My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
r/TheDonald wasn't nuked because of "inconvenience", but rather because the mods were unable or unwilling to control hate speech, threats of violence, and other abusive behavior. Nor was there a "long track record" -- it was one of about 2000 subs that were nuked in one major purge (many of them were inactive). As for "back in the days", Reddit still bans such behavior.
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
In the before times, we used government regulation to enforce private company responsibility in accordance with authority.
If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).
If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.
But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.
Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
Meta isn't blaming anything, it's the process. And no process will be perfect, thats the 'damnd if you do/don't'
This is only going to be serious to people who care about the subject itself and maybe any actual harm done in those 90 minutes, which I see as nothing.
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
It is not an ad account - the other reply is stupid. I am saying ad accounts deal with this crap from FB all the time. Add this instance to the pile. It is the price of surrendering comms and marketing to a gigantic behemoth.
Autoban? I thought they have whitelists of accounts it leaves alone, for this exact reason.
It's possible, of course, but taking anything Meta says at face value is very naive IMO. It's just as possible that they let it be banned and then measured the response, to determine if they continue the ban
There were plenty of other outlets for communicating about the rallies -- there was no dependency, and thus there is no logical reason to stop using Facebook.
Quite a few political channels I follow take the time every video to mention this very thing happening and urging you to sign up for an ol' fashioned mailing list for that reason. One or two might plug the mailing list instead of urging to subscribe to the channel itself.
Time and time again we see cases of non-aligned targets of censorship as some sort of autoban or technical issue. It's a lie and repeating it only help the liars.
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
eh. FIRE exempts universities like Liberty from its evaluation of free speech on campus because its free speech restrictions are expected. It also rated public universities in Florida well, despite stated positions that they will comply with Florida legislation to restrict speech on campus.
Lukianoff wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, in which he complains about student speech.
FIRE is indeed not as hypocritical as most "free speech absolutists." But boy howdy do they have different bars for different groups.
There is a meme that conservatives often have their rights trampled (e.g. conservative businesses being debanked, conservative figures blacklisted from Hollywood and social media, Parler being delisted), but instead of conservative leaders doing anything about it, simply point out "Wow, can you imagine if the roles were reversed? The media and legal system would be up in arms!"
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
The group now being themselves jailed still argue against those who categorically oppose jails.
You don't need to agree in order to understand the logic.
One side believes it is the "why" in the act that determines rightness or wrongness, the other side believes (if that is their genuine position) the act by itself is categorically wrong.
Let's dissect the parent poster's question for instructional purposes:
- If the answer is yes, then the parent poster would excoriate the respondent for being a horrible person.
- If the answer is no, then the parent poster would triumphantly crow that the respondent is not actually against deplatforming / pro-free speech after all.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to spot the problem: the false dilemma fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming, which is obviously nonsensical; no such people exist.
So we see that it is an attempt at a gotcha but it doesn't hold up when examined. I have no idea why people think it's clever.
Back before Gawker went kaput I used to spend a bunch of time in the comment sections at Jezebel and The Root. Jezebel in particular had a huge problem with highly-motivated trolls.
Sometimes the trolling took the form of high-volume contrarian posting, but the trolls would also post porn and pictures of gendered violence in the comments on nearly every single article.
The way Jezebel dealt with it was through a variant of commenter whitelisting. Unapproved commenters (including yet-to-be-banned trolls) would have their comments in a purgatory until approved, visible only to those who have opted in.
A community like Jezebel cannot exist when supposed free-speech absolutists have their way and protect the trolls. When the free speech of trolls is prioritized, their targets are denied freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
These are all private fora so the US Bill of Rights doesn't actually come into play. But what episodes like today remind us is that the commitment of platforms like Meta and X to ensuring full participation by their political enemies is weak.
I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
No my point is that free speech isn't a spectrum, we either can say whatever we want or we can't. As far as whether we have it, no in the US we don't have it today as certain speech is still made illegal.
I don't cast free speech in absolute terms, I take issue with those that do since it isn't a spectrum.
Free speech isn't a spectrum in the same way altruism isn't a spectrum. We probably all agree there is no true speech, so we change "free" (as in true freedom) to "free" (as in "liberty") and establish a spectrum anyway.
No one wants "true" free speech anyway. an age of social media + deepfakes means true free speech is legalizing slander/libel. And we know the lies will persist much longer than it deserves.
As well as inciting violence. We don't even need to reach "hate speech" on the spectrum in order to talk about intolerable speech everyone agrees should be punished on.
I'm impressed that you can speak for everyone collectively here.
I take issue with any law that limits speech, including libel, regardless of who says it. Such laws remove agency, and therefore a level of responsibility, from those who hear the speech and choose to act on it.
In the same way that I strongly disagree with laying any blame on a woman for dressing a certain way before being attacked, I don't blame a person for saying something before another person takes an action we've deemed illegal.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
One huge distinction to raise here is that free speech is a protection between the individual and the state. Corporations are free to regulate speech on their own platform, especially when users agree to terms of service that stipulate as much.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
The state is not regulating speech in my scenario, it is regulating algorithms and the relative promotion/limitation of another person's speech.
We have considered algorithms to be a form of speech, because it is an "editorial" process, but this does not seem to be what they actually do. Similar to how Ai output is not copyrightable, social media feed algorithms that work on big data should not be considered an "editorial" process. There is no human involved in making decisions, just like Ai. Thus, if we regulate algorithms, we are not regulating speech, we are regulating a process, albeit a digital one with less case law.
Threats are the gray area. I don't view words as violent action, people can say whatever they want. A person acting on it is a different story, including preparations like a person collecting materials for a bomb or something like that.
I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
>If the act is only words then it doesn't require privilege, I'm honestly curious how you would connect the two.
Because words carry weight based on who says them. Which is based on power/privileged. The president making an announcement about MedBeds would cause a much bigger conversation than a crackpot conspiracy group on Facebook. And that's sadly not belittling the FB group (give who I've seen fall for it), that's demonstrating how much more authority the president's words have.
>but a word alone can't harm anyone.
In the same way a pebble can't harm you, but it can be holding back a rockslide that can cause mass damage.
> In the same way a pebble can't harm you, but it can be holding back a rockslide that can cause mass damage.
That analogy doesn't hold. For one thing a pebble can in fact hurt you by itself. For another, the words still wouldn't be what harmed you, the actions people took later are what harmed you and those are what would be illegal.
And yet the former led directly to Thomas à Becket's death and is the classic example of giving direction through indirection. It was much more consequential than an unknown stranger on the internet offering a bounty.
But, strictly speaking, neither of those are threats. In English law, they'd be more likely to be prosecuted as Soliciting to Murder or Conspiracy to Murder - I imagine there are similar offences in America.
So words aren't violent action in anyway, because you haven't acted on anything. But offering money is violent enough to be legal even though you haven't paid anyone?
Speech isn't violence because its nothing more than words and our speech is a protected right. Offering money to murder someone is almost certainly illegal because they are doing more than talking, they are choosing to collude in the act of murder and a jury is much more likely to agree there.
My point wasn't that money had to change hands or be offered, I was responding to an earlier comment. A person directly taking part in plotting to commit murder I'd also likely breaking the law and likely to lose a jury trial if they are actively plotting a murder whether money I'd involved or not. Saying "someone should" simply isn't a plot.
Calls to violent or hateful ideology (brown people are all bad because of their skin color, judge a class of people based solely on their born traits) leads to nasty outcomes. We learned that many times through history, notably in the mid 20th century.
The real question there is who is to blame, the person who days something hateful or the one who acts on it?
Don't forget that we also learned in the 20th century that millions can support and die for genocide while only a few dozen will be charged while the rest returned home. We also learned that the winner of said conflict can wipe out entire cities and go home the victor without consequence.
It's not weird at all, it's pointing out most free speech absolutists just mean speech for themselves and their friends. Musk will be silent about this.
That makes no sense. Free speech is clearly defined, say what you want and the government has no authority to censor you. Anything short of that isn't free speech, and creating some middle ground between "free speech" and "absolutism" is nothing more than an attempt to move the goal posts.
