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  • Hacker News
  • Why do people still bother with meta and others?

    In my community (outside USA), we use local websites and posted bills. There's no magic to it.

    >Network effects

    If people decide the cost/effort is too high, that will dissipate.

    >"Somebody else will"

    This amounts to a thought-terminating cliche at this point. You are responsible for your own choices, not what others do. It's the worst cop out, you are claiming no agency.

    *royal "you" where applicable.

    I find a lot of responses to these stories fiendish. It is not "privileged" to refuse a bad deal. If anything, it is "privileged" to say one has no choice.

    Sorry if this comes off as rantish... I find a lot of the conversation around big conglomerates tedious and usually just laden with overtly bad-faith arguments and lazy defeatism. Conversely, love or hate Woolf, surely there is enough respect for simple arts people should find these behaviors abhorrent.

  • Sounds like malicious compliance, they should get a fine for that as well.
  • Is this an EU or Spain issue? I regularly attend at a theatre in Chicago that has socially "sensitive" plays. I often see their ads on Facebook.
  • Appears to be a response to EU regulation in 2025 banning political/electoral advertising [1]:

    > Ending Political, Electoral and Social Issue Advertising in the EU in Response to Incoming European Regulation

    I guess rather than micro-regulate what constitutes "designed to influence an election/referendum, voting behavior, or a legislative/regulatory process", they just decided to refuse to run ads for anything potentially politically or socially "sensitive".

    I'm guessing that they also refuse to run ads for things that are less socially acceptable such as anti-feminism which I would say is a good thing.

    [1] https://about.fb.com/news/2025/07/ending-political-electoral...

  • We don't have to put up with this. We simply choose to. But our laws could be whatever we want them to be.
  • The article doesn't mention this, of course, but Meta prohibits "socially sensitive" advertising due to the EU's TTPA law, or "Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising."

    It imposes substantial bureaucratic compliance burden on advertising platforms to accept ads that deal with political issues.

    Meta decided that the revenue wasn't worth the compliance burden, so they do not accept any political advertising at all. They filter anything that smells like political or social issues, whether it be a campaign about anti-immigration or a play about feminism, because if they accept it they will get heavily fined by the EU.

    This is why Meta does not ban this advertising outside of the EU. It's a EU regulatory problem. The Register does not mention this anywhere in the article.

  • Meta has a complicated history with Barcelona.

    They had a huge moderation centre in the city operated by a company called Telus (which incidentally happened to be in the iconic Glories tower - formerly Torre Agbar which is shaped like a huge vibrator). But one day to the next they fired all the more than 2000 moderators in search of cheaper pastures. They are now being sued for trying to avoid unionisation and a lawsuit of psychological harm by the moderators.

    So Barcelona does not love Meta.

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