My bet is that some sort of auto ban logic kicked in, maybe due to abuse of reporting features. It'd if course be worse if a human moderator took it down or affirmed such a decision but not impossible.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
I'm not sure why you think Meta would take such a heavy approach, as opposed to just the right amount at the right time for the minimal price and the least commitment.
> Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
you abdicate responsibility to an automated system whenever you deposit a check into an atm (which you probably don't because you use the banking system in an even more automated way)
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
It is not an ad account - the other reply is stupid. I am saying ad accounts deal with this crap from FB all the time. Add this instance to the pile. It is the price of surrendering comms and marketing to a gigantic behemoth.
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
There is a meme that conservatives often have their rights trampled (e.g. conservative businesses being debanked, conservative figures blacklisted from Hollywood and social media, Parler being delisted), but instead of conservative leaders doing anything about it, simply point out "Wow, can you imagine if the roles were reversed? The media and legal system would be up in arms!"
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
Threats are the gray area. I don't view words as violent action, people can say whatever they want. A person acting on it is a different story, including preparations like a person collecting materials for a bomb or something like that.
I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
Calls to violent or hateful ideology (brown people are all bad because of their skin color, judge a class of people based solely on their born traits) leads to nasty outcomes. We learned that many times through history, notably in the mid 20th century.
The real question there is who is to blame, the person who days something hateful or the one who acts on it?
Don't forget that we also learned in the 20th century that millions can support and die for genocide while only a few dozen will be charged while the rest returned home. We also learned that the winner of said conflict can wipe out entire cities and go home the victor without consequence.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
One huge distinction to raise here is that free speech is a protection between the individual and the state. Corporations are free to regulate speech on their own platform, especially when users agree to terms of service that stipulate as much.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
Avoiding deplatforming entirely is impossible. Either you allow brigading and harassment which deplatforms the targets of harassment (who find it effectively impossible to use the service), or you deplatform the brigaders by denying them access to the fora of their targets.
It's not weird at all, it's pointing out most free speech absolutists just mean speech for themselves and their friends. Musk will be silent about this.
That makes no sense. Free speech is clearly defined, say what you want and the government has no authority to censor you. Anything short of that isn't free speech, and creating some middle ground between "free speech" and "absolutism" is nothing more than an attempt to move the goal posts.
What most people seem to miss is that companies like Facebook aren't the government and therefore aren't held to the standard of free speech. Signal ng up for an account and agreeing to their terms gives them authority to censor.
While free speech may be defined, "free speech advocates" routinely do not care about free speech. They often use it as a rally cry to push their views onto others while working to ensure speech they don't like is silenced.
It's similar to how neoliberals say they care about humans when in reality they only care about corporations. Messaging doesn't always match optics.
Those people simply don't earn the term "free speech advocates" then. Someone can claim the banner, but if they don't live up to the term itself it doesn't matter what flag they want to fly.
"Free speech absolutist" was a strawman used against anybody who spoke out against deplatforming as a dangerous idea, which included a lot of liberals. (The pro-deplatforming crowd are very much not liberals.)
Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.
i havent really seen proper breaches of free speech until those same people got power, like the government coming in to strip people's education visas or greencards for having the illegal opinions about israel
Free speech is not freedom from free speech being used against you. You don't just get to say what you want and everyone else shuts up about it. How absolutely myopic do you have to be to think this way?
I don't know much about the Fediverse, but if you can easily move your account or data from one tyrant to another (and it looks like you can) then that is a huge improvement.
What the big social networks provide is the ability to transact money. No distributed non-corporation system can ever provide the money flows that make people use corporate social networks. Or, they can, but the instant they do they're legally attacked and destroyed. So no independent/distributed network can ever really draw those people who make up the majority who are chasing money or following those who chase money. The audience won't exist.
No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.
The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
We need the kind of populace that will care about - and demand - federated communications immune to censorship. Until then, we're entitled only to continue consuming garbage.
The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!
It was literally today that we heard about TikTok banning the account for the Musk movie because it’s politically inappropriate. This is hardly coming out of nowhere.
lol. 16 years after the first protests started being coordinated over social media, Meta, the largest social media company in the world whose tech folks are probably paid in the millions at the highest level, still hasn't figured out a way to avoid trampling over legitimate dissent for purely 'innocent, technocratic reasons'?