What most people seem to miss is that companies like Facebook aren't the government and therefore aren't held to the standard of free speech. Signal ng up for an account and agreeing to their terms gives them authority to censor.
While free speech may be defined, "free speech advocates" routinely do not care about free speech. They often use it as a rally cry to push their views onto others while working to ensure speech they don't like is silenced.
It's similar to how neoliberals say they care about humans when in reality they only care about corporations. Messaging doesn't always match optics.
Those people simply don't earn the term "free speech advocates" then. Someone can claim the banner, but if they don't live up to the term itself it doesn't matter what flag they want to fly.
Again, no true scotsman. If all the people who call a spade a diamond get together and call themselves spade-truthers, their perspective is spade-trutherism, however much that upsets true spade-trutherists.
That's totally reasonable. I don't fault people for wanting limitations on speech, I just take issue with drawing a line between free speech and "absolute" free speech.
Germany may not have free speech, and if the German people don't want it that's totally fine.
"Free speech absolutist" was a strawman used against anybody who spoke out against deplatforming as a dangerous idea, which included a lot of liberals. (The pro-deplatforming crowd are very much not liberals.)
Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.
The most famous free speech absolutist is Elon Musk and he’s not only not a critic of the Trump administrations lawlessness but a direct participant in it. Also censors a lot of shit on Twitter that he doesn’t like.
Sure, that doesn't change the question though, a lot of folks are only free speech for their cause or interest while cheers on when others speech is restricted, thus I'm curious if said poster is different.
i havent really seen proper breaches of free speech until those same people got power, like the government coming in to strip people's education visas or greencards for having the illegal opinions about israel
Free speech is not freedom from free speech being used against you. You don't just get to say what you want and everyone else shuts up about it. How absolutely myopic do you have to be to think this way?
I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN. It's not because of flamewar in the comments section, is it? The upvotes/comments ratio looks normal to me. Can someone explain? In any case, thanks to the OP for the link.
My guess: Bots paid by those supporting the current administration are brigading these threads, and flagging the threads.
One theory I've seen over and over again, as to why the current admin is cozying up with Russia, is that their bot farms and influencing campaigns are very good at what they do, and aligned enough to keep them up and running - purely out of self interest.
And you flagged it because? Without a reason, people make up their own. I think many assume bots because the other explanation means facing uncomfortable truths, like 30% of people supporting the existing Trump admin and being anti these protests.
> I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN.
YC is a fairly pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian organization and the in-group protects itself.
See: funding flock (and dozens of other authoritarian-adjacent surveillance/defense companies), YC CEO Garry Tan's recent political advocacy history, etc.
You don't say "We need more billionaires" unless you are pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian (or unless you are ignorant of history and fundamentally don't understand how inevitable it is that unaddressed extreme wealth inequality always leads to oligarchy and authoritarianism).
Because this is just a thread for people to whine about Meta with no real solutions. Most threads about Meta have nothing constructive or insightful to say at all.
And, in this case, it lasted all of 90 minutes and speaks of a typical autoban ML feature. This happens all the time. False positives are going to happen constantly with a company that literally has 4 billion people use.
I don't know much about the Fediverse, but if you can easily move your account or data from one tyrant to another (and it looks like you can) then that is a huge improvement.
What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.
The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!
It was literally today that we heard about TikTok banning the account for the Musk movie because it’s politically inappropriate. This is hardly coming out of nowhere.
lol. 16 years after the first protests started being coordinated over social media, Meta, the largest social media company in the world whose tech folks are probably paid in the millions at the highest level, still hasn't figured out a way to avoid trampling over legitimate dissent for purely 'innocent, technocratic reasons'?
I stand corrected. Still, Trump threatened to imprison other people who didn’t start dressing like a bro and talking differently after the election - and who still aren’t imprisoned.
That might be true. However, I would bet that he was also there because he sees an opportunity to wield influence to the benefit of his corporation (or limit negative consequences). Either way, ethics isn't the main driving force for being nor not being there for someone like that - it is mostly about economic power, I think.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
It's an obvious flaw in hindsight. In an oligarchy, how exactly are laws upheld? The Oligarchs got there by being above the law and in our age of instant information the People see full-view what it takes to win. Nobody wants to be the sucker when everyone is getting theirs.
They do, but I stopped subscribing to the just world hypothesis a couple of decades ago. There is just too much broken and money has too much power to be reined in by justice.
nah respectfully, to hell with this doomerism. these people and groups have names. their deeds have paper trails. For every single one of them, there's millions of us. It's a matter of sorting out the polluted discourse, remembering we have 99% more in common than otherwise, organizing, electing grassroots politicians who truly represent the people and our interests, and then finally holding them accountable through prosecution.
People coming out when they felt great pain is what got us Donald Trump. I don't know if you remember the 2016 election, but I do. People were RABID for Trump. Something something be careful what you wish for.
In 2016 the tone was wanting for an outsider not a political insider. Trump was the only outsider on the final ticket.
On the Democratic ticket Bernie Sanders would have been the outsider. But the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Shultz made sure to avoid a vote by the people of the Democrat party and put in their chosen one, insider Hillary Clinton.
you'd likely be right. I'm not contesting that. The world and its people have been utterly raped to ashes, yet the apocalyptic rapture the parties responsible have been building their doomsday shelters for has never and will never arrive. Instead from these ashes we are seeing change emerging. It's slow sure, and hell maybe it won't be enough, but the grassroots ARE giving the old corrupt institutions something to sweat about (on 'both sides' if you'd like to see it that way). People are increasingly having less and less to lose. Get informed. inform others. organize with them. build community with them. The weight we hold together outweighs the solipsistic vampires.
Have hope even if it's irrational, that's when we need it most. materialize it. DO something with it - even if we don't get to enjoy the fruits that may come of it; at least those who come after us will, and that's worth something. Besides, they're banking on your apathy as well.
> For every single one of them, there's millions of us.
Yes, the ruling elite are typically outnumbered by the masses. It matters little: by historical standards, the ruling powers have virtually always leveraged their power to exploit those who don't have power. No reason to assume that streak will end.
it’s sinister because I believe most of us (by definition) think of ourselves as part of the people but as one has ambitions and becomes capable, the pull of “success” spares nobody.
Flock is dystopian. It’s also non ironically pitched as solving crime. it’s also our friendly neighborhood YC company.
The work was done to put dumpty behind bars with evidence of his crimes in multiple jurisdictions. And enough people got manipulated by social media campaigns in the 4 years after the 2020 elections that most of them didn't even know the facts of the cases. There's a reason dumpty works with those in the photo. It's because they have created an effective and customizable propaganda campaign tool.
its a weird thing to wish for violence in this case. but i agree and just now France is in the news again for violent protests. They’ve seen the movie and they’re now vigilant.
USA has its comforts, that’s like the entire sell. Huge homes, huge lawns, huge plates, huge cars. Huge Walmarts. (the world cup brought some tourists and on X the Japanese shared their Walmart experience as basically a trip to Disneyland). Add movies, reality tv shows, game studios, and now gambling on anything because gambling in the stock market isn’t enough juice.
Nobody sane actually wishes for violence. But sometimes it is required. I legitimately do not think the United States is coming through the other side of this intact. I don't see how there can possibly be a peaceful transfer of power. The concern is how many of us you take with you as your country spirals into authoritarianism.
I make fun of the French as much as anyone but one thing about them I really respect is the way they are keen to protest rather than simply roll over and let their government fuck them, as Americans and Brits do.
Heck yeah. My mom's generation refused to buy milk when it raised in price. This one sat back and let freedoms be destroyed. People are starting to realize that sitting on their butts, doomscrolling and accepting the status quo does nothing.
Protests and Boycotts don't work when doomers sit there yapping about how they don't work instead of participating. Counter movement bot farms encourage them to do so. We've all got to unplug, wake up, stand up, and live on our feet rather than die on our knees.
You don't need a just world to imprison tech CEOs. These people are hated by the vast majority of the public and they are hoarding all the wealth. Society is at it's breaking point and we have a very convenient scape goat that everyone rightfully hates sitting right there.
