alt Hacker Newsnothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
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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.
> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
wrong. Blocking Facebook in China because they didn't follow domestic laws was the best thing that happened to the Chinese internet. It enabled the growth of domestic platforms like WeChat, Weibo and Tiktok.
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.
You don't need to censor access to the platform itself. Just declare the group for what it is: a criminal cartel. Then just make it illegal to do business with criminal organizations: no Brazilian ads on Facebook anymore.
This is not censoring "the Internet". Meta and Facebook are a private company incorporated in a foreign country.
> nothing good usually comes out of governments censoring internet
First of all, nothing good has ever come out of meta.
Secondly, restricting election interference seems like an unalloyed positive.
Facebook is hardly a neutral part of the internet.
Actually, the Australian government censored the internet for children and it appears to be working out as being good.
Then they should go wild on a governmental campaign about how FB is bad for mental health with daily TV, radio ads etc. Fight fire with fire.
Private companies are censoring the internet right now to interfere with democracy.
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.
They don't have to censor the internet. They just have to make it illegal for their citizens to do business with Meta.
But isn’t this the internet censoring a government?
Maybe not when internet was an open platform. Now it is controlled by a few American billionaires that love they have a US Gov administration that thinks the same way as them.
Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.
And it wasn't that long ago.
This is less like censoring the internet and more like banning lead-based paint.
Right, don't ban them that's bad for free speech, just impose huge fines on Facebook to bankrupt them.
Depends on who the government is. You can’t realistically give anyone full write access to your populace.
Conflating "the internet" with "~Trillionaire owned, oligarchy controlled, American social media" is certainly a choice.
I'll say the opposite: Every single place that has banned American social media is better for it. Every group of people denied access to American social media are healthier and happier for it.
But something good comes out of facebook being able to censor the internet?
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.
Eh, as a staunch free speech advocate, I absolutely want Meta and X banned from Canada. That doesn't stem free speech at all, and is akin to banning a propaganda arm of a hostile foreign government.
They are cancerous propaganda/idiocracy funnels that are destructive to every Western country. They should not be freely operating anywhere but American America of America, Inc (TM Trump Inc).
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.