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

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.

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.

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

Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.

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.

And it wasn't that long ago.

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.

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

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.