The universe may not be just, but it seems to set many things in motion if you want to participate.
Dude you could literally just type any of the company's names and add the word "lawsuit" after it and see a plethora of lawsuits that were either lost or settled, and the majority of them are privacy related.
Its hard to believe just how many of you are this defensive of these companies and are just completely disingenuous, as if they give a shit about you.
I literally just typed "google lawsuit" and these came up.
A flagrant violation requires clearly established jurisprudence. What is considered fair use has always been nebulous, and to the extent that there are standards on it, it's mainly through established precedence, of which there is none on AI training.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
I think HN takes issue with the hypocrisy of the matter. Copyright law was used to punish regular people for consuming illegal media, but AI tech companies are forgiven for using the same illegal methods to run a business.
They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
> According to the organizers, Meta failed to respond to their team for approximately 90 minutes while the account was offline during the peak of their national day of action and livestream.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.
They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
It's not your fault but we're too far down the rabbit hole of The United States of Incorporation. A company is not the Government. Intentionally so. But it's all fucked through money influence. So no, a company will never have your public interest in mind. By design.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "expect". I'm under no illusions that Facebook and its management are trash. In that sense I don't expect much.
But not expecting better is letting them off the hook.
Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country's election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.
Meta said the technical issues cited in the report were already public and the conversations it referenced related solely to the severity of the issues, not political interference. "Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false," it added in a statement
No one cares about these protests who isn't already voting blue. If anything it alienates the majority of people who find endless futile protests annoying. Shutting down the account intentionally is so extraordinarily stupid politically that it seems pretty plausible that it was algorithmically flagged.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
90 minutes. Trump was kicked off social media for how long?
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.
It is pretty funny seeing the reaction to this considering what conservatives had to deal with for around 6 years and continue to experience on major platforms.
Maybe leftists should sit this one out and reflect on what they promoted during that time. A taste of one's own medicine is humbling from time to time.
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
The (only) part of this that I find rather ironic (and kind of funny) is that these idiotic companies never seem to learn a thing. Nearly every single time they take something like this down, it just draws even more attention to it (the Streisand effect).
Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?
Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.
Yeah and nothing convinces the undecided independents, who now are mostly paranoid schizophrenics, to vote for you like appearing to shut down free assembly
I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like
No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
They literally trotted out Hanlon’s razor as a moral argument that we should not blame Meta since it was probably just a whoopsie-doodle. This is a very common moral argument that people implicitly make or explicitly advance when using it.
I am pointing out how that is a absurd moral argument deriving from the rule of thumb. If anything, the corollary is the literal opposite.
Any stupidity indistinguishable from malice should be treated the same.
The usage as a epistemological rule of thumb just points out how great harm is usually caused by stupidity, intentional or otherwise, rather than intentional desire to cause the specific harm. If you aim to reduce great harms targeting just malice is not merely inadequate, it is likely missing the overwhelming majority.
One should try their best to make sense of reality before making moral arguments. That's what epistemological tools are for, like Hanlon's razor. Whether moral implications are downstream is unrelated to what the razor is, which you claimed to know but don't.
You seem to be claiming that intent is not related to justice or blame, which would result in an inhumanely cruel justice system where punishments don't fit crimes.
But don't worry, I attribute your proposal to stupidity not malice
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
According to the actual court findings, Facebook blocked or hindered Lula's campaign for weeks, not hours. This was already explained to you before you made this post [0]. For further findings of fact, just read what the judges wrote after the investigation (I'm sure you're a nice, smart person, but obviously your opinions don't overrule Brasil's supreme court's findings).
Also, taking the word of the attacker that their crime wasn't that bad, or was an accident, without evidence, is pretty silly behavior, especially when it's facebook, with their long history of malfeasance and deception.
> this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts.
It really isn't. Courts deal with the facts in political situations all the time. Here, they looked at the facts and made their decision. You can disagree, but it's not like you're "debating" a court ruling in doing so. The excuses you're tossing out were already tried and ruled dishonest by the courts, all the way up to the supreme court.
Also, your note about Facebook being fined for refusing to block right-wing hate speech and disinformation is actually counting against your claim that the courts are biased and Facebook is not. What happened to the blocks happening across the board irrespective of politics? Right-wing hate speech and disinformation is allowed, but innocuous left-wing mainstream political movements and politicians get blocked right before an election? That illustrates the exact opposite of what you claim. We're gonna need evidence to believe your and Facebook's unconvincing claims of an "accident" here.
The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
> That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this?
Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?
> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.
> The only reason this is newsworthy is
...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.
So your theory is Meta let some protest organize on their social media for years, then 90 minutes before one of their many protests start they'd take down a single page on only one of their platforms (Instagram), as a way to stop the protests from happening? Then Mark Zuckerberg told them to restore it within a short timeframe for plausible deniability?
I go where the evidence points. Meta has not provided sufficient evidence to conclude that this was an accident. Given their track record of blocking left-wing political politicians and causes over the last couple years (and their even longer track record of malfeasance and deception), they do not have the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are not transparent about what happened.
The article makes it pretty clear: Left-wing political figures blocked from posting to facebook for several hours (not 90 minutes) right when the event occurred. Can't get much clearer than that. Then enough furor erupted to unblock them, or the event ended and then they were unblocked.
It fits with their track record, e.g. blocking/hampering Brazilian left-wing candidate communications for weeks until a court ordered them to stop. If you have a theory about both these things being an accident (while the corresponding right-wing causes were all conveniently given a pass), we're gonna need more evidence from you to back that theory.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between a) Some conjecture that a social media account was briefly taken down as part of a right-wing conspiracy by a major publicly traded US corporation OR b) yet another example in a long history of accounts being auto-flagged by overly-aggressive algorithms and then later being restored by a human moderator without proper transparency.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between:
a) oops, they accidentally blocked ONLY left-wing political candidates and causes right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes, totally a coincidence, people, or
b) yet another example in a facebook's history of blocking left-wing political candidates and causes, right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes
Obviously Facebook does not have the benefit of the doubt, given their long history of malfeasance, deception, and nontransparency, so A is a pretty strong claim, and thus we can go with B until you have strong evidence otherwise. I don't think anyone here on HN can say "I trust facebook to be honest and transparent, to admit, explain, and atone for their malfeasance without prompting, and to always make choices that best reflect the will of the people" with a straight face these days. In fact, we still don't even have transparency into the very incidents we're discussing (likely due to deception and malfeasance, if we're going based off past behavior and proper Bayesian priors).
Indeed, if it was actually an accident, then that means that after Facebook's Lula scandal, they had the opportunity to stop this sort of thing from happening, and made the choice not to do so. That was their choice, making it no longer an accident in this case. There's no escaping accountability for that choice.
Back to our earlier request: can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking major right-wing candidates or major right-wing mainstream political movements, immediately before an election? If it was just an accident, and these accidents happen all the time without respect for politics, we should expect to see an equal number of blocks applied to both sides in the same situation. Do we? I don't think so.
> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side
I don't know if that's true. Protests - or in fact, any large scale ability to organize people - have the potential for action baked in. Remember that the fall of the USSR started with some relatively mild protests.
It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.
This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
I would be more suspicious if No Kings wasn't an equally shady/opaque organization actively working overtime to subvert real leftist movememts from gaining traction in the US.
Its just your typical dark money poltical antics, funded by questionable people. It came out of nowhere with hundreds of millions in nationwide funding with teams of publicists and graphic designers. You should always be suspicious of these well funded, spontaneous but benign political movements.
It's a cathartic ritual organized and funded by billionaires that acts as a quartely pressure valve for the working class during the Trump administration. It prevent frustrations from boiling over (like in France) here during this time so the ruling class can push forward with their agenda.
It hijacks all momentum from local political organizing that actually have teeth. It funnels the energy back to the Democratic party, who serves the billionaires just as much as the Republicans.
or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol
The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.
This post is 100% relevant to hacker news. Why is it flagged? Who is flagging these posts? Do we have a Russian bot problem?
