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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

> When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.

That’s Meta response. There is no mention of any regulation in that article.

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That's Meta's response to advertising rules that they find too onerous. Governments keep trying to regulate businesses to appease the voters, sometimes they go too far and the business decides the sensible thing is to leave the market.

This is especially an issue with insurance in disaster prone areas. Insurance company comes along and notices that in the east it's houses very close to the beach (hurricanes/storm surge), in California it's wildfires. Insurance companies raise the premiums in such areas to reflect the risk, the people living there scream. The state does things that mandate spreading the risk--now the dangerous behavior continues but others pay the cost. And those others start screaming because they are paying insurance rates way above the value delivered. And sometimes we insurance companies simply pull up stakes and leave--and we see states responding by saying if you want to do any business in the state you'll provide the homeowner's insurance at a "fair" (not fair, it's a price they're losing money on) rate. I'm not aware of any insurance companies completely leaving a state yet.

We have seen this with malpractice insurance for doctors, though. The biggest carrier simply quit and the market went crazy. Locally we had doctors who would pay more for malpractice insurance for delivering a baby than the insurance payment for delivering said baby.

Just because The Guardian intentionally didn't mention the regulations or role they might play and you want to be pedantic about their existence doesn't mean there aren't any.

Businesses are allowed to and routinely comply with regulations to their best ability even if it wasn't as intended based on the act of the regulator/government.

For ex:

[1] https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...

You’re the one who mentioned it was in the article.

Have you read that regulation? Because I did, and it’s not any form of ban on political advertising

It wasn't in the article. Ok we can move past that now.

You can ban something by requiring excessive compliance with a regulation that is unobtainable or very unprofitable. The Guardian failed to even mention the regulation or what may have motivated Meta's actions.

Meta go one further and literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event in their own published guidelines on Slide - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - as eligible to run in the EU.

https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...

This was either an automated filter set to 'anti-woke' or some childish attempt at malicious compliance, or both. Thousands of such plays are advertised on numerous platforms across Europe every year without incident or comment.

Yes, it’s so transparent I cannot fathom how so many people directly assume it’s the EU fault. Meta isn’t subtle at all in their lobbying

That's a problem. That the Guardian doesn't mention the regulation and doesn't give us the wording of the advertisement.

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