The site www.alqst.org is blocked here. I had to turn on a VPN to read the article.
Here, it's not even allowed to read about what's not allowed!
Depending on the sophistication of the VPN software being used network traffic can appear to monitors as UDP[0] packets superficially similar to what many video games produce.
If you do business in a country you’re expected to follow the laws of the country. The device you made the comment from is most likely made in China or has several parts made there.
But Meta is evil…
I don’t like meta for their creepiness factor. Outrage on this one though is unwarranted. It puts their local employees at risk of prosecution.
The fact that these criminals are embedded so deeply in our society is a reason to fight against them even harder. They are corrupting politics, they are corrupting the economy, they are pushing for lower salaries and less rights for the working class across the globe. They can be stopped and should be stopped.
One does not stop fighting cancer just because it has spread out.
So yes, they absolutely have a choice.
Is this a good justification though? I get what you’re saying, but the same argument you’re making for social media can also be applied to everything else, isn’t it?
If I don’t do human cloning, someone else will. If I don’t make bio weapons, someone else will. And so on
Yes, they absolutely have a choice. People can choose to not assist with transgressions against human rights in the year 2026 :)
You however, as people, can choose not to patronize a Meta that assists with transgressions against human rights.
Has a company ever faced any sort of legal repercussions for sacrificing profit for moral reasons? That isn't rhetorical. I'm not aware of this ever happening, so I'm dubious of your claim.
A person from a government told a person at Meta to block it, and that person did (probably by telling yet more people to do it).
It is also operated by human individuals as employees and c-suite
Anyhow, yeah - Facebook being banned in UAE would surprise exactly nobody that's familiar with their government. People are willing to tolerate a whole lot of nonsense for 0% taxes!
[1] - https://apnews.com/general-news-4c1f57ed465940659eeb79b41447...
Neither the UAE nor Saudi Arabia have extradition treaties with the United States. (On a practical level, they wouldn't be able to enforce one if they had it.)
The governments that forced these changes in the first place are of course acting immorally, that's not in dispute.
Hyperbolic example: If your boss tells you to kill the next customer or you won’t get paid, doing the killing isn’t amoral.
Apologies for the sarcasm. But I think it’d be helpful for you to expand a little on what you mean by EU “censorship” in this case.
In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.
In a just world what Zuckerberg and his cronies are doing - the sheer unrelenting tidal wave of destabilising societal damage (nationally, internationally, globally), not to mention the negative consequences of bullying and the exacerbation of mental health issues at individual and group levels over the course of, now, decades - would be considered crimes, and they would all be put on trial, held to account, and appropriately sanctioned for them.
What he's done to individuals, to marginalised and oppressed groups, to societies, and to global stability is far worse than any damage that, for example, Sam Bankman-Fried managed to do and yet somehow SBF is in prison for 25 years and Zuck walks free.
Not OK.
(Not to say SBF doesn't deserve his criminal penalty but to highlight the disconnect where we're not seeing similar treatment of these social media moguls who, at very best, are completely indifferent to the harm they cause but whom, one starts to suspect, are actually gunning for that harm in order to cement their own power and positions.)
Zuck made money for rich people.
Criminal culpability must always filter through this lens.
Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.
When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?
Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.
Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.
How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively
Banning is not the way to go about things. India is always ban happy -> a competitive exam in a state? Take down internet in the whole state to curb cheating. Outright banning hard to deal with stuff sets a bad precedent.
So just give up because something is hard? Sounds like the tech industry and its never-ending quest for low-hanging fruit.
"We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas."
You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.
You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.
I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg
The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?
I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.
I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.
If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.
The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.
1. Whatever the govt wants
2. Their own mods to max profit.
Corporations were conceived specifically to remove responsibility. They should not be this widely available.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?
Despite Meta's self serving actions here their morals are significantly better than those of Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.
they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.
Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.
If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.
Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?
If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I'd say the US government is more important to Meta than either the UAE or Saudi government. What do you think US government people are saying to Meta about this?
Those countries don’t allow Meta to operate at all.
> If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. Large companies comply with the laws of countries they operate in. It’s not optional. If you have a presence there you either comply with their laws or they shut you down.
In some of these countries they might even arrest any employees of the company they can get their hands on to send a message, even if they didn’t have decision making authority. That’s not something you subject your employees to.
A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
thats not a very relevant comparison.
If the answer is “No”, then it makes sense they would not follow laws they do not have to.
They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.
But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.
It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.
it is legal to drink Cola, yes? so I will drink it as I have no control over it... eventually I am going to have serious health issues... and Ray20 will pay for this from his taxes... or alternatively, we can add some tax to companies that are net negative to society and are causing Ray20's money to be spent on my fat asses healthcare, yes?
Make them put big block ads across ⅓ of the screen with rotating warnings of the harms of the web site people are using, like with cigarette packs.
People hate friction online.
A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?
Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.
Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.
> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.
Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.
My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.
The remedy in that case then would not be a tax but to ban them from operating in that country. We already have these sorts of export controls with other countries. It is just the case that despite their egregious human rights record (bone saw, anyone?) the United States has propped up the Saudi regime since basically it first came to exist roughly a century ago.
The reason is obvious - Saudi brutality is a feature not a bug. It secures access to cheap oil.
If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.
> The NSA has all your data anyway.
Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.
This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.
> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?
To beat a dead horse...
> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East
Factually untrue.
The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]
Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]
Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].
I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.
There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:
- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles) - Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping - Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights - Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking - Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others - Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again - Iran (1953): oil - Guatemala (1954): United Fruit! - Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt - Brazil (1964): mining - Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil - Chile (1970-73): copper - Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors - Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors
There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.
Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.
Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.
Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.
[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro... [2]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260519-poll-shows-majori... [3]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52425-what-americans-think...