You realize HN is a Y Combinator project, right? It is functionally run by Big Tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator
Posts critical of oligarchy often shoot to number 1, then magically disappear from the homepage. It's a moderation decision.
"The revolution will not be televised."
My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
r/TheDonald wasn't nuked because of "inconvenience", but rather because the mods were unable or unwilling to control hate speech, threats of violence, and other abusive behavior. Nor was there a "long track record" -- it was one of about 2000 subs that were nuked in one major purge (many of them were inactive). As for "back in the days", Reddit still bans such behavior.
The suspension that was public facing lasted 90 minutes, but they couldn’t log into the account for hours
See https://bsky.app/profile/ezralevin.bsky.social/post/3my43atj...
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
That's a done deal -- Facebook started letting their human moderators (and other contracted workers) go in 2023, and then switched to "free speech" automated moderation in Jan 2025.
One of the contributing factors was a $52 million settlement in 2020 for causing PTSD in those human moderators -- dealing with all that abusive shit was very emotionally taxing.
In the before times, we used government regulation to enforce private company responsibility in accordance with authority.
If Meta and X want to be a public square, then one of the costs should be hiring enough human moderators to rapidly review critical cases (political, health, hate/conspiracy, etc).
If they don't... fine, then make money doing something else.
But at their current scale, this is really a resource allocation question about whether their margin is a few points higher or lower.
Absolving themselves of democratic responsibilities in exchange for a few bucks is gross.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.
An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.
Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
Meta isn't blaming anything, it's the process. And no process will be perfect, thats the 'damnd if you do/don't'
This is only going to be serious to people who care about the subject itself and maybe any actual harm done in those 90 minutes, which I see as nothing.
It's entirely feasible for Meta to hire, train, and continually staff high quality human moderators to make important calls.
This isn't some nebulous 'We're not even sure if it's possible!'
It's just Meta being cheap and preferring to enrich its shareholders at the cost of everyone else.
they probably can reduce the error rate and triage false positives basically instantly with ai, but we all know how society feels about that
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
There's a big deterministic gulf between numerical OCR and judging whether a particular piece of free text is breaking TOS.
Yes, no matter what happened Meta are responsible and should provide answers.
There’s still an important distinction to make though: if it was automated then the No Kings page was not deliberately targeted for political reasons.
Meta put it's thumb in the scale against Lula in Brazil. Why would this be any different?
What evidence do you have that it was an autoban?
Autobans happen to ad accounts on FB all the time.
And this account posted ads?
It is not an ad account - the other reply is stupid. I am saying ad accounts deal with this crap from FB all the time. Add this instance to the pile. It is the price of surrendering comms and marketing to a gigantic behemoth.
> And this account posted ads?
I mean… it is for a “No Kings” rally. Yes. It’s main job is advertising. Yes.
Autoban? I thought they have whitelists of accounts it leaves alone, for this exact reason.
It's possible, of course, but taking anything Meta says at face value is very naive IMO. It's just as possible that they let it be banned and then measured the response, to determine if they continue the ban
Perhaps, but why were the owners of the account then unable to sign into it after it was restored?
Hopefully it's a lesson learned by those involved.
Don't use platforms like this to organize in the future.
Don't use the only platforms that have millions of people on them to organize millions of people in the future?
Yeah. Stuff still gets done without Meta in the loop. They’re not a dependency for democracy.
Also curious where the “millions” estimate for No Kings events today comes from.
There were plenty of other outlets for communicating about the rallies -- there was no dependency, and thus there is no logical reason to stop using Facebook.
The estimate has been reported by major news outlets (e.g., https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2026/...) and comes from a variety of evidence. If you're actually curious then you can research it.
Don’t use JUST platforms like that. Use Instagram, but also have a dedicated website
Quite a few political channels I follow take the time every video to mention this very thing happening and urging you to sign up for an ol' fashioned mailing list for that reason. One or two might plug the mailing list instead of urging to subscribe to the channel itself.
Logic failure. There is no reason to use fewer channels.
Come on. You’re not going to organize a political movement over RSS in 2026.
I like that RSS was the best alternative you could think of.
Time and time again we see cases of non-aligned targets of censorship as some sort of autoban or technical issue. It's a lie and repeating it only help the liars.
I wonder if these free-speech absolutists will rail about this? Something tells me probably not.
Have anyone in mind?
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
I think you two are saying the same thing.
Elon (and others) will stay silent unless pressed on the issue, and even then it’s betting odds.
I'm definitely not saying the same thing.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
> Elon is a bit of an outlier
Not these days, sadly.
eh. FIRE exempts universities like Liberty from its evaluation of free speech on campus because its free speech restrictions are expected. It also rated public universities in Florida well, despite stated positions that they will comply with Florida legislation to restrict speech on campus.
Lukianoff wrote The Coddling of the American Mind, in which he complains about student speech.
FIRE is indeed not as hypocritical as most "free speech absolutists." But boy howdy do they have different bars for different groups.
Not a single pro free speech right source will say anything negative about this.
The roles reversed? I'm not following.
There is a meme that conservatives often have their rights trampled (e.g. conservative businesses being debanked, conservative figures blacklisted from Hollywood and social media, Parler being delisted), but instead of conservative leaders doing anything about it, simply point out "Wow, can you imagine if the roles were reversed? The media and legal system would be up in arms!"
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
Which of those is an example of someone's rights being trampled?
I'm sure we'll find out as soon as a left-wing organization gets debanked, delisted, or banned from all social media ;)
... which already happened repeatedly?
This is one of the last social media sites I can still speak on.
I got banned from Reddit for quoting Trump verbatim.
“Cancel culture”
I condemn deplatforming regardless of who it's being done to.
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
It is extraordinary to watch the group now being themselves deplatformed still arguing against those who oppose deplatforming.
>It is extraordinary
It is actually very banal.
The group now being themselves jailed still argue against those who categorically oppose jails.
You don't need to agree in order to understand the logic.
One side believes it is the "why" in the act that determines rightness or wrongness, the other side believes (if that is their genuine position) the act by itself is categorically wrong.
what about child porn distributors, they get to stay too?
Let's dissect the parent poster's question for instructional purposes:
- If the answer is yes, then the parent poster would excoriate the respondent for being a horrible person.
- If the answer is no, then the parent poster would triumphantly crow that the respondent is not actually against deplatforming / pro-free speech after all.
Astute HN readers should immediately be able to spot the problem: the false dilemma fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma). They have set up an imaginary "free speech absolutist" who must be 100% against any and all speech restrictions if they do not support deplatforming, which is obviously nonsensical; no such people exist.
So we see that it is an attempt at a gotcha but it doesn't hold up when examined. I have no idea why people think it's clever.
Back before Gawker went kaput I used to spend a bunch of time in the comment sections at Jezebel and The Root. Jezebel in particular had a huge problem with highly-motivated trolls.
Sometimes the trolling took the form of high-volume contrarian posting, but the trolls would also post porn and pictures of gendered violence in the comments on nearly every single article.
The way Jezebel dealt with it was through a variant of commenter whitelisting. Unapproved commenters (including yet-to-be-banned trolls) would have their comments in a purgatory until approved, visible only to those who have opted in.
A community like Jezebel cannot exist when supposed free-speech absolutists have their way and protect the trolls. When the free speech of trolls is prioritized, their targets are denied freedom of assembly and freedom of association.
These are all private fora so the US Bill of Rights doesn't actually come into play. But what episodes like today remind us is that the commitment of platforms like Meta and X to ensuring full participation by their political enemies is weak.
I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
So are you saying free speech doesn't exist? What's your point by casting this in absolute terms?
No my point is that free speech isn't a spectrum, we either can say whatever we want or we can't. As far as whether we have it, no in the US we don't have it today as certain speech is still made illegal.
I don't cast free speech in absolute terms, I take issue with those that do since it isn't a spectrum.
Free speech isn't a spectrum in the same way altruism isn't a spectrum. We probably all agree there is no true speech, so we change "free" (as in true freedom) to "free" (as in "liberty") and establish a spectrum anyway.