> According to the organizers, Meta failed to respond to their team for approximately 90 minutes while the account was offline during the peak of their national day of action and livestream.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.
I stand corrected. Still, Trump threatened to imprison other people who didn’t start dressing like a bro and talking differently after the election - and who still aren’t imprisoned.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?
Reminds me that Plato viewed oligarchy as being better than democracy, as long as laws are being upheld. When laws are not being upheld, a lawless democracy is better than a lawless oligarchy.
They do, but I stopped subscribing to the just world hypothesis a couple of decades ago. There is just too much broken and money has too much power to be reined in by justice.
nah respectfully, to hell with this doomerism. these people and groups have names. their deeds have paper trails. For every single one of them, there's millions of us. It's a matter of sorting out the polluted discourse, remembering we have 99% more in common than otherwise, organizing, electing grassroots politicians who truly represent the people and our interests, and then finally holding them accountable through prosecution.
People coming out when they felt great pain is what got us Donald Trump. I don't know if you remember the 2016 election, but I do. People were RABID for Trump. Something something be careful what you wish for.
In 2016 the tone was wanting for an outsider not a political insider. Trump was the only outsider on the final ticket.
On the Democratic ticket Bernie Sanders would have been the outsider. But the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Shultz made sure to avoid a vote by the people of the Democrat party and put in their chosen one, insider Hillary Clinton.
you'd likely be right. I'm not contesting that. The world and its people have been utterly raped to ashes, yet the apocalyptic rapture the parties responsible have been building their doomsday shelters for has never and will never arrive. Instead from these ashes we are seeing change emerging. It's slow sure, and hell maybe it won't be enough, but the grassroots ARE giving the old corrupt institutions something to sweat about (on 'both sides' if you'd like to see it that way). People are increasingly having less and less to lose. Get informed. inform others. organize with them. build community with them. The weight we hold together outweighs the solipsistic vampires.
Have hope even if it's irrational, that's when we need it most. materialize it. DO something with it - even if we don't get to enjoy the fruits that may come of it; at least those who come after us will, and that's worth something. Besides, they're banking on your apathy as well.
> For every single one of them, there's millions of us.
Yes, the ruling elite are typically outnumbered by the masses. It matters little: by historical standards, the ruling powers have virtually always leveraged their power to exploit those who don't have power. No reason to assume that streak will end.
it’s sinister because I believe most of us (by definition) think of ourselves as part of the people but as one has ambitions and becomes capable, the pull of “success” spares nobody.
Flock is dystopian. It’s also non ironically pitched as solving crime. it’s also our friendly neighborhood YC company.
The work was done to put dumpty behind bars with evidence of his crimes in multiple jurisdictions. And enough people got manipulated by social media campaigns in the 4 years after the 2020 elections that most of them didn't even know the facts of the cases. There's a reason dumpty works with those in the photo. It's because they have created an effective and customizable propaganda campaign tool.
You don't need a just world to imprison tech CEOs. These people are hated by the vast majority of the public and they are hoarding all the wealth. Society is at it's breaking point and we have a very convenient scape goat that everyone rightfully hates sitting right there.
The universe may not be just, but it seems to set many things in motion if you want to participate.
A flagrant violation requires clearly established jurisprudence. What is considered fair use has always been nebulous, and to the extent that there are standards on it, it's mainly through established precedence, of which there is none on AI training.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!
They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
Do people actually expect these companies to be fair and impartial? Seriously, you may as well have a No Kings account on Truth Social while you’re at it.
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
I would be more suspicious if No Kings wasn't an equally shady/opaque organization actively working overtime to subvert real leftist movememts from gaining traction in the US.
or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol
Look, as much as we hate Meta... doesn't Hanlon's razor apply here - "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"? Could it be that the account triggered some automated system?
Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.
Yeah and nothing convinces the undecided independents, who now are mostly paranoid schizophrenics, to vote for you like appearing to shut down free assembly
I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like
No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
They literally trotted out Hanlon’s razor as a moral argument that we should not blame Meta since it was probably just a whoopsie-doodle. This is a very common moral argument that people implicitly make or explicitly advance when using it.
