Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election | Hacker News Reader

Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election

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471 pointsrbanffy303 comments

He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling" by the president.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...

And Meta (or the US government) seems determined to prove him right

Meta == US gov. It’s another tool in their toolbox. You shouldn’t trust US tech any more than Chinese tech. If anything, probably should trust it less than Chinese tech.

Interesting that people trust foreign tech/government over their own to represent their interests. Not saying you're wrong.

For Brazilians and about half of HN readers Meta and Chinese companies are both foreign tech

The CCP doesn't worship Jesus meanwhile we know what hell on earth 1000 years of Christianity was.

It's a two-edged sword. Compared to other governments your own government when good is the best to promote your good. But when bad, it is by far the worst abuser.

It's not so much a matter of thinking one is "better" (for whatever definition of "better") - it's that the Chinese tech and Chinese government are so obviously coupled at the hip while American tech continues to claim independence (all the while paying billions in bribes directly to Trump's family and vanity projects).

I don't trust the Chinese government but i do trust that they're disinterested in me and don't have much agency over me. My own government is more trust worthy, but have interest and agency in me, so it could be said I trust the Chinese government more.

The frenemy of my frenemy is my... frenemy?

I think this is something many people tend to miss. The Chinese might spy on you, or steal your data when you use their devices. But for the _majority_ of people living the west, the odds of that actually being used against them are small.

The US government is much more likely to act against their interest than the Chinese.

Nobody can "miss" this, it's brought up whenever the letters C, C or P are mentioned.

I just remember that Mariott employee got fired for liking a tweet thanking the chain for having Tibet in a dropdown menu.

https://onemileatatime.com/marriott-fired-employee-for-likin...

> “This job was all I had,” Jones also said. “I’m at the age now where I don’t have many opportunities.”

"they might spy on you and take your data but not use it against you", oh that's alright then. Of course, unless you show kindness to those they torture and disappear. Or don't even, but do something the CCP construes as such. So what you're really saying is that you can reasonably expect to never be tempted to show such kindness. That I hear such talk in Western circles by Western supposed peers I already consider a great harm the CCP has done to me.

Totalitarian revisionism, by definition, seeks control of the whole planet, because it must. It can allow other totalitarian spheres if influence, but no non-totalitarian ones, where people are free to experiment and investigate, collect evidence etc. It's like bacteria agree about hating direct sunlight, but being agnostic about the color of the material that blocks it.

Comparing the two like this is interesting but there are fundamental differences. The US today could not delete tech companies, or the people who run them, the way China can its industries—and, crucially, the people who run them. The US’s version is personalist and would not survive even changing to another person other than Trump, not even going as far a a political party shift, which is possible in America.

It currently can't, but the current administration wants that power so desperately.

I am sure the plan is to make J D Vance president with all these powers and perhaps more, so he can rule for the project 2025 crowd.

20 million people wearing facial recognition glasses in public, always-on, networked and geolocated, with a Muse agent monitoring the feed, would 1000x the domestic surveillance capacity of current Flock, Ring, Tesla and CCTV cams.

The Fermi probability that you'll be ingested and inferenced by this network on any given day is incredibly high, even if you never buy a Meta product and never create an Instagram account.

It's hideously dystopian and you cannot opt out.

Maybe that's why the Muse avatar is a cute and cuddly Teletubby.

I suspect they are working on the edge where limited data makes the subjects more interesting.

Correction: Meta == Israel + US gov.

That would require that Meta is carrying water for Trump. I don't think I see that as very likely.

"Likely" or not has nothing to do with it, it's well documented. https://www.wsj.com/tech/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-donates-1-mil...

Meta restored Lula's FB account hours after it got flagged for content that as posted on their page. That is a pretty weak basis for a conspiracy theory.

Did they anticipate there would be large numbers of attempts to report the page and cause it to be automatically flagged and/or blocked?

I am sure the American president is target for such efforts as well and provides ample material for rules violations.

As the source article covers, they’ve been facing a number of complaints from human rights organizations that they are being insufficiently censorious regarding the Brazilian election, failing to swiftly take down some things which ethical standards and Brazilian law require. So that presumably influenced their policy. A lot of people seem to have an idea that Facebook’s election policy should quickly block all the bad ads with no risk of blocking any good ones, and that’s just not possible.