No one wants "true" free speech anyway. an age of social media + deepfakes means true free speech is legalizing slander/libel. And we know the lies will persist much longer than it deserves.
As well as inciting violence. We don't even need to reach "hate speech" on the spectrum in order to talk about intolerable speech everyone agrees should be punished on.
I'm impressed that you can speak for everyone collectively here.
I take issue with any law that limits speech, including libel, regardless of who says it. Such laws remove agency, and therefore a level of responsibility, from those who hear the speech and choose to act on it.
In the same way that I strongly disagree with laying any blame on a woman for dressing a certain way before being attacked, I don't blame a person for saying something before another person takes an action we've deemed illegal.
> there is no in between
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
One huge distinction to raise here is that free speech is a protection between the individual and the state. Corporations are free to regulate speech on their own platform, especially when users agree to terms of service that stipulate as much.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
At the same time, the people can petition the state to regulate corporations use of our speech, and generally our data
They have been abusing their power, something has to change
Totally agree here, once the state compels a private company to regulate speech it should become a free speech issue.
I haven't seen anyone show that here yet, though the Twitter files did show that for example.
The state is not regulating speech in my scenario, it is regulating algorithms and the relative promotion/limitation of another person's speech.
We have considered algorithms to be a form of speech, because it is an "editorial" process, but this does not seem to be what they actually do. Similar to how Ai output is not copyrightable, social media feed algorithms that work on big data should not be considered an "editorial" process. There is no human involved in making decisions, just like Ai. Thus, if we regulate algorithms, we are not regulating speech, we are regulating a process, albeit a digital one with less case law.
You probably shouldn't be able to threaten somebody or direct people to kill somebody, so I guess by your definition, I don't believe in free speech.
Threats are the gray area. I don't view words as violent action, people can say whatever they want. A person acting on it is a different story, including preparations like a person collecting materials for a bomb or something like that.
I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
Some people may not be as privileged to be immune to being terrorized by violent threats as you are.
If the act is only words then it doesn't require privilege, I'm honestly curious how you would connect the two.
Words aren't terrorism or violent. That doesn't mean people can't interpret them that way and feel harm, but a word alone can't harm anyone.
>If the act is only words then it doesn't require privilege, I'm honestly curious how you would connect the two.
Because words carry weight based on who says them. Which is based on power/privileged. The president making an announcement about MedBeds would cause a much bigger conversation than a crackpot conspiracy group on Facebook. And that's sadly not belittling the FB group (give who I've seen fall for it), that's demonstrating how much more authority the president's words have.
>but a word alone can't harm anyone.
In the same way a pebble can't harm you, but it can be holding back a rockslide that can cause mass damage.
> In the same way a pebble can't harm you, but it can be holding back a rockslide that can cause mass damage.
That analogy doesn't hold. For one thing a pebble can in fact hurt you by itself. For another, the words still wouldn't be what harmed you, the actions people took later are what harmed you and those are what would be illegal.
> I don't view words as violent action, people can say whatever they want.
Where does that put someone calling out a public hit? It is just words after all.
> I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
They say there’s no atheists in foxholes.
When you say "calling out a public hit" what do you mean exactly?
Vaguely saying "someone should" is very different from offering a bounty or plotting to do it yourself.
Run the full range. From, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” all the way to “10K to whoever takes out heimdall”.
The former isn't a legal issue, in my opinion. The latter would be as its actively offering a reward or bounty for a hit.
And yet the former led directly to Thomas à Becket's death and is the classic example of giving direction through indirection. It was much more consequential than an unknown stranger on the internet offering a bounty.
But, strictly speaking, neither of those are threats. In English law, they'd be more likely to be prosecuted as Soliciting to Murder or Conspiracy to Murder - I imagine there are similar offences in America.
So words aren't violent action in anyway, because you haven't acted on anything. But offering money is violent enough to be legal even though you haven't paid anyone?
Speech isn't violence because its nothing more than words and our speech is a protected right. Offering money to murder someone is almost certainly illegal because they are doing more than talking, they are choosing to collude in the act of murder and a jury is much more likely to agree there.
My point wasn't that money had to change hands or be offered, I was responding to an earlier comment. A person directly taking part in plotting to commit murder I'd also likely breaking the law and likely to lose a jury trial if they are actively plotting a murder whether money I'd involved or not. Saying "someone should" simply isn't a plot.
Calls to violent or hateful ideology (brown people are all bad because of their skin color, judge a class of people based solely on their born traits) leads to nasty outcomes. We learned that many times through history, notably in the mid 20th century.
The real question there is who is to blame, the person who days something hateful or the one who acts on it?
Don't forget that we also learned in the 20th century that millions can support and die for genocide while only a few dozen will be charged while the rest returned home. We also learned that the winner of said conflict can wipe out entire cities and go home the victor without consequence.
> The real question there is who is to blame, the person who days something hateful or the one who acts on it?
Both? It’s not hard to share the blame.
Believing that people's behavior is not based off born traits also will lead to nasty outcomes.
What is your argument here? That hate, violence etc is genetic?
Your hunch is right because most of them are frauds who only support free speech if that speech is the kind they agree with.
Kind of a weird comment to make. Are you admitting they were right, or are you supporting the right for platforms to censor?
Or are you trying to elicit emotions?
It's not weird at all, it's pointing out most free speech absolutists just mean speech for themselves and their friends. Musk will be silent about this.
Those aren't free speech advocates, and there is no absolutism with speech - you either have free speech or you don't.
Classic no true Scotsman. All the people who proclaim to be absolutists or advocates but dont meet my definition clearly are not.
That makes no sense. Free speech is clearly defined, say what you want and the government has no authority to censor you. Anything short of that isn't free speech, and creating some middle ground between "free speech" and "absolutism" is nothing more than an attempt to move the goal posts.
What most people seem to miss is that companies like Facebook aren't the government and therefore aren't held to the standard of free speech. Signal ng up for an account and agreeing to their terms gives them authority to censor.
While free speech may be defined, "free speech advocates" routinely do not care about free speech. They often use it as a rally cry to push their views onto others while working to ensure speech they don't like is silenced.
It's similar to how neoliberals say they care about humans when in reality they only care about corporations. Messaging doesn't always match optics.
Those people simply don't earn the term "free speech advocates" then. Someone can claim the banner, but if they don't live up to the term itself it doesn't matter what flag they want to fly.
Again, no true scotsman. If all the people who call a spade a diamond get together and call themselves spade-truthers, their perspective is spade-trutherism, however much that upsets true spade-trutherists.
How would you propose defining free speech beyond the freedom to say whatever you wish to say without government censorship?
You can claim no true Scotsman, but you need to back it up with reasonable alternatives to alternative definitions of the same term.
At least in germany there are more gradient,you can't say anything but most things. And thats ok i'd say.
That's totally reasonable. I don't fault people for wanting limitations on speech, I just take issue with drawing a line between free speech and "absolute" free speech.
Germany may not have free speech, and if the German people don't want it that's totally fine.
"Free speech absolutist" was a strawman used against anybody who spoke out against deplatforming as a dangerous idea, which included a lot of liberals. (The pro-deplatforming crowd are very much not liberals.)
Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.
So wait… are you supporting Meta’s censorship here or not? Another weird comment
It just seems like these comments want to stir the pot
Do I support a ban with no reasoning behind it? Not particularly.
Right winger and free speech absolutist here. I do condemn it. The fact that it was only for 90 minutes does somewhat lessen the blow, though.
The irony of your comment getting immediately flagged.
What tells you that? Do you have evidence? Or just a vague sense that no one actually has any principles?
My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.
I'd fall into this bucket. I both disagree with much of what people consider wokism and think Trump is a gigantic ass hat.
The most famous free speech absolutist is Elon Musk and he’s not only not a critic of the Trump administrations lawlessness but a direct participant in it. Also censors a lot of shit on Twitter that he doesn’t like.
Why would pro free speech people be right wing?
Because for the last 10 years anyone who was pro free speech was called a fascist in the US.
Okay? That doesn't say much about what they do today nor if you are against this censorship.
It wasn't censorship. Their activity hit a limit and triggered an automated suspension.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/meta-says-suspe...
