He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling."
Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?
Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.
Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.
The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.
Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.
Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?
I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.
And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.
Brazil can very easily block FB from operating there, but FB is a private American company and it can do what it wants on its own platform - it can allow or disallow any content as it sees fit. If Brazil doesn’t want to deal with this then… ban FB. IP block it. But they won’t, because they like leeching off American manpower and ingenuity with no local alternative (just like the Europeans with their [lack of] homegrown technology).
Europe has many of the same issues (I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development), and they should do the same - ban FB/ban twitter/ban Google etc. but they never do lol.
But no it’s not an attack on Brazil’s ‘sovereignty’. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazil’s court: just ban it.
It’s extremely frustrating because we all know what the American big tech firms are at this point (especially Fb/Meta), and yet the only viable current alternatives seem to be from - hilariously - the Chinese. Absolute shit show all around.
If the American tech firms are so bad and so evil why aren’t you banning them from your country?
What you call "leaching" we call "comparative advantage" on good days, and "dear god just ban it all already" on bad days.
What you call "I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development", Trump calls "a trade deficit" and tries to stop.
(The "deficit" becomes almost, not perfectly but relatively, neutral if you include the digital stuff like FB).
That’s my point. The Europeans heavily rely on America for all sorts of shit, but all the Europeans do is whine and complain about literally everything. I’m no trump or Facebook/zuckerberg fan, nor do I even live in America.
But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).
Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
> But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t stfu with their whining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.
> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
No it’s not. There are several European efforts to develop AI, they just aren’t good at it and it isn’t anywhere near frontier level. The analogy is that the Europeans are trying to make their own cigarettes but can’t do it as well as the cigarette makers they are criticising and fining constantly.
There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.
- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.
- The account has been reestablished already
This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?
I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?
He said the thing that Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and various other countries are worried about, but is either publicly ignored in the US or dismissed as "trolling."
Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.
Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?
I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.
nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.
I don't really know anything about Lula (I wouldn't have known this was Brazil if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, I only know from the Wikipedia page 30 seconds ago that their full name is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and "Lula" is a nickname), so I can't say if they're "fine" or "evil", but one does not simply get to disregard the implications of censorship (of anyone, let alone a political party) when it happens to be done by a private corporation.
Especially when it's a foreign private corporation that's already deeply suspicious for political interference in multiple nations, as Meta is.
If a company openly acts as an enemy of the democratic process, I'm not sure it's the same as censoring a random porn site.
It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.
But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?
Its like throwing a grenade into a goverment building and being surprised that the government now wants to prosecute you. It is a fair prosecution based on actions in that case.
Banning facebook might actually be a moral good for the internet but that's my personal opinion.
The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.
I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.
Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.
And it wasn't that long ago.
Facebook is not the internet.
Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?
I often use Study Together which is a large discord server (50k users online) for folks to work and study in groups/body doubles, but someone told me a lot of Brazilians have to use VPN to circumvent the ban.
https://www.studytogether.com/discord
This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.
And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.
And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy
Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.
But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?
They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.
Yeah, you don’t know what sovereignty means.
Brazil can very easily block FB from operating there, but FB is a private American company and it can do what it wants on its own platform - it can allow or disallow any content as it sees fit. If Brazil doesn’t want to deal with this then… ban FB. IP block it. But they won’t, because they like leeching off American manpower and ingenuity with no local alternative (just like the Europeans with their [lack of] homegrown technology).
Europe has many of the same issues (I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development), and they should do the same - ban FB/ban twitter/ban Google etc. but they never do lol.
But no it’s not an attack on Brazil’s ‘sovereignty’. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazil’s court: just ban it.
It’s extremely frustrating because we all know what the American big tech firms are at this point (especially Fb/Meta), and yet the only viable current alternatives seem to be from - hilariously - the Chinese. Absolute shit show all around.
If the American tech firms are so bad and so evil why aren’t you banning them from your country?
What you call "leaching" we call "comparative advantage" on good days, and "dear god just ban it all already" on bad days.
What you call "I mean seriously aside from Airbus and ASML wtf even goes on over there in terms of actual technological development", Trump calls "a trade deficit" and tries to stop.
(The "deficit" becomes almost, not perfectly but relatively, neutral if you include the digital stuff like FB).
Just ban it and make your own social networks then? Surely it’s easy and straightforward to do.
If the social networks provide no value then ban them. And if they do but they are so harmful then create your own.
A tri polar world technologically would be great.
I mean … that would have large large costs when the Americans retaliate. I don’t think this is the easy call you claim it is for Europe.
That’s my point. The Europeans heavily rely on America for all sorts of shit, but all the Europeans do is whine and complain about literally everything. I’m no trump or Facebook/zuckerberg fan, nor do I even live in America.
But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).
Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
> But it’s actually laughable how much the Europeans complain about the Americans/American big tech while at the same time inventing no alternatives themselves and in fact relying on America for a whole host of shit, notably their defence. AI is another great example where the Europeans won’t stfu with their whining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.
That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.
> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
That would be stuff like this, in order to give the legal cover needed to resist counterclaims by the USA: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...
No it’s not. There are several European efforts to develop AI, they just aren’t good at it and it isn’t anywhere near frontier level. The analogy is that the Europeans are trying to make their own cigarettes but can’t do it as well as the cigarette makers they are criticising and fining constantly.
I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.
But this case is something else entirely.
Define political expression.
There is no win here. In Europe they simply quit the political advertisement business and simply don't do political ads. Such clear rules work much better. No politics or any politics, free speech etc. Of course nobody really wants free speech. Only free speech for the "correct" side and silence the "dangerous" other side. It's always like that. So then it becomes a game of blaming social media either way. "They allow too much propaganda for Bad Party A! This is misinformation and election interference!" "They banned my preferred Good Party A (same party)! This is censorship and election interference!"
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.
Last time I looked, Lula was favored, but this time it seems he's about even with the far-right opponent, Flávio. How do you think it'll turn out?
If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.
Anyone familiar, to comment?
Calculated & orchestrated I believe.
Having worked ad review, mass flags like this are usually a dumb classifier, not a plan.
They never said "Don't do evil".
Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".
Here we go again
Much ado about nothing:
- Meta didn't block their page, they blocked their Ad account.
- The account has been reestablished already
This was probably because their campaign shipped complete misinformation about the opposing candidate (with several profiles boosting the same misinformation) but when they do it, that's cool, right?
I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?
This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...
Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?
Trump is friends with Bolsonaro.
It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".
"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"
are they even allowed to do that, damn
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