In a sane world, the US as a supposed bastion of free speech and personal liberties would enact legislation that requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts due to rules violations and offer everyone the chance to appeal. That would serve as a counterbalance to more authoritarian regimes insisting companies like Meta censor people, even if the US can’t guarantee it for people not affiliated with the US. Unfortunately, the US seems more intent on censoring its own residents and becoming one of those authoritarian regimes than actually doing anything about it.
You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.
For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
Most online platforms will become unusable if it becomes legally untenable for them to set their own rules about what is allowed and what is not.
Just take this website for example. If HN stops all forms of moderation, I bet you it will be flooded by wannabe startup entrepreneurs selling vibe coded SaaS overnight, right before every thread devolves into generic flame war about politics and whatnot.
And by the way, making platforms liable for scam and fraud that they do not intentionally allow turns every platform into the de facto arbitrator of what is scam and what is not, ironically giving them more power to control speech than they already do. Just look at how often DMCA takedowns are abused or how often the fraud detection on google etc misfires and censors legitimate websites to get a sneak peek of the future your good intentions pave the way to.
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
What will happen in reality is the too big too fail platforms stay online by regulatory carve outs and smaller mom and pop forums shutdown, just like what is already happening now under other internet regulations.
Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.
Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.
>>You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
>Personal opinion, not legal opinion.
Fair enough. But not very charitable (or helpful/useful to freedom of speech) to anyone who doesn't have billions in cash on hand to fight the hundreds/thousands of lawsuits anyone who doesn't like what the thoughts of others that you (or I) choose to host on our platforms, whether they be web sites, mailing lists or video comment sections.
Section 230 protects the little guy much more than it does Meta, Alphabet, Musk, etc. As they have the deep pockets to fight those lawsuits. Do you? I don't.
(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.
(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.
But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).
Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.
Free speech is specifically limiting the government’s ability to limit your speech, not private enterprise, and its limited to the US. The US government can legally try to restrict the speech of … I don’t know let’s say Palestinians.
It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.
Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.
It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.
Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
I'm british, so I am not an absolutist by any stretch of the meaning. I just know that whenever I have queried why companies like facebook are not held liable for the content they promote, I am told that the 1st amendment allows them to do pretty much what they like, along with Section 230
You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook. When you invest your life into platforms run by for profit corporations, you agree to play by their rules. Merging state and big tech is not going to help.
> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
You are correct. But it's a ridiculous suggestion. Can you imagine the local corner store with a bulletin board, and some patron tacks up a picture of a swastika, and the owner of the store is not allowed to take it down?
Au contraire, enacting such a law is akin to forcing FB to support certain speech.
That itself is unconstitutional and any such legislation would be struck down.
There is a reason moderation decisions are not perfectly transparent: They are gamed otherwise. So there needs to be legal recourse with discovery and meaningful liability attached to submitting to the role of acting as the agent of a foreign government.
Presumably Kuwait could just assemble a panel of self-proclaimed experts to denounce the speech of people threatening to the regime to be "very dangerous to our democracy", "hate speech", islamophobic, etc.
Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
They also try to drive to canada with their guns, and believe they can't be "foreigners" because they're american. 30% of americans are functionally illiterate, no surprise really.
Embarrassing, but the statistic cited there is 6 cases in 2017 for a single crossing point, looks like there are ~1.5M visits a year[1] so I would imagine even if we're talking hundreds of cases (generous), still not too common?
US currency is accepted in a surprisingly large number of countries abroad. Just not in Europe proper. US dollars are even accepted in some European sovereign territories outside of Europe.
It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
I've seen plenty of waiters, taxi drivers, etc., be quite happy to receive tips in USD in many countries where USD is not the official currency. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I've seen such a tip be rejected because of its currency.
That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
No one expected anything and there wasn't any weirdness in getting a tip in your national currency. It's just that people happily accepted strong/popular foreign currency like the US dollar (I think that the Deutsche Mark was another option).
Sometimes you could even pay with it even if it wasn't officially accepted. Getting some money and then exchanging it yourself into the national currency (so that the accounting books are in order) is better than getting no money. And if it's a fuss, just charge a big extra, there's no need to make a big deal out of it.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The US is only a bastion of free speech when what is said aligns to their thinking and goals. UK is the same - if not worse.
This seems to be "unverified accusations from critics". It's not really fair to accuse someone from this.
Do not underestimate Meta for being purely immoral. I'm pretty sure they would assisted russians with persecution if they wouldn't be sure now about potential backlash.
It goes quite a bit further: the Muslim Brotherhood are fascists (as in actual fascists) and (religous) racists, of the supremacist kind. They are in control of the most famous university in islamic countries: Al-Azhar. Long ago they were a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and today are known for being the parent organization of Hamas and they are supporting the genocide in Sudan (meaning they are sponsoring Arabs committing genocides on black Africans (muslim black Africans if that matters), because they're black)
They are considered a terrorist organization by most countries, including their host country of Egypt.
Muslim Brotherhood is a coherent organisation, so we can meaningfully talk about its beliefs. Asking whether "Zionists" are fascist is as incohrent as asking if Antifa "believes" in anything. These aren't coherent organisations, just loose collections of aligned folks.
Fundamentally, nothing about Zionism strikes me as requiring fascism or religious supremacy (though it does require religious segregation).