I am pointing out how that is a absurd moral argument deriving from the rule of thumb. If anything, the corollary is the literal opposite.
Any stupidity indistinguishable from malice should be treated the same.
The usage as a epistemological rule of thumb just points out how great harm is usually caused by stupidity, intentional or otherwise, rather than intentional desire to cause the specific harm. If you aim to reduce great harms targeting just malice is not merely inadequate, it is likely missing the overwhelming majority.
One should try their best to make sense of reality before making moral arguments. That's what epistemological tools are for, like Hanlon's razor. Whether moral implications are downstream is unrelated to what the razor is, which you claimed to know but don't.
You seem to be claiming that intent is not related to justice or blame, which would result in an inhumanely cruel justice system where punishments don't fit crimes.
But don't worry, I attribute your proposal to stupidity not malice
90 minutes. Trump was kicked off social media for how long?
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.
No one cares about these protests who isn't already voting blue. If anything it alienates the majority of people who find endless futile protests annoying. Shutting down the account intentionally is so extraordinarily stupid politically that it seems pretty plausible that it was algorithmically flagged.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
Meta employees acknowledged in internal communications that the Instagram accounts of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva were hindered by restrictions during the country's election, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported on Friday, citing messages it reviewed.
The messages also acknowledged the platform recommended the profile of challenger Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, as well as his WhatsApp channel, according to the report.
Meta said the technical issues cited in the report were already public and the conversations it referenced related solely to the severity of the issues, not political interference. "Any suggestion that Meta favors one side is false," it added in a statement
Oh the days of watching Silicon Valley and loving this crazy, but quirky but seemingly good intentioned industry to work in. Maybe this is who they always were, but either way, how many billions do these CEOs need in exchange for the good of society is the question I ask.
The (only) part of this that I find rather ironic (and kind of funny) is that these idiotic companies never seem to learn a thing. Nearly every single time they take something like this down, it just draws even more attention to it (the Streisand effect).
> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.
I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers.
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
> That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this?
Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?
> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.
> The only reason this is newsworthy is
...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.
So your theory is Meta let some protest organize on their social media for years, then 90 minutes before one of their many protests start they'd take down a single page on only one of their platforms (Instagram), as a way to stop the protests from happening? Then Mark Zuckerberg told them to restore it within a short timeframe for plausible deniability?
I go where the evidence points. Meta has not provided sufficient evidence to conclude that this was an accident. Given their track record of blocking left-wing political politicians and causes over the last couple years (and their even longer track record of malfeasance and deception), they do not have the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are not transparent about what happened.
The article makes it pretty clear: Left-wing political figures blocked from posting to facebook for several hours (not 90 minutes) right when the event occurred. Can't get much clearer than that. Then enough furor erupted to unblock them, or the event ended and then they were unblocked.
It fits with their track record, e.g. blocking/hampering Brazilian left-wing candidate communications for weeks until a court ordered them to stop. If you have a theory about both these things being an accident (while the corresponding right-wing causes were all conveniently given a pass), we're gonna need more evidence from you to back that theory.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between a) Some conjecture that a social media account was briefly taken down as part of a right-wing conspiracy by a major publicly traded US corporation OR b) yet another example in a long history of accounts being auto-flagged by overly-aggressive algorithms and then later being restored by a human moderator without proper transparency.
Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between:
a) oops, they accidentally blocked ONLY left-wing political candidates and causes right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes, totally a coincidence, people, or
b) yet another example in a facebook's history of blocking left-wing political candidates and causes, right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes
Obviously Facebook does not have the benefit of the doubt, given their long history of malfeasance, deception, and nontransparency, so A is a pretty strong claim, and thus we can go with B until you have strong evidence otherwise. I don't think anyone here on HN can say "I trust facebook to be honest and transparent, to admit, explain, and atone for their malfeasance without prompting, and to always make choices that best reflect the will of the people" with a straight face these days. In fact, we still don't even have transparency into the very incidents we're discussing (likely due to deception and malfeasance, if we're going based off past behavior and proper Bayesian priors).