One paper that really hammers this point: Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness [1]

The example they focus on is different but the general principles and takeaways are very powerful and applicable to all classification problems including content flagging.

[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3219617.3219634

Wake me up when the right wing guy in the corporations pockets is banned by mistake

Is there a betting market for that?

IIRC, profiles of public officials are (or should be) handled differently.

Only insofar as more careful review. Otherwise, no, they shouldn't. Exactly the same policies on content should be applied uniformly to everyone.

I agree with both of you.

They should be handled differently [than they are today]. They should not be handled differently [than any other persons]. Meta should be giving everyone careful review.

donating money to the president and their party is something nearly every national corporation does. Using their corporate power to do political favors is not. those are two very different things.

That's not a campaign donation, this is straight up a gift to show loyalty to the new guy, after he won the election. But that's not the only thing, for just one more example, look at Zuckerberg getting on Joe Rogan weeks after the election to praise "masculine energy", wearing a ridiculous haircut and necklace, just to pander to the Right.

If the title of this article is not sufficiently eloquent, the photo should finish the job

https://www.wired.com/story/tech-ceos-donald-trump-white-hou...

What universe have you been in for the past decade? Meta is hand in glove with authoritarian interests, including in the US.

Meta hired Dina Powell McCormick into a position directly under Zuckerberg after the election and appointed Dana White to their board of directors. Is that enough water?

Zuckerberg started pandering to the Trump admin mere months after he took office, publicizing "evidence" consisting of a few emails from Biden admin officials as proof of widespread government manipulation of tech platforms that Trump rightly put a stop to in the name of free speech.

At the time the story blew up on HN drawing lots of outrage from the self-styled free speech maximalists. Now, of course, there's comparative silence from that crowd after regular stories about the FCC routinely weaponizing licenses to enforce preferred speech, lawsuit threats against Wikipedia, coercion of universities to suppress specific political views, etc. But at the time it was a big thing and a political gift to the Trump admin's public image.

The same old cool-aid: the label on bottle reads "freedom". But if you look at the ingredients: greed, gluttony, looting, bullying, spread american culture, slavery, surveillance - the full nth-amendmend package. Dosages may vary.

If those countries worried for real they would have built open platforms themselves. In reality they are making running any social platform next to impossible operate legaly.

Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.

Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?

the pay-to-play claim is wrong, the issue is the ban threshold itself, post certain topics from the "wrong" political side and you get banned almost instantly, the same ideas posted repeatedly from the other prefered side of the us gov face no consequences on especially meta and twitter

They changed their name to "Meta" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

If they changed their name to “Flobular” it wouldn’t change a thing.

They’re Facebook in many people’s minds.

“Meta” doesn’t convey the same meaning that “Facebook” does. And it’s also squatting on an important term in English. Mets is used all over the language, like metaphysical.

No thanks, I’ll use Facebook

How committed are you? A one letter change gets you to Faceboot, as in "a boot stamping on a human face - forever". Just sayin'.

It just comes naturally to me, I know them as Facebook.

There’s some effect of corporate name changing in order to have a reputational reset. I’m opposed to that.

Real people OTOH I’m happy to call them whatever they wish

Right on, I agree with you on all points. I just found it easy enough to change that last letter to a 't'.

Because in addition to simply opposing corpos' name resets, I'll go even further by modifying their names to better label their behavior. Corpos spend gobs of cash on naming and branding - it must mean something. So why not embrace that dynamic from an individualist perspective?

> They’re Facebook in many people’s minds.

And Meta loves it. People can ‘not use Facebook’ while living on WhatsApp and Instagram.

Was the name change related to publicity from that? My memory is that it was part of an attempt to be the new Second Life. But on the other hand I tend to be naive.

Yes, they did it to break the association with their brand (“reputation laundering”) and then they got into 3D to throw some chaff. Seems to have worked for them.

Facebook marked a video where a famous Italian author was saying what he was going to vote and why as "fake news". Of course he's opposing the current right wing pro-USA government.

edit: yes please, as usual, keep downvoting factual information.

Can't we just ban Facebook everywhere? I bet that will make a lot of people a lot happier in a lot of different ways. It's ridiculous how much power over our lives and our internet experience we've given to American Big Tech companies. Time to roll it back.