> These aren't coherent organisations, just loose collections of aligned folks.
Yeah, there aren't any coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist. There's no state in the Middle East born from this ideology. There aren't political organisations that bribe US politicians to influence US government. There aren't organisations that hose real estate meetings in Synagogues to sell illegal lands for people to make Aliyah.
Definitely just a loose collection of aligned folks. Yep.
> there aren't any coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist
That you have to put up straw men sort of proves my point.
Yes, there are coherent Zionist organisations (including political parties and lobbying groups). Some (perhaps many, hell, maybe even most) of these are fascist and ethno-religious supremacist. We can make meaningful statements about them because, as you said, they're "coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist".
Trying to expand that to "Zionists" in general isn't meaningful unless you're constructing a totem to pillory.
The Zionist project is one of settler-colonialism, that seeks to displace/eliminate the Palestinian population from its land to establish a Jewish ethno-state in its place. Sounds pretty fascist and supremacist to me.
This is ridiculous. The only ones afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood are Middle Eastern dictatorships, who would rather not see a political movement take popular hold.
I see a lot of discourse but without much context.
With HN, I'd expect people to have more context than bashing what feels more politics than reviewing a banned or censored (still need more context).
All I can find which isn't enough (at least for me), to have an educated conclusion is the following:
Tweet re-tweeting Ahmed Shihab-Eldin:
"After weeks of trying to regain access to my @instagram account, which was temporarily suspended by @accessnow while I was wrongfully detained, I FINALLY got a backup code which allowed me to login only to receive this prompt that my account has been permanently disabled"
"On March 3, 2026, Shihab-Eldin was detained by Kuwaiti authorities for resharing news articles about the Iran war;[13][17] the previous day, he had posted images of a U.S. fighter jet crashing over the country.[18] The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that he had not been seen publicly in Kuwait, where he was visiting family, since March 2, and that he was under arrest over accusations of "spreading false information," "harming national security" and "misusing his mobile phone;"[13][19] the incident occurred as part of a wider wave of crackdowns targeting journalists across different Gulf states amid the war."
Then mentioning his Kuwaiti citizenship was revoked on 29th of April 2026
and earlier some implicit hint? he was released.
(though he's American born so I can assume he also has a US Citizenship unless he gave it away at some point)
Crazy that these mega corporations still bow to the requests of countries.
Would they do the same of any important actor requesting censorship? like if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored, even though they're more powerful than Kuwait.
Elon and Bezos aren't more powerful than Kuwait. Kuwait is a sovereign government, with authority to write laws, raise an army, and do whatever it wants with its 5M+ citizens (draft them, imprison people, execute people, etc.) with pretty much no consequence unless they're absurdly reckless. There is more to power than money.
I think the argument being made is that they don't have any meaningful power over Meta's corporate decision-makers, even if they do have power over some other people.
Right, but if you control access to a market of millions of people, a lot of companies will do what you say (i.e. follow your laws) in order to retain access to that market, as well as protect their local employees from jail. I would say that counts as meaningful power.
They also shipped 0 barrels of oil last month, the basis for 90% of gov revenue, 50% of its GDP. Clearly their faux workforce of subsidized "natives" and "indentured servants" is heading for a fulminant blowup, with no one in charge with the faintest clue towards mitigation.
So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
The fact it gets public shows you are a b-tiwr customer, the bigbs have a sort of psychological warfare suit available. You dont loose your account, you loose your sanity.
Google (including YouTube) has black-holed content at the request of the Chinese and Pakistani governments and in response to domestic Muslim pressure groups. This effects content shown everywhere, including within the United States:
Did you forget that Elon literally bought out an entire major international social media platform and fundamentally re-oriented its algorithmic editorial policy? He did a lot more than "ask". He literally took the thing over and personally dictated censorship.
Well, homosexuality is criminalized in Kuwait for example, do we see Meta banning accounts because of it? Suddenly the company doesn’t follow the country’s regulations. Meta aligns with israel narrative (notorious against anything that goes against that), and it seems that person account wasn’t aligned with that, so they got banned, that’s the real reason, it’s never about following other countries’ laws or whatever, just a legal justification so the company isn’t directly blamed for it, selective censorship.
Fascinating that “Meta did ______”
makes the front page weekly it seems. I have long reached a point in life where “Meta did _____” is either interesting or surprising
My favorite part is all that Meta will say is "account doesn't follow Community Standards" [1]. Impossible to defend against such a vague accusation, and they get to keep the real reason secret.
[1] Really they're Meta's standards - it wasn't "the community" that wrote them.
Then Meta can write "account disabled due to legal order by the Kuwait judiciary", or wherever the order came from, instead of hiding behind "Community Standards".
I see this all the time in such cases - deflections about the legality of censorship, to avoid the issue that they want to keep the censorship itself, or the source of it, secret. "They" in this case being Meta, unless they produce a legal order compelling them to deceive us.
Did I say they're not good, or did I say the "community" (as if the wildly different groups that use Meta share a single community) didn't write them?
And if they're so good, then Meta can take credit for them and call them "Meta's Standards", instead of gaslighting us into thinking there is some shared "community" that encompasses Kuwait and California and Belarus, and that this community has agreed on a single set of standards to be imposed on everyone across the globe.