Indeed, if it was actually an accident, then that means that after Facebook's Lula scandal, they had the opportunity to stop this sort of thing from happening, and made the choice not to do so. That was their choice, making it no longer an accident in this case. There's no escaping accountability for that choice.
Back to our earlier request: can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking major right-wing candidates or major right-wing mainstream political movements, immediately before an election? If it was just an accident, and these accidents happen all the time without respect for politics, we should expect to see an equal number of blocks applied to both sides in the same situation. Do we? I don't think so.
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
you are exactly proving the point, the protests seem engineered to make people think they are doing something tantamount to ousting communist dictators when they really don't seem to be doing much at all except maybe annoying the moderates already on their side
I don't know if that's true. Protests - or in fact, any large scale ability to organize people - have the potential for action baked in. Remember that the fall of the USSR started with some relatively mild protests.
It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.
"Proven" is too strong, but some COVID experts now consider the lab leak hypothesis plausible. It used to be that you could get banned from social media (mostly Facebook and pre-Musk twitter) for promoting it.
I was there and I remember this. Joe Biden was one of the people pushing the now completely debunked lab-leak conspiracy theory at the time. So no, you did not get banned. You had the president of the USA spreading the same bullshit as you.
It was a racist conspiracy theory back then as well, even when the president of the USA was pushing this crap.
Hm. That's not what I remember. I remember he ordered an investigation into the origins of the virus but I don't remember him singling out China as the origin. That was Trump, who called it a 'Chinese virus'.
He ordered an investigation into the origin of the Virus at a time when these racist conspiracy theories were proliferating, while at the same time he did not exclude investigating these obviously racist conspiracy theories. He played right into the hands of racist conspiracy theorists.
To me, and to many of us on the left wing, it was obvious what he was doing. The theory of natural origin had become the de-facto scientific consensus when he started this “investigation”. That is he was muddying the waters and trying to stir up anti-China sentiment among Americans in his political favor.
1. Origin is still not conclusive.
2. wtf. that is total bullshit, I'm not even going to bother with that.
3. I came from a country that locked down early for a month. We spend the following summer going to the beach and concerts while the rest of the world suffered on the news. Had other nations actually implemented such a policy quickly and properly, covid could have been controlled. But they didn't. They did it piecemeal.
Origin is as good as conclusive. These lab-leak conspiracy theories are nothing but crackpot anti-asian racism, and have been from the beginning. Covid had a natural origin and spread from a wet market in Wuhan. We know this.
There are some missing pieces, such as how long the virus had been circulating in bats, which other animals it had crossed over, were there unidentified cases in humans in China before the Wuhan wet-market spread? etc. But one thing is for sure, this virus was not made in a lab, and Chinese scientists did not do anything to cause it’s spread.
>>>There was about 50 different origin conspiracies.
50 bat species?
>>>Vaccine absolutely was proven to work
There were at least couple of vaccines.Yeah they worked - some % died from complications of blood clotting...
>>>Lockdowns absolutely slowed the spread of COVID to allow the hospital systems to rationalise the limited PPE.
BS! Hospitals stopped to work - except for emergency situations. I had a surgery that had to be postponed for couple of years. The backlog from covid took years to clear up.
There were some revelations to me because of covid:
1. Majority of people appears to be unable to think by themselves.
2. The absolute stupidity and greed among officials - especially WHO was hilarious.
3. People here parrot "official" texts, that were fabricated in anticipation of mass panic or covering their asses. None of that has anything to do with covid and actual history of events.
you’re 6 years older and can’t understand the difference between slow down transmission and no transmission, with the former being the goal and that was successful in places with higher distancing and vaccination rates. can’t understand the difference between less severe symptoms versus none at all, with the former again being the goal
as a betting man, I bet you still don’t realize that every issue with the vaccine was a default issue with catching actual covid
1. Covid had a natural origin and spread from a wet market in Wuhan, China
2. Most vaccines were effective and helped reduced the severity of Covid. Vaccines saved lives.
3. Lockdowns were extremely effective in slowing down the spread of the virus in its initial stages, before we had enough life-saving vaccines to protect the most vulnerable from the virus. Lockdowns saved millions of lives.