> Can't we just ban Facebook everywhere?

That's not that EU asks. EU asks to have a direct interface to delete posts EU elites don't like.

If you think the US elites don't have a Zuckerberg-shaped button to delete posts they don't like, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.

That is exactly what this article is about. Censoring people in order to interfere with an election, most likely on direct behalf of Donald Trump. That is far beyond anything the EU would ever ask for.

Careless people, the book talks about it too.

I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.

nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet

Facebook is not the internet.

Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?

I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.

https://www.studytogether.com/discord

That doesn't sound like studying.

To you, perhaps. But it works for the thousands that use it to study and work.

If a company openly acts as an enemy of the democratic process, I'm not sure it's the same as censoring a random porn site.

It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.

Surely meta sides on the side that's more willing to pay them. While this is in line with "democracy" it seems distinctly bad

The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.

I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.

But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?

In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.

I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.

Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.

It feels like your treat the facebook as some common good, and censorship made by it thus preposterous, something which should be punished

But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange

---

Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations

"Governments are still more powerful than corporations" at this point i would not be so sure anymore. especially when some of corporations have full weight of us goverment behind them.

Not coincidentally, there’s a word for the consolidation of government and corporate power.

Facebook has to follow the law like everyone else… I know they don't like to but…

Spoiler, they only follow court orders. You can violate the law as long as you want until there's a judge saying you do. This is just modus operandi for any big corp in America nowadays.

And right now the election court in Brazil is headed by two justices named by Jair Bolsonaro mostly for how loyal to him they’d be.

That's a plain big lie. There was no court order to ban Lula's account.

I was referring to normal business operations in the US.

So if someone thinks this is illegal, it's only illegal until a court says so. It can be in clear violation of the law but until a judge says it is they can pretend they 'interpret' things differently

All the more reason to ban Meta. If Meta are actively taking sides in Brazilian elections, then the site _should_ be banned, even if it's temporary for the lead-up to the election.

Meta can do whatever they want, but so can a sovereign nation if they deem Meta was actively subverting their democratic process.

> Governments are still more powerful than corporations

Corporations aren't all equal. And Meta is one of the most unequal. Add to that the relationship with Trump's government, and your 'corporations' argument is meaningless.

If it were some other mutli-national that doesn't have its own massively popular news platform, I'd be much more likely to agree.

The US Government is the military branch of American Corporations. The US govt doesn't have much autonomy outside of what the oligarchs demand

"Governments are still more powerful than corporations, this is why I am more afraid of the censorship of the internet by governments than of it by corporations"

Sure mate, disregard the fact that some companies make more money than half the countries in the world and are actively trying to undermine democracies, but yeah it's the government's fault for trying to protect the citizens.

Meta's specific goal is to have conversations go through them. They want to have the benefits of free speech without the obligations to support it, and use their power and influence to campaign to maintain both aspects of this.

To borrow the EU's language, Meta is a "gatekeeper".

> But it's a multimillion dollar corporation in a foreign country, to me the idea they owe you something is strange

You misunderstand: I do not claim they owe us anything. At least, not in this regard.

What I claim is that nobody owes them anything either.

They want to be the platform? Then speech occurring on it is not theirs.

They wish to perform acts of censorship? Then they cannot be "the platform". With emphasis on "the", because if they were simply "a" platform this wouldn't be any bigger a deal than a newspaper picking a side.

I don't actually know if Meta is close to being a monopoly in Brazil, that's just kinda an assumption on my part owning to the other legal cases against them for knowingly making their products addictive.

This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.

And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.

Ok so sanction and fine their ass until they start behaving. If we can sanction north korea for having an ideology we don't like, surely brazil can sanction meta's ass for trying to blatantly meddle in another state's affairs. Bar every employee from traveling there. Freeze any assets. Use diplomacy to pressure the US to press charges. Make them come to heel for chrissake

Or, just ban them.

And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy

how do you block access to it without going to TCP/IP level? And when governments do that, everything goes to shit

Not supporting the idea, but this feels like the traditional technical details vs practical real world solution.

Rather than banning individuals right to access a site, and then playing technical whackamole, you make that company's ability to operate in a country illegal. this puts the incentives and the technical onus where it belongs.

