicative of a larger pattern that clearly does not exist. A conclusion this article clearly alludes to and wants you to come to but doesn't do on it's on because it's so provably incorrect.

Just because this administration has done something in the past doesn't mean that every time that thing happens, this administration is responsible for it.

I didn't blame the administration at all. I don't even think this is specifically about political speech. You're ascribing a lot of beliefs to me that I haven't expressed, and assuming we have a similar experience of social media which flies in the face of everything we know about filter-bubbles and algorithmic content.

> The purpose of a system is what it does.

I'm a fan of a slightly different version of this that I heard years ago:

"Just because something isn't working as advertised, doesn't mean it's not working as intended."

I like that, and there are definitely situations where that describes what’s happening better. But I feel like adding intent changes it a bit. Some of the worst things exist not because of intent but because of indifference. E.g. nobody wants to destroy the planet, but a lot of people don’t give a shit if what they do happens to do that.

That is why less capable clones of US services get so much attention at the moment.

Every time these end up on HN, someone says something along the lines of: ”I would not host in a country without 1st amendment rights.”

Are the tech companies actively censoring or subtly deranking pro-Canada sentiment on their platforms? Or is this some activist doing takedowns?

Drove past the club yesterday, the sign is still up with the lake joke.

Hope it gets more countries to do their own thing; it's rather insane companies are dependent on social media for marketing while they control 0% of that social media and can be wiped out by some silly AI (aka cheap; you don't want Astra/Fable scanning all our photos, you use some lobotomised model which barfs out false pos/neg all day long) or Stasi Ministry of Censorship. At least locally I can just get in a car and drive up to hear what's up and I understand the laws and know what my rights are while in the US, I have 0 rights.

Can one of the undoubtedly many meta employees reading this comment section speculate on why this happened?

Why was this flagged?!

'Murrican flagged.

I’m sure lots of egos were bruised by that one neon sign.

Why is this 'flagged'?

Another red flag of bigtech domination being terrible for digital democracy. At least Europe has now got this message loud and clear,and some govts/etc are using self hosted Mastodon (and Nextcloud, AI models...). Eurosky might be good but we have to wait and see, though it can also be self hosted through AT protocol. Decentralised, federated social media is now bottom line essential for diverse opinion with different, independently controlled moderation systems.

I thought MAGA supported freedom of speech? Didn’t they have a meeting with Zuckerberg about censorship many years ago? What a joke the US has become.

Vancouver is in Canada.

Instagram is not.

Freedom of speech only for a small part of only the US then? So not the ideal of freedom of speech, but the dictatorial version of freedom of speech?

there is a Vancouver, Washington, down near Portland, Oregon

I didn’t realize that someone from Washington State would think of Lake Ontario as theirs?

The much larger Vancouver, and the one that this is about, is in Canada.

There is also Vancouver Island, which is separate from the other two.

All are named after Captain George Vancouver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Vancouver

Neither the city of Vancouver B.C. nor the country of Canada took down the Vancouver nightclub's Instagram account though.

That was either accidental auto moderation or a testy and likely MAGA aligned person of influence (inside or outside of Meta).

Either way, not a good look for Freedom of Speech.

I am sorry that you had to explain that, and even sorrier that many people failed the third grade. The fault lies not with the teachers, but the parents who do not know who's geologic fact either... it's stunning, but par for the course given the countries leadership.

They had no need to explain what most already knew and which had little bearing on the apparent actions of a US company.

The fault lies not with the geological bedrock underpinning Vancouver B.C. nor with it's geographic location although it is indeed a visually stunning part of the world.

It's also less an issue with the leadership of the two countries involved, more an issue with the fish rotting from head of one country's leadership.

Only if it doesn’t embarrass his orangeness.

Since when has Facebook been associated with MAGA? They were famously part of the attempt to get Trump banned [0] from social media that led to Truth Social. Their moderation team tends anti-MAGA to the point where it is an international political concern.

And, assuming that the article is accurate, obviously they shouldn't have banned an account for posting "Can't handle a pool, but wants our lake?". I think everyone would agree outside the Facebook team. That would be a classic Facebook over-moderation. Extreme to the point where I'm going to assume there is more to the story.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...

  >Since when has Facebook been associated with MAGA?

That's easy. January 20, 2025: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo

"Oh, being bribed/extorted by the government we took control-of doesn't count, because internally the lügenpresse still has unreasonably-biased employees who keep accusing us of being bad people who'll abuse government power. But don't worry, we will fix that soon..." /s

____

P.S.: I wanted to add something that wasn't ironic, but I'm having a surprisingly hard time unpacking my own sarcastic-intuition into arguments. Perhaps:

1. The MAGA bloc angry at companies moderating Dear Leader have already struck back, and they will not be satisfied by less than a reversal into cheerleading.

2. It can be hard to judge what most employees think when the corporation itself is under some duress.

3. Sometimes the circumstances of a "reversal" demonstrate that the original concern was extremely valid.

Facebook/Meta happily hires GOP operatives and has done so for years.

Have you been living under a rock? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-oversaw-cambr...

So "it appears" ...

Not enough actual facts in the article to form an opinion or even write the article about.

The facts are quite clear:

1. A Canadian business posted an image of a sign criticizing the US administration

2. Soon after, their Instagram account was suspended.

3. This has happened before with their Twitter account, which they were able to get restored after a week.

But you already knew that, and instead are making passive-aggressive insinuations. If you want to make an actual argument, make it.

As for me, that along with the other facts I know about the Trump administration are more than enough to form an opinion: this isn’t evidence of a politically-motivated takedown, but it certainly fits the administration’s character, and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But maybe it was because they started getting lots of attention and someone noticed they are promoting a strip club?

Yep, that would make sense.

Meta is well known for having strict rules on nudity[0], particularly the display of women’s nipples. I would want to know the base rate at which the instagram accounts of strip clubs get suspended before assuming the motive was political.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g734pj22zo

That’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. The article says that they’re careful with what they post, but I haven’t actually looked up their content. It’s also possible that Meta just doesn’t want strip clubs on their platform at all, regardless of what they post.

Well, the joke by itself was enough to write an article about. Simple, hilarious, and we need a lot more of this. A bit sad that it's a strip club sticking it to the man, but perhaps that's appropriate too.

But as for claiming that there are "not enough actual facts" -- are you really suggesting that the takedown of the insta account was coincidental, and entirely unrelated to the sign?

Don’t deprive me my outrage

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