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

86 points rbanffy 1 hour ago 40 comments

OrdersOfMagnitu 1 hour ago | parent

are they even allowed to do that, damn

go_elmo 47 minutes ago | parent

Trump approves this message

pestatije 1 hour ago | parent

"your account violates our terms of use, if you think that is not the case tell us why not"

N_Lens 59 minutes ago | parent

Calculated & orchestrated I believe.

dotcoma 58 minutes ago | parent

They never said "Don't do evil".

Zuck famously said, of his users: "dumb fucks".

johnnyApplePRNG 46 minutes ago | parent

Trump is pro Israel. Zuck bends over backwards to get Trump elected.

Lula is against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Zuck blocks his entire campaign page.

I wonder why?

amelius 45 minutes ago | parent

Trump is friends with Bolsonaro.

cassianoleal 8 minutes ago | parent

It depends on when you ask him. Sometimes Bolsonaro "was actually a pretty good guy", other times he's "just a guy I know".

condenser 44 minutes ago | parent

Facebook election interference has been going on for a long time in Europe. It's a two-tier system where parties outside the establishment have a far lower ban-threshold.

actionfromafar 26 minutes ago | parent

Isn't it probably an n-tier system which is pay to play?

amelius 44 minutes ago | parent

I would be in favor of blocking ALL political expressions on social media a few weeks before elections.

But this case is something else entirely.

abroszka33 43 minutes ago | parent

I hope Lula wins and they will ban Facebook for good after the elections. This is an attack on Brazil’s sovereignty.

tryauuum 32 minutes ago | parent

nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet

Hoasi 31 minutes ago | parent

Facebook is not the internet.

bel8 23 minutes ago | parent

Didn't t Brazil also ban discord screen sharing and camera?

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

riffraff 30 minutes ago | parent

If a company openly acts as an enemy of the democratic process, I'm not sure it's the same as censoring a random porn site.

petcat 14 minutes ago | parent

It depends on which side of the "democratic process" benefits the most. It's the eternal debate.

nasmorn 24 minutes ago | parent

The platform want to be both just neutral platforms and police content. This is ridiculous. Either be liable for the rape threats or don’t interfere at all.

_ink_ 6 minutes ago | parent

I agree platforms are not neutral anymore. They decide what people see. They are entirely responsible for the feed. They should be liable accordingly.

croes 16 minutes ago | parent

But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?

ben_w 16 minutes ago | parent

In this case, the unelected leadership of Facebook is apparently censoring the free speech of a political candidate.

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.

cassianoleal 14 minutes ago | parent

This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.

abyssin 9 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

zapkyeskrill 8 minutes ago | parent

And they can stay private and isolated to that foreign country. Everyone happy

tjpnz 14 minutes ago | parent

They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.

avazhi 23 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, you don’t know what sovereignty means.

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 doesn’t want to deal with this then… ban FB. IP block it. But they won’t, 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 it’s not an attack on Brazil’s ‘sovereignty’. Brazil chooses to allow Facebook to operate in its jurisdiction and Facebook chooses what content to disallow. The ball is is Brazil’s court: just ban it.

It’s 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 aren’t you banning them from your country?

sjbzbeiks 16 minutes ago | parent

I mean … that would have large large costs when the Americans retaliate. I don’t think this is the easy call you claim it is for Europe.

avazhi 10 minutes ago | parent

That’s my point. The Europeans heavily rely on America for all sorts of shit, but all the Europeans do is whine and complain about literally everything. I’m no trump or Facebook/zuckerberg fan, nor do I even live in America.

But it’s 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 won’t cease complaining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.

Europeans love to berate and criticise others for building something but won’t build it themselves (and they still use what’s being built in the end).

Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.

ben_w 7 minutes ago | parent

> But it’s 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 won’t stfu with their whining but don’t have and apparently won’t have a single frontier model of their own. Mistral is the best they’ve got lol.

That's like criticising people for complaining about cigarettes when they don't even have their own cigarette companies.

> Ban those big bad evil American companies or pipe down.

That would be stuff like this, in order to give the legal cover needed to resist counterclaims by the USA: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...

ben_w 8 minutes ago | parent

What you call "leaching" we call "comparative advantage" on good days, and "dear god just ban it all already" on bad days.

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).

avazhi 3 minutes ago | parent

Just ban it and make your own social networks then? Surely it’s easy and straightforward to do.

If the social networks provide no value then ban them. And if they do but they are so harmful then create your own.

glerk 19 minutes ago | parent

I hate Meta/Facebook with passion and will never use their services. That being said, they can choose to host whatever they want on their property. Your little corporation with a fancy flag and its “sovereignty” isn’t scaring anyone.

croes 14 minutes ago | parent

If you reach a certain market power it isn’t so easy anymore.

If you become something like public infrastructure you have to act like one or reduce your importance

ben_w 13 minutes ago | parent

> Your little corporation with a fancy flag and its “sovereignty” isn’t scaring anyone.

Do I misunderstand, or are you calling Brazil, the nation whose population is around 214 million, a "little corporation"?

glerk 4 minutes ago | parent

You are conflating the (insignificant) entity that controls the Brazilian state with the 214 million people that live on the territory of Brazil, so yes, some degree of misunderstanding.

NicuCalcea 13 minutes ago | parent

Corporations can host whatever they want and governments can ban them for it.

cassianoleal 10 minutes ago | parent

And can also criminally prosecute the individuals responsible for those decisions if the law says so.

cassianoleal 11 minutes ago | parent

Actually, elections in Brazil are highly regulated and rules are enforced in the name of fairness. If Meta/Facebook want to keep serving the Brazilian public, they need to abide by local laws.

Brazil is not a "little corporation with a fancy flag". Brazil is a democratic republic. The largest in Latin America, and one of the largest in the world.

bell-cot 32 minutes ago | parent

If giant foreign corporations, American interventions, or just Zuck were sufficiently unpopular in Brazil, then this could help Lula on election day.

Anyone familiar, to comment?

petesergeant 19 minutes ago | parent

I mean by all means ban Meta everywhere, but this is a Reddit post linking to a substack post that’s a republish of a heavily politicized new source, and fails to mention the page was restored the same day, and also fails the very basic journalist standard of approaching Meta for comment, so I think we can do a little better here?

This would be better, but I guess less anger-tormenting and also you’ll need to translate it yourself: https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/politica/noticia/2026-09/me...

MrToadMan 10 minutes ago | parent

A more accurate headline would be 'temporarily blocked' given the first line below the heading is 'The page is now back online' and it seems to have been brought back online the same day.