Again not saying they should or I support the notion of banning a site. Just that there are practical legislative solutions.

Make it illegal. Make it illegal for local advertisers to do business with them. Sanction individuals that cannot be locally prosecuted. Sanction the company.

It's already a requirement that to operate in Brazil they need local representation. Someone local who can be prosecuted, even if it's just a proxy - I'm hazy on the details but I remember reading about this at one point when they went after Twitter.

Is it going to fully stop Brazilians from using the service? Most likely not, but it will almost certainly reduce their usage, and the remaining users become a less profitable product to Meta, since they're not going to see ads for companies they can actually spend money on.

This changes incentives and may well be enough to make Meta rethink their policies. Or not, but then its effects can be measured and adjusted.

So actual government censorship.

Yeah, like the US government already does with about 10 countries on this planet.

Better than Facebook censorship. I can vote for my government. I have no control over the whims of Zuck (or the US Gov).

The government was elected. Zuckerberg wasn’t.

Censorship by elected governments is OK?

When it's done to protect democracy and the fairness of elections, especially against foreign interference? You bet!

With adequate checks and balances, following laws approved by a democratically elected legislature, and when it's done to protect democracy and rule of law, then yes. If we can limit the reach of someone yelling "fire" in a crowded theater in order to cause a stampede and harming people, why not preventing the already yelled word from being heard by the crowd and cause the action to fail?

Actual government censorship of a censor who tried to censor that government.

They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.

Yes, this would be a better outcome. Or at least make it illegal for politicians to use facebook / TikTok

From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.

Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.

Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.

And it wasn't that long ago.

But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?

Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.

Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.

Private companies are censoring the internet right now to interfere with democracy.

This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.

The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.

Right, don't ban them that's bad for free speech, just impose huge fines on Facebook to bankrupt them.

You don't need to censor access to the platform itself. Just declare the group for what it is: a criminal cartel. Then just make it illegal to do business with criminal organizations: no Brazilian ads on Facebook anymore.

This is less like censoring the internet and more like banning lead-based paint.

Hahahaha I like this framing

> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet

First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.

Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.

Then they should go wild on a governmental campaign about how FB is bad for mental health with daily TV, radio ads etc. Fight fire with fire.

> Fight fire with fire.

How would you go on a ad campaign against Facebook, using Facebook ads, where Facebook have already blocked your ads?

I don't know the exact media landscape of this world any more, but I can say I don't personally own a TV and can't even remember when I last watched live, and given all the TVs in stores sell themselves on how "smart" they are and which streaming services they work with I don't want to guess what normal viewing habits are.

Similarly, the closest I get to radio ads are in podcasts. If I own a radio, it's been forgotten in the bottom of a box for years and at least two house moves.

I have no idea which companies are ultimately behind podcast ads.

Actually, the Australian government censored the internet for children and it appears to be working out as being good.

Appears is the key word as most have gotten around the ban while others move to other sites usually from China.

Laws can be iterated on.

Depends on who the government is. You can’t realistically give anyone full write access to your populace.

Meta is not the Internet. It is a company.

it's a part of internet. To properly block it, you need to block it on the IP level

"Properly" is not that important. First, most people are both lazy and also non-technical. Second, ban business relations with them suddenly they get no ad revenue, ban schools and governments from using them as well as businesses and people have to connect with everyone besides friends by non-Facebook means (or non-Meta depending on details).

Maybe not when internet was an open platform. Now it is controlled by a few American billionaires that love they have a US Gov administration that thinks the same way as them.

Eh, as a staunch free speech advocate, I absolutely want Meta and X banned from Canada. That doesn't stem free speech at all, and is akin to banning a propaganda arm of a hostile foreign government.

They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).

> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet

wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.

Conflating "the internet" with "~Trillionaire owned, oligarchy controlled, American social media" is certainly a choice.

I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.

And yet this is somehow better?

Facebook is not the internet. If anything, their existence is a net negative for the internet.

But what good comes from a channel for misinformation and bot networks?

That was true before social network corporations started agressively manipulating opinion. If anything social networks could be considered a nuisance

Usually. Because usually it's governments that are censoring specific people to push a certain narrative. This time it's Facebook censoring specific people in order to push a certain narrative.

Ok? Then how about "nothing good comes out of foreign corporations controlling speech"?