Sure, that doesn't change the question though, a lot of folks are only free speech for their cause or interest while cheers on when others speech is restricted, thus I'm curious if said poster is different.
i havent really seen proper breaches of free speech until those same people got power, like the government coming in to strip people's education visas or greencards for having the illegal opinions about israel
That isn't freedom or speech, that is the first amendment.
Free speech is not freedom from free speech being used against you. You don't just get to say what you want and everyone else shuts up about it. How absolutely myopic do you have to be to think this way?
Well when you put it like that, were right wing folks ever really pro free speech?
Mostly no, but the people who ARE pro free speech (e.g. libertarians) have mostly found the right to be slightly more tolerant.
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams was a great read, highly recommend
Also Dark Money by Jane Mayer
I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN. It's not because of flamewar in the comments section, is it? The upvotes/comments ratio looks normal to me. Can someone explain? In any case, thanks to the OP for the link.
My guess: Bots paid by those supporting the current administration are brigading these threads, and flagging the threads.
One theory I've seen over and over again, as to why the current admin is cozying up with Russia, is that their bot farms and influencing campaigns are very good at what they do, and aligned enough to keep them up and running - purely out of self interest.
I flag some of these, I'm not a bot.
There must be some law on the internet that states something like : Anything I don't agree with or can't explain must be bots on the internet.
And you flagged it because? Without a reason, people make up their own. I think many assume bots because the other explanation means facing uncomfortable truths, like 30% of people supporting the existing Trump admin and being anti these protests.
It'd be nice if HN made the flagger specify a reason (or select a previously specified reason), and then display these tallies to all users.
Ideally that'd expose lazy flagging as well as cut down on these inevitable "why was it flagged?" threads.
You can vouch for flagged comments but not for flagged posts.
The flagging system makes it easy for any sort of coordinated brigading or organic dislike to hide posts that some people don’t want seen
> I'd really like to understand why posts like this often get flagged on HN.
YC is a fairly pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian organization and the in-group protects itself.
See: funding flock (and dozens of other authoritarian-adjacent surveillance/defense companies), YC CEO Garry Tan's recent political advocacy history, etc.
You don't say "We need more billionaires" unless you are pro-oligarchy/pro-authoritarian (or unless you are ignorant of history and fundamentally don't understand how inevitable it is that unaddressed extreme wealth inequality always leads to oligarchy and authoritarianism).
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1942992514954224025
Threads like this always get flagged as soon as they gain any sort of traction. Free speech for me, but not for thee.
Because this is just a thread for people to whine about Meta with no real solutions. Most threads about Meta have nothing constructive or insightful to say at all.
And, in this case, it lasted all of 90 minutes and speaks of a typical autoban ML feature. This happens all the time. False positives are going to happen constantly with a company that literally has 4 billion people use.
I'm literally begging people to start using the Fediverse at this point.
It doesn't have what people want (an audience)
And we replace one tyrant for dozens. It's not much of an improvement.
I don't know much about the Fediverse, but if you can easily move your account or data from one tyrant to another (and it looks like you can) then that is a huge improvement.
You can even become your own tyrant
What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
You are asking for too much sadly.
Fediverse is fine, are there any other platforms that work around such censorship?
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.
We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.
Ok, so what is the actual reason it was suspended?
Edit: They hit a rate limit and tripped an automated suspension.
The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!
It was literally today that we heard about TikTok banning the account for the Musk movie because it’s politically inappropriate. This is hardly coming out of nowhere.
interesting, did they turn the account back on after 90 minutes?
lol. 16 years after the first protests started being coordinated over social media, Meta, the largest social media company in the world whose tech folks are probably paid in the millions at the highest level, still hasn't figured out a way to avoid trampling over legitimate dissent for purely 'innocent, technocratic reasons'?
I don't know if you remember the inauguration photograph but it is pretty clear that this is one big family now.
To save you some searching:
https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto's/guests-includ...
How weird still that that is the world we live in now. I would have never predict that photograph 1 year before it was taken.
You should read A People's History of the United States!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Un...
I read this for my AP USH class. It's an interesting read that gives a little bit of very _interesting_ point on stuff. It's a fun book to read.
more fun, 'A Renegade History of the United States'
Down voted for suggesting the most salient analysis of US history. Sad!
Well yeah, Donald Trump was threatening to imprison Zuck a year before it was taken
He also threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton. ~~She wasn't at the inauguration.~~
No she was there with her husband.
I stand corrected. Still, Trump threatened to imprison other people who didn’t start dressing like a bro and talking differently after the election - and who still aren’t imprisoned.
They are there as representatives of their companies. They have a fiduciary duty to do what they think is best for the company and its shareholders.
Hillary doesn't need to do anything like that. But even she was there.
We each have a lens on reality, your lens' aperture is skewed on this specific aspect.
The parent implied Zuckerberg was there because he was afraid of retaliation
That might be true. However, I would bet that he was also there because he sees an opportunity to wield influence to the benefit of his corporation (or limit negative consequences). Either way, ethics isn't the main driving force for being nor not being there for someone like that - it is mostly about economic power, I think.
Trump, just now:
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
It was always this world. Except there were no pictures and definitely no social media back then. Welcome to reality.
Why ?
I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
Loss of accountability and deregulation leads to oligarchy. If we are lucky, this will take decades to clean up.
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
It's an obvious flaw in hindsight. In an oligarchy, how exactly are laws upheld? The Oligarchs got there by being above the law and in our age of instant information the People see full-view what it takes to win. Nobody wants to be the sucker when everyone is getting theirs.
All of those people belong in prison.
They do, but I stopped subscribing to the just world hypothesis a couple of decades ago. There is just too much broken and money has too much power to be reined in by justice.
nah respectfully, to hell with this doomerism. these people and groups have names. their deeds have paper trails. For every single one of them, there's millions of us. It's a matter of sorting out the polluted discourse, remembering we have 99% more in common than otherwise, organizing, electing grassroots politicians who truly represent the people and our interests, and then finally holding them accountable through prosecution.
I'll take that bet. $1000 that five years from now none of these fat cats are behind bars. I'm good for the money.
I would also take that bet, but when the pain gets great enough people do come out and vote historically anyway
That’s the tidy way. Going full Luigi is a darker path.
People coming out when they felt great pain is what got us Donald Trump. I don't know if you remember the 2016 election, but I do. People were RABID for Trump. Something something be careful what you wish for.
In 2016 the tone was wanting for an outsider not a political insider. Trump was the only outsider on the final ticket.
On the Democratic ticket Bernie Sanders would have been the outsider. But the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Shultz made sure to avoid a vote by the people of the Democrat party and put in their chosen one, insider Hillary Clinton.
> People were RABID for Trump.
‘Were’? Has that changed? They got exactly what they voted for.
I was not trying to say they aren't still. I was just saying that in 2016 they were out in droves voting for him.
I’ll add another $1000 in support. It’s funny/sad how fast things change, especially one’s values given the circumstances.
you'd likely be right. I'm not contesting that. The world and its people have been utterly raped to ashes, yet the apocalyptic rapture the parties responsible have been building their doomsday shelters for has never and will never arrive. Instead from these ashes we are seeing change emerging. It's slow sure, and hell maybe it won't be enough, but the grassroots ARE giving the old corrupt institutions something to sweat about (on 'both sides' if you'd like to see it that way). People are increasingly having less and less to lose. Get informed. inform others. organize with them. build community with them. The weight we hold together outweighs the solipsistic vampires. Have hope even if it's irrational, that's when we need it most. materialize it. DO something with it - even if we don't get to enjoy the fruits that may come of it; at least those who come after us will, and that's worth something. Besides, they're banking on your apathy as well.
> For every single one of them, there's millions of us.
Yes, the ruling elite are typically outnumbered by the masses. It matters little: by historical standards, the ruling powers have virtually always leveraged their power to exploit those who don't have power. No reason to assume that streak will end.
it’s sinister because I believe most of us (by definition) think of ourselves as part of the people but as one has ambitions and becomes capable, the pull of “success” spares nobody.