>Covid had a natural origin and spread from a wet market in Wuhan, China
What an amazing coincidence that the virus came from the same city that the China’s only level four bio lab happens to be in, the one with records destroyed, the same one that the US was with one step removed from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance was directly performing gain of research on coronaviruses at, a fact that Fauci’s own emails confirm as it was his buddy Peter Daszak’s name on so that when he testified that the US was not doing GoF that he was still perjuring himself just not immediately provable.
I get why people get so confused because it truly is just such a neat coincidence.
1. Lol. The virus was related to bats that live 1000 miles from Wuhan.
The main issue is that China lied when people already were dead from Covid.
2. Vaccines were completelly ineffective. Virus adapted much faster and became less lethal - as expected. Or rather immunity of organism of people stopped overreact to something that was never lethal, unless you had no immunity.
Sweden is top example of how to deal with covid by doing nothing. My home country vaccinated over 80% population and had the highest fatality rate per population from blood clots mainly. Corruption kills people.
3. Lockdowns were too late. Because of China. Lockdowns for various reasons did not work - healthy looking people were spreading covid for months before and during lockdown - it seems that you still do not realize that major part of people got through covid without life threatening complications.
You know that China informed the UN in the first time when they confirmed the virus right?
Just because your country ignored some messages from China (as usual), doesn't mean China didn't do it's job.
The history:
1. The virus was firstly reported by a docker working in Wuhan, but the govt doesn't take it seriously.
2. The covid spreads and Chinese govt started to lockdown. Also the govt informed the U.N.
3. Covid spreads globally.
Really? I missed the evidence that the vaccine was mind a controlled experiment linked to 5G funded by Bill Gates that killed everyone who had the vaccine within 6 months.
Come, come, my good sir! COVID conspiracy theorists proven correct? Did 5G phone signals activate tiny robots in the COVID vaccine? No. Does the COVID vaccine work? It's not 100% effective, but mortality data certainly shows that those vaccinated are less likely to die. Time to do some research, update your priors, my friend.
This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country. But since most people in the US are being deluded, I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
with the next change of administration there needs to be an investigation into every single one of these techbros and a Roosevelt treatment of the tech sector and corporate power.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
Heh. Zuck got a call from "The King" and The King told him he better behave. Take down that site ... Zuck knows who holds the DOJ over his head ... and from where the money flows
The internet routes around damage. If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government rather than their customers, hackers or AI will just replace them. Won't be as pretty, perhaps, but it won't block or snoop so much. These companies haven't built up any goodwill to protect them.
But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.
Meta and other big tech usually over-relies on automated enforcement because it's easier on their wallets than hiring enough moderators to keep up in near-real time. And it's hella easy for a group of motivated people to coordinate flagging of content, which the automation often takes at face value.
Clearly having public spaces in private hands like this is tricky, as if we try to require better moderation that ends up to expensive, private interests will probably find a way to just kick anything controversial / political off their platforms.
If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)
See https://bsky.app/profile/ezralevin.bsky.social/post/3my43atj...
We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?
An account was suspended for 90 minutes. Why is the automatic assumption that it was malicious?
In fact, if Meta had protections against this I’m sure some people would be crying about “obvious political favoritism”.
Hopefully they can move the needle that makes the system in general harder to abuse. But wow, the outrage is insane.
Because the business model is malicious.
Meta has, quite intentionally, wedged itself in-between large amounts of human interaction. They know some people are malicious. They know the machine will frequently make the wrong call, because the auto-moderator can neither reason, nor account for context.
But hiring enough moderators to run moderation through the computer, provide a default "suggested" action, and having a human approve or deny, would be too expensive. It would demolish their profit, and may even pull Meta from black to red, financially. Their business model relies on making the wrong call, and having outrage bring it to the attention of actual Meta staff to correct it.
Meta does not get to blame the computer they put in charge of moderation instead of hiring adequate staff; computers can never be held accountable, so accountability moves up the chain to the people that programmed the computer and left it in charge.
if the accusation is political cronyism then yes, whether it was automated or discretionary is obviously relevant
There’s still an important distinction to make though: if it was automated then the No Kings page was not deliberately targeted for political reasons.
I mean… it is for a “No Kings” rally. Yes. It’s main job is advertising. Yes.