Yeah, me too, but he’s a coward. I wish there would be an actual leftist running for president this year.

Feels like the future of the internet is every country having their own internet stuck within their own national firewall

In terms of internet hygiene, a better solution might be to just exclude the USA from the existing network.

A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.

I can't find the postmortem. Do you know where the posted it?

I don't understand why countries don't simply block facebook, instagram, etc. There's zero upside to allowing them.

The people rely on them too much, sadly

This may sound weird, but: Alternatives will appear, just like how Chinese people have been able to live their lives without access to Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp etc. The alternatives may not be good -- I'd argue the Chinese version of Google (Baidu) is quite a lot worse in many ways -- but they work and are good enough for most people.

That's not weird at all. This is the very schumpeterian premise this forum is built on.

People in Iran or China don't rely on Facebook and Instagram. Before Facebook penetrated Europe in ~2010, each local market was dominated by copycat services like StudiVZ or Hyves, which then vanished within 2 years. When the US floated the idea of banning TikTok, some people felt compelled to download Chinese social media apps.

If a country was to ban Facebook from operating in their country, people would be on an alternative 2 weeks after. There are reasons why a Facebook ban would be hard to enact, but dependence on the product is not one of them

I think you’re not aware how deeply engrained WhatsApp and instagram are in Brasil.

I think dependence is definitely a problem because everyone would get mad at you for having to switch. Sure in the long run it wouldn’t be an issue but immediately you will lose some voters

When WhatsApp was banned for a day, people immediately migrated to Telegram. This is not an excuse.

Didn't Brazil massively adopt Bsky as an alternative to X? And in a very short timespan too? Did they turn around on that?

Maybe, I don’t use either - but WhatsApp is a different use case too

I'm just as confused as you are.

The economic value seems literally negative and the influence on the discourse massive and much too unpredictable.

The recent Romanian election where a focused botnet created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election _and got him elected president_ should really be proof enough that the state of things is unnatural.

I hadn’t heard of this, so here’s more context [1] for the curious.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/articles/cqx41x3gn5zo

Because western democracies are about freedom of speech and access to information ?

Are you aware of The Paradox of Tolerance?

I am, which is the problem, if you start banning social media, you are banning access to information.

The real way out of it is education. Educating people about algorithms, social engineering, the harms of misinformation etc?

I'm fine with that, it's primarily the finely tuned bubbles I'm against here.

So, very approximately, ban fyp.

That's what makes it even more confusing why we don't ban these sites.

To my ear, "freedom of speech" mostly means "ability to be an asshole without consequence". Facebook seems determined to push this as close to fraud as possible without incurring legal consequences. This is, of course, the main drawback of democracy, but why don't states stand up for themselves and demarcate the freedom clearly rather than acting like a doormat for capital? Not that america in living memory would understand such values....

"created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election"

The way you phrased this made it seem like the candidate didn't exist. The candidate was a real person, but just wasn't well known or polling very well before winning.

> why countries don't simply block facebook

because everyone currently in power has used it to get there

why would they block their best weapon?

Because people cry "censorship" — just like we are seeing here in the comments.

Well, with all due respect, fuck them. If they’re so desperate, let them use VPNs.

Brasil pretty much runs on WhatsApp and instagram - they are by faaaaaar the most popular communication platforms. It’s cooked.

But many countries do: China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, [...].

Do you think it is aspirational to join that club? Because I don't think so.

In an ideal society, I think you just tax digital ads to help compensate for the damage from this attention economy. Maybe even use that money for education?

I'm against government building a scaffold to be able to block selective parts of the Internet because the block list always expands and never retracts.

You have to understand the president position is extremely weak, since he’s a centrist posing as left wing, there’s a lot of scrutiny on all his actions and he has very little support in congress, since it’s a very conservative country politically dominated by evangelicals and big farmers.

Blocking Facebook would be deeply damaging for him, they would quick him out even before the election

people would not vote for someone who took away their doom scrolling addiction dealer, that’s why.

American terrorists cry wolves about election interference in their country during election period. But the real fact is they interfere in democracy and democratic process across every part of the world. This is to help bolsenaro and destroy BRICS.

According to Google, Meta restored their account within hours after it got flagged for some content.

