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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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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.

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