Don't use platforms like this to organize in the future.
I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.
I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.
I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).
Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.
Elon (and others) will stay silent unless pressed on the issue, and even then it’s betting odds.
I expect almost zero hypocrisy from "free speech absolutists", I expect them to be ideologically consistent and loud about it. FIRE in particular has a tremendous track record of doing so.
Elon is a bit of an outlier in his more hypocritical track record.
(You may not agree with the meme, I'm just telling you that the meme exists)
I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.
Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.
I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
Words aren't terrorism or violent. That doesn't mean people can't interpret them that way and feel harm, but a word alone can't harm anyone.
Where does that put someone calling out a public hit? It is just words after all.
> I could care less if someone wants to say they're going to hurt me. My beef is when they actually try to do it.
They say there’s no atheists in foxholes.
Vaguely saying "someone should" is very different from offering a bounty or plotting to do it yourself.
Don't forget that we also learned in the 20th century that millions can support and die for genocide while only a few dozen will be charged while the rest returned home. We also learned that the winner of said conflict can wipe out entire cities and go home the victor without consequence.
However there is a difference. A balance of free speech on social media could look like
1. Anyone can say anything they want
2. The algorithms are simplified such that they are chronological and your direct network, rather than the anxiety boosting, "editorial" choice in promoting or limiting the speech of others, especially with how reposts and quote tweets amplify a given post.
We need to rethink and regulate algorithms while we are working on Ai regulation. Let's not let the tech companies that brought us the mess we are in slip by in this moment of seemingly bipartisan cooperation.
Let us also make targeted advertising illegal to remove the incentives that make the "anxiety algorithms" so profitable. Go back to a world of context based advertising like magazines.
We can debate where the line on regulation should fall, but that isn't a free speech debate.
Or are you trying to elicit emotions?
What most people seem to miss is that companies like Facebook aren't the government and therefore aren't held to the standard of free speech. Signal ng up for an account and agreeing to their terms gives them authority to censor.
It's similar to how neoliberals say they care about humans when in reality they only care about corporations. Messaging doesn't always match optics.
Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.
It just seems like these comments want to stir the pot
My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/meta-says-suspe...
My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.
You are asking for too much sadly.
We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.
* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.
Edit: They hit a rate limit and tripped an automated suspension.
Is it really that unusual to contact a large tech company and not get a response for (egad!) 90 minutes?
To save you some searching:
https://www.gettyimages.nl/detail/nieuwsfoto's/guests-includ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Un...
Hillary doesn't need to do anything like that. But even she was there.
We each have a lens on reality, your lens' aperture is skewed on this specific aspect.
"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."
On the Democratic ticket Bernie Sanders would have been the outsider. But the Democratic National Committee under Debbie Wasserman Shultz made sure to avoid a vote by the people of the Democrat party and put in their chosen one, insider Hillary Clinton.
‘Were’? Has that changed? They got exactly what they voted for.
Yes, the ruling elite are typically outnumbered by the masses. It matters little: by historical standards, the ruling powers have virtually always leveraged their power to exploit those who don't have power. No reason to assume that streak will end.
Flock is dystopian. It’s also non ironically pitched as solving crime. it’s also our friendly neighborhood YC company.
It’s over.
The universe may not be just, but it seems to set many things in motion if you want to participate.
But that's not the point!
The point is that the laws are written by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs.
Laws are made to protect wealth and power, so of course the wealthy and powerful haven't "broken" them.
One can argue that the closest thing to an AI's training on a book is a person reading a book and remembering the details, which i'm sure you reject, but it's not prima facie unreasonable.
Five years ago this site was ready to burn you at the stake if you defended copyright laws, which clearly were only written to protect the rich and powerful, like Disney!
Now those laws are obviously there to defend the little guy against the oligarchs, and we should ready our pitchforks to march on Silicon Valley for daring to violate our precious copyright laws!!
Tiktok banned the account promoting a Musk documentary too. Oh how the cookie crumbles!
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013453/tiktok-bans-alex-gibne...
>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.
>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.
Oh well. I've heard this on Reddit for years: "̶̶̶̶̶̶̶ Meta can ban whoever they want, they are a private company". Just a hint of schadenfreude.