This happens all the time on these social media websites. Automatic flagging of content, human reviewers restore it.

Including accounts of public officials? I thought they were treated differently. Like manual review before any action.

Everybody in tech should read Careless People, not just to learn details about Meta. I'm sure many of us (myself included) have worked at places where the technical challenge outweighs any concerns about the overall company's mission or effect on the world at large. In Facebook's case they have a lot of blood on their hands.

I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.

But this case is something else entirely.

Define political expression.

The law isn’t code. It doesn’t require formal definition of all boundaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Then people will carve around the edges. Also do you need to moderate every single post or comment by anyone? That's not free also.

Speech is already not entirely free and it works fine. You can’t scream “murder all the X” in a theatre. It doesn’t break the concept of freedom to have regulations, and assuming nothing can be regulated just leads to governance by corporation.

> You can’t scream “murder all the X” in a theatre

You actually can.

Without consequences? Where?

[Edit:] Oh you’re quite right. In the USA that’s legal sometimes. Where I live that would be seen - reasonably enough to us - as a call to violence.

It can be worked out. It does not need to be perfect. I see no need to start an endless discussion on it here.

Saying "no political expression this week" is a political expression that usually favors the status quo.

I think you're taking it too far.

Exactly 48 hours (before and on the day of election), banning electoral advertising is the right thing, gives voters the mental space to make up their own decision. It's the silence period.

Add much as I hate the lead up to elections, I love the day before and on, where it becomes purely personal.

That's simply not true though. There are cases when no answer is an answer. But this is simply not participating. As they shouldn't.

Many countries already have electoral silence (but it's limited to one or two days usually).

It's difficult to completely block all political expression, but I think it's a no brainer to simply not allow any political advertising money to be accepted. From the pacts or anyone. When you're taking money to promote a political opinion you've become part of that influence.

Social media is too powerful and influential to be allowed continue unchecked. Falsities, defamation cases all take too long for the election cycle. So you get garbage in, and then you get a populist TV show host as president who doesn't understand economic interests rates, international trade, pain points of international war.

If you read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, you'll learn that this isn't the first time they've done something like this. I left WhatsApp after reading that book in protest (I already left FB and Instagram many years ago) and don't miss it.

I wish I had your discipline regarding Whatsapp. I have quit Facebook and Instagram but quitting Whatsapp has been tough.

My entire family uses WhatsApp. I held off for years because of that.

After reading this book, I decided that I couldn't keep supporting this company and told them that I'm leaving WhatsApp and that they can text me if they want to chat.

They were all not only more than fine with the move but actually helped me recreate the chat groups we had before!

So if you really want to go cold turkey on Meta products, going scorched Earth might not scorch as much as you think it will!

Whether you're for or against Lula, the only logical position is to oppose censorship. Eventually the tool gets used against you too.

They did the same thing in India/ There were student protests that were widely covered by Western media (and the students did have a valid concern, I dont want to downplay that)

The problem is when Indian Prime Minister posted a video asking for calm, that was blocked by Meta.

Pushing one side/narrative is something western media companies like BBC and CNN do a lot, and now it seems Meta has joined the party.

If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

Pretty much the opposite, influencers depend on it and have a disproportional "influence" and audience given by Meta to keep pushing their agenda

Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.

The problem is that US needs subservient explorable countries for its resources, and that's exactly what the other candidate will drliver.

exploit and explore are the same word in Portuguese.

In the same way USA is realising “holy crap all our stuff is made in China”, every non-US company is realising “holy crap, all our news and information runs through a couple of American web sites”

Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)

But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.

The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.

Interesting

The big difference is that the US shared institutions and common frameworks with democracies, they weren't supposed to be used as deliberate tools for misinformation.

Actual link: https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-blocks-president-...

It’s why democracy as a concept is an illusion, a utopian concept, a naive wishful thinking, humanity never had it and never will. Whoever controls the information and the money, control the results, it is very easy to manipulate the public, one time you scare them to do/don’t do something, other times you promise a reward for that, coupled knowing the majority of people lack critical thinking, you can do anything if you control the information feed conduit and have enough money to pump it.

What if we get rid of the money

I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?

This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...

The good ole "If it fits my agenda it's true" test

Calculated & orchestrated I believe.