Flock is dystopian. It’s also non ironically pitched as solving crime. it’s also our friendly neighborhood YC company.
The work was done to put dumpty behind bars with evidence of his crimes in multiple jurisdictions. And enough people got manipulated by social media campaigns in the 4 years after the 2020 elections that most of them didn't even know the facts of the cases. There's a reason dumpty works with those in the photo. It's because they have created an effective and customizable propaganda campaign tool.
Fascism has never been defeated without violence, but Americans are too complacent to rise up in arms, despite the societal gun fetish.
It’s over.
its a weird thing to wish for violence in this case. but i agree and just now France is in the news again for violent protests. They’ve seen the movie and they’re now vigilant.
USA has its comforts, that’s like the entire sell. Huge homes, huge lawns, huge plates, huge cars. Huge Walmarts. (the world cup brought some tourists and on X the Japanese shared their Walmart experience as basically a trip to Disneyland). Add movies, reality tv shows, game studios, and now gambling on anything because gambling in the stock market isn’t enough juice.
fuck we’re cooked.
Nobody sane actually wishes for violence. But sometimes it is required. I legitimately do not think the United States is coming through the other side of this intact. I don't see how there can possibly be a peaceful transfer of power. The concern is how many of us you take with you as your country spirals into authoritarianism.
I make fun of the French as much as anyone but one thing about them I really respect is the way they are keen to protest rather than simply roll over and let their government fuck them, as Americans and Brits do.
"The base violence necessary for change"
The people with the gun fetish are largely on the side of the fascists.
Heck yeah. My mom's generation refused to buy milk when it raised in price. This one sat back and let freedoms be destroyed. People are starting to realize that sitting on their butts, doomscrolling and accepting the status quo does nothing.
Protests and Boycotts don't work when doomers sit there yapping about how they don't work instead of participating. Counter movement bot farms encourage them to do so. We've all got to unplug, wake up, stand up, and live on our feet rather than die on our knees.
You don't need a just world to imprison tech CEOs. These people are hated by the vast majority of the public and they are hoarding all the wealth. Society is at it's breaking point and we have a very convenient scape goat that everyone rightfully hates sitting right there.
The universe may not be just, but it seems to set many things in motion if you want to participate.
There are lots of people in SF that belong in prison.
What law do you believe that they have broken?
Combined, their companies have broken basically every law in the book that you could when it comes to privacy and copyright.
Which one specifically, with evidence? And if you're saying the current admin is protecting them, the acts shouldn't have been occurring previously?
Dude you could literally just type any of the company's names and add the word "lawsuit" after it and see a plethora of lawsuits that were either lost or settled, and the majority of them are privacy related.
Its hard to believe just how many of you are this defensive of these companies and are just completely disingenuous, as if they give a shit about you.
I literally just typed "google lawsuit" and these came up.
https://www.federalcellularclassaction.com/
https://www.googleassistantprivacylitigation.com/file\
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-approves-68-million-goo...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-mexico-jury-finds-fa...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
Specifically?
Stop being disingenuous, it takes a literal 2-second search to find a plethora of examples.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141449
How copyright applies to ai training hasn't been established.
Good news, Congress can change the law to be whatever society wants.
congress can not pass ex post facto laws making things in the past retroactively illegal, it's in the constitution
Gasp, not copyright! Quick, get the pitchforks!!
What sort of lion lives in the sea?
It would be quicker if you listed what laws you think they haven't broken. And remember, the bar for conspiracy is quite low.
Perhaps you could just provide us one law deserving prison that they have broken instead of waving off the question?
Every AI company has flagrantly violated copyright, to begin with.
But that's not the point!
The point is that the laws are written by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs.
Laws are made to protect wealth and power, so of course the wealthy and powerful haven't "broken" them.
A flagrant violation requires clearly established jurisprudence. What is considered fair use has always been nebulous, and to the extent that there are standards on it, it's mainly through established precedence, of which there is none on AI training.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
This is genuinely so funny to me.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
It’s remarkable to me the number of people on this site whose “heartfelt convictions” change with the direction of the political winds.
I think HN takes issue with the hypocrisy of the matter. Copyright law was used to punish regular people for consuming illegal media, but AI tech companies are forgiven for using the same illegal methods to run a business.
RICO, sexual assault of minors, treason, labor laws, drug laws, and probably a million other things.
hn is becoming reddit every day
There is a thread about about why posts like this get flagged...
This thread is the reason, it's like people off meds posting here about unrelated topics, crazy town.
I've been seeing variations of this stupid comment for like 15 years on this site.
respectfully your ad hominem reflects more poorly on you intellectual capacity than mine
They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Party.html?id=v7fSD...
> According to the organizers, Meta failed to respond to their team for approximately 90 minutes while the account was offline during the peak of their national day of action and livestream.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.
We have other options, yet we still keep using Meta. They're tied to all sorts of unethical stuff. Why. Stop using Meta.
Meta is also influencing Brazil's election: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l... - other social networks as well.
If Instagram is not a platform but instead an arbiter of speech they should be held legally liable what is said on the platform.
They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.
> Free speech for me but not for thee
Tiktok banned the account promoting a Musk documentary too. Oh how the cookie crumbles!
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013453/tiktok-bans-alex-gibne...
In case people don't click the link:
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
From Indivisible [0]
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
[0]https://indivisible.actionkit.com/mailings/view/127823
Instagram is trash. Stop wasting your time.
Reddit astroturfing seems to have spread here
Oh well. I've heard this on Reddit for years: "̶̶̶̶̶̶̶ Meta can ban whoever they want, they are a private company". Just a hint of schadenfreude.
there's some pretty impressive delusion in this thread, but thinking reddit is going to astroturf hacker news i think wins the top prize
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
Yes, yes I do. that should be the standard.
should
It's not your fault but we're too far down the rabbit hole of The United States of Incorporation. A company is not the Government. Intentionally so. But it's all fucked through money influence. So no, a company will never have your public interest in mind. By design.
We're talking about the dorm room project of a rich kid who stole the idea from his friends and thinks his users are "dumb f**s".
There's really no reason to expect anything from Meta except for it to do what's best for Zuckerburg.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "expect". I'm under no illusions that Facebook and its management are trash. In that sense I don't expect much. But not expecting better is letting them off the hook.
Is it surprising? Zuckerberg kissed the ring, did he not?
Zuckerberg is the ring.
Strange how this keeps happening to Meta:
"Meta employees said Lula's accounts were hindered during Brazil election, Folha reports" (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...)
No one cares about these protests who isn't already voting blue. If anything it alienates the majority of people who find endless futile protests annoying. Shutting down the account intentionally is so extraordinarily stupid politically that it seems pretty plausible that it was algorithmically flagged.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
90 minutes. Trump was kicked off social media for how long?
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.
It is pretty funny seeing the reaction to this considering what conservatives had to deal with for around 6 years and continue to experience on major platforms.
Maybe leftists should sit this one out and reflect on what they promoted during that time. A taste of one's own medicine is humbling from time to time.
If by "conservatives" you mean hate speech and vaccine conspiracies, then sure.
If by "conservatives" you mean conservative political speech, I'd love to see some examples.
The balls on this Zuck, I tell ya ... grinds my gears.
I'm fairly certain that page is AI-written - see the paradium link in the footer
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
> Maybe this is who they always were
Absolutely. But they were super good at getting smart people to pull their carts.
Soon they won't need to bother convincing people to work on their software, or at least that's the dream.
The (only) part of this that I find rather ironic (and kind of funny) is that these idiotic companies never seem to learn a thing. Nearly every single time they take something like this down, it just draws even more attention to it (the Streisand effect).
Mundus Sine Caeasaribus. https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/mark-zucke...
From the wayback machine, I could not get into the linked article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20261018012124/https://meidasnew...
Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?
Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.
Yeah and nothing convinces the undecided independents, who now are mostly paranoid schizophrenics, to vote for you like appearing to shut down free assembly
I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like
No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
that's absolutely not what hanlon's razor says. it's an epistemological rule of thumb, not a moral argument.