There's really no reason to expect anything from Meta except for it to do what's best for Zuckerburg.
> Today, amidst a historic day of thousands of rallies to mobilize early voting and fight against Trump’s election sabotage, Meta suspended the primary No Kings Instagram account without warning or reason.
> After intense backlash, Meta made the account visible again 90 minutes into the suspension, giving the appearance that everything was normal. But it blocked the account admin from posting for another three hours -- censoring the NO Kings coalition in the middle of today’s historic day of action.
[0]https://indivisible.actionkit.com/mailings/view/127823
If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.
I am pointing out how that is a absurd moral argument deriving from the rule of thumb. If anything, the corollary is the literal opposite.
Any stupidity indistinguishable from malice should be treated the same.
The usage as a epistemological rule of thumb just points out how great harm is usually caused by stupidity, intentional or otherwise, rather than intentional desire to cause the specific harm. If you aim to reduce great harms targeting just malice is not merely inadequate, it is likely missing the overwhelming majority.
You seem to be claiming that intent is not related to justice or blame, which would result in an inhumanely cruel justice system where punishments don't fit crimes.
But don't worry, I attribute your proposal to stupidity not malice
It can't be only wrong when it is done to your interests. It has to be either right or wrong across the board.
The more you dislike someone and their views, the more your principles and values are tested.
I"m assuming you value things like freedom of speech, liberty, freedom, democracy, progressive liberal ideas, and that sort of thing. If all you can about is power and winning, then never mind.
Trump has done many genuinely scary things but shutting down a social media account then turning it back on 90 minutes later is not exactly sending tanks into Tiananmen Square.
"Meta employees said Lula's accounts were hindered during Brazil election, Folha reports" (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...)
Absolutely. But they were super good at getting smart people to pull their carts.
I've seen more coverage of a brief 90-minute ban than I have of the protests themselves.
Trump and the Republicans are as unpopular as ever, but I don't think the No Kings protests are moving the needle right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
Today's protests seem aimed around GOTV, rather than opposing specific policies. It makes sense that they wouldn't have the same draw.
The main organising IG account for the protests is https://www.instagram.com/50501movement, with almost 900k followers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261018012124/https://meidasnew...
Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins...
and Meta employees have commented also:
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence.
I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).
Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time.
When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...
what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).
also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.
0: https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/28/facebook-blocks-lulas-cam...
That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".
Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?
> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).
Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.
> The only reason this is newsworthy is
...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.
The article makes it pretty clear: Left-wing political figures blocked from posting to facebook for several hours (not 90 minutes) right when the event occurred. Can't get much clearer than that. Then enough furor erupted to unblock them, or the event ended and then they were unblocked.
It fits with their track record, e.g. blocking/hampering Brazilian left-wing candidate communications for weeks until a court ordered them to stop. If you have a theory about both these things being an accident (while the corresponding right-wing causes were all conveniently given a pass), we're gonna need more evidence from you to back that theory.
a) oops, they accidentally blocked ONLY left-wing political candidates and causes right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes, totally a coincidence, people, or
b) yet another example in a facebook's history of blocking left-wing political candidates and causes, right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes
Obviously Facebook does not have the benefit of the doubt, given their long history of malfeasance, deception, and nontransparency, so A is a pretty strong claim, and thus we can go with B until you have strong evidence otherwise. I don't think anyone here on HN can say "I trust facebook to be honest and transparent, to admit, explain, and atone for their malfeasance without prompting, and to always make choices that best reflect the will of the people" with a straight face these days. In fact, we still don't even have transparency into the very incidents we're discussing (likely due to deception and malfeasance, if we're going based off past behavior and proper Bayesian priors).
Indeed, if it was actually an accident, then that means that after Facebook's Lula scandal, they had the opportunity to stop this sort of thing from happening, and made the choice not to do so. That was their choice, making it no longer an accident in this case. There's no escaping accountability for that choice.
Back to our earlier request: can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking major right-wing candidates or major right-wing mainstream political movements, immediately before an election? If it was just an accident, and these accidents happen all the time without respect for politics, we should expect to see an equal number of blocks applied to both sides in the same situation. Do we? I don't think so.