Brazil is turning its back on the future. Its next president will either be a vengeful nepotism-baby (Bolsonaro) or a doddering leftie (Lula).

Meta and Mark are the new Murdoch.

Evil always finds new acolytes.

The US empire at work. Luckily for all of us its 1955 and the empire is on its last legs.

why is it 1955? Do you see parallels between how trans people are treated today and the start of the civil rights movement?

No, the British Empire, the one dominating before the US, finally ended in 1956. We'll see if the Russian empire collapses before the US one.

and, the chinese one is gaining power. Empires fall, but not in my lifetime.

> They asked Rubio if Trump’s administration would commit to respecting Brazil’s electoral process and requested a response by 1 October. The state department has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Completely meaningless. Of course the US (my country) will interfere. And the people doing so will have absolutely no shame about it.

Last time I looked, Lula was favored, but this time it seems he's about even with the far-right opponent, Flávio. How do you think it'll turn out?

Trump will pull his favorite move a fake promise of cold hard cash to vote for his preferred candidate bc he's the least America First president there ever was

Flavio is the favorite on exchange betting markets. Not by much though... he's rated a 57% chance to win the presidency.

I'm watching out for right (anti-other, ancaps) and left (anti-status quo, ansocs) getting together to fight the centrists.

Eg Bannon+Sanders against AI, but led by much younger people including women/LGBTQXXX.. strangely, this might happen in Japan/US/LA first not EU/EA because urban youth are more polarized in the earlier set?? The ancap against AI angle is particularly interesting-- YC already has some of it.. so what it might take would be the anti-other to first reach entente with the LGBTQ/left-identitarians/feminists/antiZionists, that is, recognizing "institutional-AI" as a bigger threat than "patriarchy"

Btw.. HN feels to me like Thiel-like (in methods, not stance) propagandists for the Convivial-Institution weaponizing their growing hoard of humane but "incidentally" individualist stories. (Because fun details about bureaucracy are structurally rare in comparison)

Friendly, knowledgeable oldbeards (men) finding their energetic curious young "broccoli haired" successors, to make this sound more... Immunogenic ;)

I was writing a long post, but I just deleted the comment. I disagree with what you just said, but my reasoning feels a bit contrary to Hacker News, so...

The US proves "every accusation is a confession" and "accuse them of what you do and call them what you are".

Brasil is never block Facebook at all, WhatsApp is the most used app and Instagram too, only TikTok is relevant competitor, but recent the brazil governor block meta from try control payments like eu did with Gatekeeper rules, sorry but yes this is right vs left but is lot more is about civ social and work class fight, the social media is the New press and society is manipuled

Did you understand what you wrote here?

Of course, and the people need understand every angle , if you think the company a is good or governor b ia good you is been manipuladed, i very dislike this censorship over lula, but need understand this is retalation over governor try regulamented somes aspects of the world

Mano, seu comentário é incompreensível.

reframe:

Brazil will never fully block Facebook. WhatsApp and Instagram are the most used apps, with TikTok being their only relevant competitor. However, the Brazilian government recently blocked Meta from controlling payments, similar to the EU's Gatekeeper rules. While this is certainly a right-versus-left issue, it is about much more than that—it is a struggle involving civil society and the working class. Social media is the new press, and society is being manipulated.

Of course, people need to understand every angle; if you think Company A or Governor B is entirely good, you are being manipulated. I strongly dislike this censorship surrounding Lula, but it's important to understand that this is retaliation for the government attempting to regulate certain global aspects.

Waiting for people to realise that this is not a recent Facebook specific development.

This thread is quicky suggests that Brazil should just ban Twitter/FB/What'sUp. And as matter of fact Brazil did that couple of times. As for today Brazil orders ISPs to block ~15k sites. Mostly gambling. However plenty of sites in the lists are political in nature.

Another argument, that blocking is not doing any good to the citizens. See Russia where FB/Linkedin and many other sites are blocked. That's not helping democracy at all.

But the most important sad realization that besides the USA there is NO other country where one can host and run even slightly popular forum site. Even forum related to stamps or railway models. The regulatory burden and the harassment from government agencies makes the exercise impossible to execute. HN front page had a plenty of examples of the niche forums/sites shutting down in UK/Germany because of the regulatory risks.

