wouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?
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.
Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?
To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.
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.
There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
bull shit.
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
https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...
Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.
I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.
They are considered a terrorist organization by most countries, including their host country of Egypt.
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"
Access Now - that I can understand works for human rights. https://www.accessnow.org/about-us/
English Wikipedia:
"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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shihab-Eldin
https://www.ahmedshihabeldin.com/
I see he has been a journalist and activist over the years within context of the Middle East.
But if someone have more details about why he was blocked it would be much more helpful to understand this story.
Kuwait's sovereign fund has about 1 trillion under management. A couple of phone calls about disposals and its surprising what changes.
However, its my understanding that this page was promoting/representing the Muslim Brotherhood.
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.
[1] Really they're Meta's standards - it wasn't "the community" that wrote them.
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.
Have you read them? they are acutally quite good. its a shame they are not enforced evenly.
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.
