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Discussion (86 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/25/lula-says-trum...
Also, isnât Facebook the same place that people said âwhen itâs a private company itâs not censorshipâ when it came to Covid and other contentious issues that were censored at the request of Biden âembedsâ in Twitter, FB and other social media?
[1] https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
When the left censors their political opponents, they're "protecting democracy". When the right does the same, they're "threatening democracy". Those are the rules.
https://derechadiario.com.ar/us/argentina/x-revelo-source-co...
The economic value seems literally negative and the influence on the discourse massive and much too unpredictable.
The recent Romanian election where a focused botnet created a pro russian candidate from thin air 2 weeks before the election _and got him elected president_ should really be proof enough that the state of things is unnatural.
I 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 InĂĄcio 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.
This ideological fear of democratic structures ignores the very real threat of autocratic, privately owned structures consolidating more and more power.
The only viable counterweight to corporate power is public power.
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
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.
And it wasn't that long ago.
From where I am, one third of politicians in recent elections have tiktok. It's a shame, everyone knows about human rights violation in China but the european politicians have no issues with using tiktok.
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 doesnât want to deal with this then⌠ban FB. IP block it. But they wonât, 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 itâs not an attack on Brazilâs âsovereigntyâ. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazilâs court: just ban it.
Itâs 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 arenât you banning them from your country?
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).
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.
But itâs 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 wonât cease complaining but donât have and apparently wonât have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best theyâve got lol.
Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but wonât build it themselves (and they still use whatâs being built in the end).
Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.
But this case is something else entirely.
Yes this looks like a overly enthusiastic attempt to block disinformation during an election (a good thing, and also LuLa will be sailing close to that line if not over it)
But Brazils most famous election candidate just booked his whole campaign on Facebook. I bet he prints the flyers in Brazil, I bet he speaks on Brazilian TV and radio, appears on Brazilian podcasts, but the globalisation race means he has to use American social media.
The only response is going to be Balkanisation or ending curation by algorithm.
Interesting
Evil always finds new acolytes.
There are no easy answers here, and every side just wants social media to support their side and suppress the others.
For example, you can't advertise overtly for political candidates or parties. You can't advertise if you are a political party or an org that has candidates for election. Of course they will then use supposedly independent orgs who are totally not affiliated with the party, but again it's some friction.
In Hungary, since Fb banned political ads in the EU, the previous governing party had a much harder time in advertising themselves, they tried but didn't manage to go around the rules at scale.
> defining "political" ads
Yes, and people will also complain that you now suppress serious conversations about people's lives and want them to live in some rose tinted walled garden where they can only post wholesome sanitized corporate friendly content etc.
And anyway in the last decade or more, there was a big push to say that "everything is political", you must always speak up for your ideas even in unrelated venues and spaces, etc., so yes it becomes very hard to delineate this because again, realistically, the problem is not political vs not political but my side vs their side.
Anyone familiar, to comment?
Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".
To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.
- 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?
This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also youâll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...
Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.
I wonder why?