They literally trotted out Hanlon’s razor as a moral argument that we should not blame Meta since it was probably just a whoopsie-doodle. This is a very common moral argument that people implicitly make or explicitly advance when using it.
I am pointing out how that is a absurd moral argument deriving from the rule of thumb. If anything, the corollary is the literal opposite.
Any stupidity indistinguishable from malice should be treated the same.
The usage as a epistemological rule of thumb just points out how great harm is usually caused by stupidity, intentional or otherwise, rather than intentional desire to cause the specific harm. If you aim to reduce great harms targeting just malice is not merely inadequate, it is likely missing the overwhelming majority.
One should try their best to make sense of reality before making moral arguments. That's what epistemological tools are for, like Hanlon's razor. Whether moral implications are downstream is unrelated to what the razor is, which you claimed to know but don't.
You seem to be claiming that intent is not related to justice or blame, which would result in an inhumanely cruel justice system where punishments don't fit crimes.
But don't worry, I attribute your proposal to stupidity not malice
I see that you are unaware of basic legal/moral concepts like “negligence” [1] if you think such standards are inhumanely cruel.
Thankfully, legal systems are not that inhumanly stupid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligence
Marx’ counter-Razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.
marx's ideas famously have never missed
(for 90 minutes)
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
A judge in Brasil read the situation differently than you, it appears:
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins...
and Meta employees have commented also:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
According to Meta their account was deactivated "for just over 1 hour" before being restored https://about.fb.com/br/news/2026/10/a-meta-nao-esta-interfe...
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
According to the actual court findings, Facebook blocked or hindered Lula's campaign for weeks, not hours. This was already explained to you before you made this post [0]. For further findings of fact, just read what the judges wrote after the investigation (I'm sure you're a nice, smart person, but obviously your opinions don't overrule Brasil's supreme court's findings).
Also, taking the word of the attacker that their crime wasn't that bad, or was an accident, without evidence, is pretty silly behavior, especially when it's facebook, with their long history of malfeasance and deception.
> this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts.
It really isn't. Courts deal with the facts in political situations all the time. Here, they looked at the facts and made their decision. You can disagree, but it's not like you're "debating" a court ruling in doing so. The excuses you're tossing out were already tried and ruled dishonest by the courts, all the way up to the supreme court.
Also, your note about Facebook being fined for refusing to block right-wing hate speech and disinformation is actually counting against your claim that the courts are biased and Facebook is not. What happened to the blocks happening across the board irrespective of politics? Right-wing hate speech and disinformation is allowed, but innocuous left-wing mainstream political movements and politicians get blocked right before an election? That illustrates the exact opposite of what you claim. We're gonna need evidence to believe your and Facebook's unconvincing claims of an "accident" here.
0 — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50137079
The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
0: https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/28/facebook-blocks-lulas-cam...
> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
> That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this?
Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?
> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.
> The only reason this is newsworthy is
...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.
So your theory is Meta let some protest organize on their social media for years, then 90 minutes before one of their many protests start they'd take down a single page on only one of their platforms (Instagram), as a way to stop the protests from happening? Then Mark Zuckerberg told them to restore it within a short timeframe for plausible deniability?
I go where the evidence points. Meta has not provided sufficient evidence to conclude that this was an accident. Given their track record of blocking left-wing political politicians and causes over the last couple years (and their even longer track record of malfeasance and deception), they do not have the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are not transparent about what happened.
The article makes it pretty clear: Left-wing political figures blocked from posting to facebook for several hours (not 90 minutes) right when the event occurred. Can't get much clearer than that. Then enough furor erupted to unblock them, or the event ended and then they were unblocked.
It fits with their track record, e.g. blocking/hampering Brazilian left-wing candidate communications for weeks until a court ordered them to stop. If you have a theory about both these things being an accident (while the corresponding right-wing causes were all conveniently given a pass), we're gonna need more evidence from you to back that theory.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between a) Some conjecture that a social media account was briefly taken down as part of a right-wing conspiracy by a major publicly traded US corporation OR b) yet another example in a long history of accounts being auto-flagged by overly-aggressive algorithms and then later being restored by a human moderator without proper transparency.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between:
a) oops, they accidentally blocked ONLY left-wing political candidates and causes right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes, totally a coincidence, people, or
b) yet another example in a facebook's history of blocking left-wing political candidates and causes, right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes
Obviously Facebook does not have the benefit of the doubt, given their long history of malfeasance, deception, and nontransparency, so A is a pretty strong claim, and thus we can go with B until you have strong evidence otherwise. I don't think anyone here on HN can say "I trust facebook to be honest and transparent, to admit, explain, and atone for their malfeasance without prompting, and to always make choices that best reflect the will of the people" with a straight face these days. In fact, we still don't even have transparency into the very incidents we're discussing (likely due to deception and malfeasance, if we're going based off past behavior and proper Bayesian priors).
Indeed, if it was actually an accident, then that means that after Facebook's Lula scandal, they had the opportunity to stop this sort of thing from happening, and made the choice not to do so. That was their choice, making it no longer an accident in this case. There's no escaping accountability for that choice.
Back to our earlier request: can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking major right-wing candidates or major right-wing mainstream political movements, immediately before an election? If it was just an accident, and these accidents happen all the time without respect for politics, we should expect to see an equal number of blocks applied to both sides in the same situation. Do we? I don't think so.
It was an account with a few thousand followers. Nobody I know (in Brooklyn) follows the account.
I've seen more coverage of a brief 90-minute ban than I have of the protests themselves.
Trump and the Republicans are as unpopular as ever, but I don't think the No Kings protests are moving the needle right now.
> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
You're not comparing like with like.
Today's protests seem aimed around GOTV, rather than opposing specific policies. It makes sense that they wouldn't have the same draw.
The main organising IG account for the protests is https://www.instagram.com/50501movement, with almost 900k followers.
product liability means the product is the liability
Frankly I'm not sure why they would bother.
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
Ask Ceausescu.
Ceausescu was ousted by a permitted street protest that lasted a few hours as scheduled and then everyone went back to brunch?
you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side
I don't know if that's true. Protests - or in fact, any large scale ability to organize people - have the potential for action baked in. Remember that the fall of the USSR started with some relatively mild protests.
It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.
what actions specifically are baked in in this case. you think these protestors are on their way to toppling the federal government?
They could for instance call a nationwide strike if there are tricks around election day.
Patriot. God bless, Mr. Zuckerberg.
This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
> This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country.
Like what happened in 2024?
About 2,000,000 less people voted in 2024 than in 2020. Those 2 million could have changed the results
> I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
The thing is that they are also dragging many other countries into that misery. Just look at here at Latin America.
with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
The good news is that the protests are working. Number of kings holding steady at zero.
What is the value on trolling like this?
what is the value of asking the value of trolling, you have a downvote
It's weird to me to protest no kings now when 2020-21 is still so fresh in the mind. The circumstances of today pale in comparison.
I have no idea what you are trying to dog whistle
its not a dog whistle if you just state your belief openly like this person did
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
I would be more suspicious if No Kings wasn't an equally shady/opaque organization actively working overtime to subvert real leftist movememts from gaining traction in the US.
I'm genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?
Its just your typical dark money poltical antics, funded by questionable people. It came out of nowhere with hundreds of millions in nationwide funding with teams of publicists and graphic designers. You should always be suspicious of these well funded, spontaneous but benign political movements.
It's a cathartic ritual organized and funded by billionaires that acts as a quartely pressure valve for the working class during the Trump administration. It prevent frustrations from boiling over (like in France) here during this time so the ruling class can push forward with their agenda.
It hijacks all momentum from local political organizing that actually have teeth. It funnels the energy back to the Democratic party, who serves the billionaires just as much as the Republicans.
or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol
The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
> If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government
They favour themselves. And if to best position themselves they must suck up to the government then that's what they'll do. Every time.
> rather than their customers
Who do you think their customers are? They aren't the users. The users are the product, the cattle farmed by social media companies.
The customers are the advertisers. Advertisers don't want filthy protesters tarnishing their shiny brands.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.