The organizers of No Kings may be well-intentioned, but the rallies themselves seem to be maximally engineered to make people feel like they've done their part resisting without materially affecting anything. Why would anyone in Trump's coalition feel threatened by them at this point?
It wasn't long before there were Zomo's in the streets of Gdansk, Poznan, Warsaw and many other places to try to curb those protests and that in turn is what led to the fall of the Polish regime.
It was a racist conspiracy theory back then as well, even when the president of the USA was pushing this crap.
To me, and to many of us on the left wing, it was obvious what he was doing. The theory of natural origin had become the de-facto scientific consensus when he started this “investigation”. That is he was muddying the waters and trying to stir up anti-China sentiment among Americans in his political favor.
There are some missing pieces, such as how long the virus had been circulating in bats, which other animals it had crossed over, were there unidentified cases in humans in China before the Wuhan wet-market spread? etc. But one thing is for sure, this virus was not made in a lab, and Chinese scientists did not do anything to cause it’s spread.
Vaccine absolutely was proven to work in reducing deaths and building immunity in the community.
Lockdowns absolutely slowed the spread of COVID to allow the hospital systems to rationalise the limited PPE.
50 bat species?
>>>Vaccine absolutely was proven to work
There were at least couple of vaccines.Yeah they worked - some % died from complications of blood clotting...
>>>Lockdowns absolutely slowed the spread of COVID to allow the hospital systems to rationalise the limited PPE.
BS! Hospitals stopped to work - except for emergency situations. I had a surgery that had to be postponed for couple of years. The backlog from covid took years to clear up.
There were some revelations to me because of covid: 1. Majority of people appears to be unable to think by themselves. 2. The absolute stupidity and greed among officials - especially WHO was hilarious. 3. People here parrot "official" texts, that were fabricated in anticipation of mass panic or covering their asses. None of that has anything to do with covid and actual history of events.
as a betting man, I bet you still don’t realize that every issue with the vaccine was a default issue with catching actual covid
Just let it go. It's a religion now.
2. Most vaccines were effective and helped reduced the severity of Covid. Vaccines saved lives.
3. Lockdowns were extremely effective in slowing down the spread of the virus in its initial stages, before we had enough life-saving vaccines to protect the most vulnerable from the virus. Lockdowns saved millions of lives.
What an amazing coincidence that the virus came from the same city that the China’s only level four bio lab happens to be in, the one with records destroyed, the same one that the US was with one step removed from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance was directly performing gain of research on coronaviruses at, a fact that Fauci’s own emails confirm as it was his buddy Peter Daszak’s name on so that when he testified that the US was not doing GoF that he was still perjuring himself just not immediately provable.
I get why people get so confused because it truly is just such a neat coincidence.
2. Vaccines were completelly ineffective. Virus adapted much faster and became less lethal - as expected. Or rather immunity of organism of people stopped overreact to something that was never lethal, unless you had no immunity. Sweden is top example of how to deal with covid by doing nothing. My home country vaccinated over 80% population and had the highest fatality rate per population from blood clots mainly. Corruption kills people.
3. Lockdowns were too late. Because of China. Lockdowns for various reasons did not work - healthy looking people were spreading covid for months before and during lockdown - it seems that you still do not realize that major part of people got through covid without life threatening complications.
The history: 1. The virus was firstly reported by a docker working in Wuhan, but the govt doesn't take it seriously. 2. The covid spreads and Chinese govt started to lockdown. Also the govt informed the U.N. 3. Covid spreads globally.
So can you tell me what China lied about covid?
And now for a big BS quote from the article, which we all know is false.
>There is no evidence at the moment that the suspension was politically motivated
Like what happened in 2024?
The thing is that they are also dragging many other countries into that misery. Just look at here at Latin America.
You've got to hand it to Thiel, at least like other people of questionable political persuasion he's already fled to Argentina, gonna get crowded there in the future
They favour themselves. And if to best position themselves they must suck up to the government then that's what they'll do. Every time.
> rather than their customers
Who do you think their customers are? They aren't the users. The users are the product, the cattle farmed by social media companies.
The customers are the advertisers. Advertisers don't want filthy protesters tarnishing their shiny brands.
Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.