Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Can just re-title this to: "[Company] forced to follow local laws where it operates as always has been the case"
Meta also had to block legitimate coverage in the US during the Covid pandemic because it conflicted with whatever the mainstream narrative was at the time, due to government forcing their hand.
If you're mad at any company that's following laws you don't like, you should direct your ire at the government that created the laws or policies, not at the companies that have no power to overrule said governments.
On one hand HN gets mad when big tech is perceived to have too much power, then on the other hand HN gets mad when big tech doesn't have enough power. It doesn't seem very coherent, just a mob getting angry at random emotional triggers.
by pembrook - Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?by dotcoma
- It can and does. The power of social media to spread ideas and accelerate political action is why fascists took it over and co-opted it. That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.by krapp
- I’ve never heard a single time social media companies say that social media would spread democracy. Sounds like a straw man to meby noname120
- It was a good pitch to get funding.by maxglute
- “Spread democracy” means “manipulate public opinion to submit to USA”.
That includes censoring content that threatens puppet governments.
by manoDev - Who told you that, the entire point was to talk to girls you lacked the courage to strike up a conversation with.
Saying ‘hi, I also like that band you have a shirt of’ was just too hard so we had to create trillion dollar monstrosities.
by 999900000999 - Isn't that precisely why this is happening? Because it's doing exactly that, and the people in power in these countries don't like it?by Ajedi32
- No, I don’t. I remember when the internet would (it did!) and Usenet would (it did!) and irc and open source and the web (they did!) but social media was always about entertainment and (one way or another) monetization of those technologies. It’s the cancer of our collective mind and achievements.by fnordpiglet
- Put social media onto torrent. Make reshares a seed, have it where users can use their device or a remote device to hold the seed.by 8eye
- This is sort of what Scuttlebutt did. You receive and distribute posts by anyone you follow, creating a decentralized network, not just a federated one. I enjoyed checking it out briefly a few years ago, but there really wasn’t that much to see, and it would randomly cause your computer to run hot and eat up gigs of storage. I also worry about inadvertently storing copies of illegal images on this kind of network.by eloisius
- Well, it's that or the accounts get removed completely. Sometimes you have to pick your fight, and this doesn't look like one that's worth it.by skeledrew
- Not true, there’s a third option: Stop operating in those countries. Which used to be a common choice for tech companies, until it somehow became unthinkable for some reason.by p-e-w
- This is a false dichotomy, especially in light of the article mentioning that Twitter hasn't blocked accounts that KSA asked them to block.by dfxm12
- The third option is to ignore them and let them block you. In a democracy this causes lots of public outrage and might be reversed. Not sure how it goes in authoritarian monarchies.by chadgpt3
- I would like to congratulate Meta on this day as they layoff more people for AI. I hope all your platforms burn to ash.by jeffwask
- If Meta operates in Saudi Arabia and UAE, shouldn't they follow their laws?by aurareturn
- If it’s legal to eat babies in a country, does it make it morally ok to do it too while visiting?by ornornor
- Nah fuck that.by NewJazz
- I don't think someone accessing content on US servers run by a US company counts as "operating in" any country other than the US.
But Meta is an international company, so maybe they have servers/staff in Saudi Arabia, in which case their only options are to leave the country or comply.
by Ajedi32 - Meta is the worst of the worst. I don't use it other than a tombstone account with some family connections and a separate burner account we use for Facebook marketplace.by mmastrac
- So you do use them. Twice.by slumberlust
- Do you boycott Apple and Google too? Because they have to comply with debatable laws just as Meta. See drama about Apple maps for Taiwan/China for example.by hu3
- I've been clean for about 2 years at this point, and I have not missed anything!
Messaging apps like Signal are more than enough now a days to stay connected with the few people I need and want to stay in touch with.
by hedayet - This is how everyone talks about their use of Meta products: "I don't use them except for those times I use them...". We all need to actually boycott and actively help create alternatives or these little bits of fabricated need will keep them in business forever.by greentea23
- The way to fix social media is to get off of social media.by altruios
- This shouldn't be downvoted, it's absolutely correct.by jjulius
- "Just remember to put plastics in the yellow bin and you can save the planet!"
Individual action is not an effective response.
by thrance - Social media companies post record earnings year after year from their ads business while increasingly proving to be harmful to society. They do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots while priming the algorithms to maximize revenue. The good ol' privatized profits, socialized harm model.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
by 0x5FC3 - I would like someone to come up with a way to block tracking and complicate their data collection processes, with consumers able to remove those features selectively in return for cash payments from Meta et al. The problem is that consumers don't have control of their data and are grossly under-compensated for it (primarily with access to broken, predatory services that are mostly designed to extract even more money from their pockets). There needs to be a rebalancing; tech ads should be stupidly low-margin because data sales are actually compensated correctly.by underlipton