Think for a second, Brazilian candidate complains that the private USA company blocked him. Bu the problem is that Brazilian elites made Internet regulations so hostile that there is absolutely no open platforms do discuss political mattes there, thus even those elites have to rely on US-based platform. And they do, with all that hipocricy, i.e. advertise there then in benefits them, ban quickly once not.

Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,and not an arm of the American state whipping up hatred, spreading misinformation, and interfering with elections?

To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.

> Remember when Facebook was a nice place to talk to your friends,

No. I tried it for a week, 20 years ago. Fb bastards still have my info, but I am not signing in ever again.

Careless People (the book) is a great study on how Facebook ran out of growth in western territories (due to market saturation), combined with a callous disregard for the consequences to regular people - led to an ever increasing willingness to deploy political levers in order to keep the hyper growth train running...

I genuinely cant remember that - maybe there was a golden age before it went international but I pretty much used to use fb only for consuming political rage bait (luckily i stopped many years ago)

It was pretty great until around 2010 when it was still a social network rather than social media.

Not surprising - Suckerberg is one of the BigBro oligarchs running the USA right now. I think the bigger issue is that so many people helped empower these dictator-like corporations in the first place. That is actually a big problem, that the society world-wide depends on these private companies so much. Why do we not have working alternatives here that are decoupled from these corporations? (I could add US-centric corporations, but let's be honest - other companies as big may behave in the same way. It is also clear that current legislation is ineffective; Suckerberg should be held accountable and be in jail, without way to buy himself out here.)

Lula is a horrific monster, good for Meta.

"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"

They never said "Don't do evil".

Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".

Sadly he wasn't, and still isn't, wrong.

Doesn't mean he's not a totally corrupt shell of a human being though.

No one used to care about elections in other countries, but it seems political polarization is truly globalized now. An election in one country seems to carry such heavy stakes for citizens elsewhere. Why? Transnational disinformation? Sad time.

Disgusting. They bent over 5x backwards not to meddle in election politics for Trump (that is: in the era after they banned him for violating policies)

Here we go again

Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.

Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.

I wonder why?

Trump is friends with Bolsonaro.

It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".

are they even allowed to do that, damn

Trump approves this message

Much ado about nothing:

- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.

- The account has been reestablished already

This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?

Pretty damming quote from Zuckerberg tho:

“Vamos trabalhar com o presidente Trump para pressionar os governos ao redor do mundo que estão perseguindo empresas americanas”, afirmou Mark Zuckerberg.

True, at this time (not that it was ever better) we can't expect anything but this kind of attitude from him

There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"

There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.

I guess the challenge comes in even defining "political" ads. Is an ad about expensive gas prices or egg prices political? Unless you put such a huge ring fence around any topics of economy, immigration, law, crime, etc; I can think of a number of effective messages that aren't inherently political, but would activate an audience aligned with a political affiliation.

And also you can masquerade political ads as ads for a newspaper article, for example: "Governor A opens a new school" or "Party A declares amazing plans for next 5 years" (actually done here by ruling party, to work around election ad laws and limitations).

Yes, but it puts friction on it. Perfect vs good etc.

For example, you can't advertise overtly for political candidates or parties. You can't advertise if you are a political party or an org that has candidates for election. Of course they will then use supposedly independent orgs who are totally not affiliated with the party, but again it's some friction.

In Hungary, since Fb banned political ads in the EU, the previous governing party had a much harder time in advertising themselves, they tried but didn't manage to go around the rules at scale.

> defining "political" ads

Yes, and people will also complain that you now suppress serious conversations about people's lives and want them to live in some rose tinted walled garden where they can only post wholesome sanitized corporate friendly content etc.

And anyway in the last decade or more, there was a big push to say that "everything is political", you must always speak up for your ideas even in unrelated venues and spaces, etc., so yes it becomes very hard to delineate this because again, realistically, the problem is not political vs not political but my side vs their side.

A few years ago, in NL they banned a campaign from the Brandwondenstichting (foundation for treating burn victims) because it used photos from actual burn scars to warn the public. Ostensibly, the reason given was that it upset their delicate eyes -- which was the entire point of the campaign. The campaign itself was not political, but Facebook choosing to apply their weak US sensibilities to a Dutch campaign surely was a political act.

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