You aren't telling me anything I don't already know. You cannot be pro democracy and at the same time treat the electorate like children. Propaganda is part of electioneering. Parties advocating for their own interests should be a feature in a healthy democracy. Are you suggesting the electorate is incapable of dealing with their basic obligations as citizens of a free society? And your scapegoat for this is the corporations?
What is your theory of democracy if the population is so susceptible to "corporate lobbyists"? Why trust such a body to make decisions if it can't even cope with basic propaganda?
Have you been to red counties? I think you are severely over-indexing on your own biases. Corporate lobbying has nothing on tribalism, racism, and general parochialism. You seem to be well read enough when it comes to history. I am surprised your assessment of human nature has not caught up.
The fact is most Americans don't care. If they did they would elect different leaders. If your theory is that the electorate is simply brainwashed well that seems to me as much an indictment on the notion of democracy itself as a criticism of any allegedly brainwashing entity.
Of course I put blame on citizens. Your attempt to shift all the blame to "corporate lobbyists" is about as convincing as the "they were about to get a nuclear weapon" responsibility shift.
Citizens are responsible because in a democracy they are the ultimate arbiters. You don't get to shift the responsibility, it's not optional. The notion of democracy itself rests on it. If you feel a need to control what information citizens consume so that you can personally legitimize their decisions I would suggest to you perhaps you don't really believe in democracy. As George Carlin said, garbage in garbage out.
> Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.
no, this is something people dont care about, and is a low invasive way for the government to solve a problem people do care about - terror attacks
It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.
I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.
My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.
Then again, here I am arguing in good faith with you, so more the fool I.
Unlike you, I listen with an open mind and curiosity. It's led me to an obsession in my health practices as a nearly full-time job for about 10 years, I don't just blindly follow what I'm spoon fed by a doctor or some authority figure. And neither do I blindly call forth the label of "science" to win approval and credibility.
I say this as someone who closed my facebook account 15 years ago, and who never opened an Uber account.
Messaging apps like Signal are more than enough now a days to stay connected with the few people I need and want to stay in touch with.
But Meta is an international company, so maybe they have servers/staff in Saudi Arabia, in which case their only options are to leave the country or comply.
Need to maximum profits for the share holders. Modern day large scale companies follow the Friedman doctrine, not human decency. [0]. They need that fix of infinite growth, which by doing so become cancerous to society.
E.g. in The Netherlands. First they did a mass block last December, then again in April:
https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/237924/meta-verwijdert-instagra...
Some were reinstated again, but not all and not after they have been offline for to long.
Governments suppress information all the time. We know of a huge list of thousands of documents and terabytes of video implicating people in child abuse and as important as that is, we aren't getting all of the information. That's the government position. Redact and suppress. It's up to the people to demand transparency from their government and if they don't demand it and fight for it, they won't get it. Corporations like Meta aren't there to help fight the power.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/08/the-twitter-devolution/
See also...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/evalu...
And these lies, of course, were spread by the social media platforms themselves and their PR departments.
Saying ‘hi, I also like that band you have a shirt of’ was just too hard so we had to create trillion dollar monstrosities.
Oh well, now we have AI girlfriends as the next trillion dollar industry. We'll get it next time!
Boxer Rebellion, etc.
That includes censoring content that threatens puppet governments.
Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.
If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).
Most people's proposed solutions seem counterproductive. Making social media illegal and banning it entirety removes a valuable means of communication and networking for people. Forcing all social media platforms with n> users to be nationalized means all platforms that might be useful for activism will be controlled by the government. Forcing them to only use strictly alphabetic or chronological listings makes access more difficult, but doesn't necessarily remove polarizing or false information. Repealing Section 230 would cripple speech across the internet and make it impossible for platform owners to police minsinformation and hate speech without taking on legal liability for themselves. All of these solutions at least implicitly serve the interests of authoritarians and all of them only seem reasonable because of the current moral panic around social media.
and the genocide in myanmar, that was definitely accelerated political action
Arab Spring
Nepalese Discord Protests
Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine
2009 Iranian presidential election protests
2011 Egyptian revolution
#BlackLivesMatter
#MeToo
Hong Kong protests
#NoKings protests
Yellow Vest protests (France)
Anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protests
Anti-vaccine protests during COVID
Rohingya genocide
GamerGate
> Since 30 April 2026, Gulf-focused NGOs ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan, as well as Saudi researcher Abdullah Alaoudh and human rights defender Yahya Assiri, have had their Facebook accounts rendered “unavailable” in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government, in a form of “geo-blocking”. Similar restrictions have been imposed in the UAE
Meta is a scourge.
Some say it will never happen, but they said that about the now-dying tobacco industry, too.
If they won't move off of facebook, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to retain the same level of interaction. Maybe you could allow yourself a reduced level of interaction while still feeling connected. For example, an SMS every couple of days should be plenty enough contact to keep up with any significant events. If you really want to take the reins, you could organise events yourself, ensuring you won't miss them.
It is frequently confused with privacy, however. (https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/why-privacy-matters/)
iMessage is the dominant messenger because most people have iPhones combined with the fact that SMS has long been free and unlimited, so people don't see the problem of using it with the occasional Android user.
Really, it's all about the defaults. Even though everyone uses iPhones, they still use the calling feature from their cellular provider, because Apple doesn't push FaceTime as the default calling mechanism.
Signal is gaining popularity because there are people that care about using it over iMessage.
Signal is 100x better than WhatsApp, but it feels so unstable using any centralized messenger that has complete control over the software and the users. No centralized service can truly be relied on, non-profit or for-profit. But clearly that's what has to happen in order for the service to become mainstream, so it's an acceptable compromise for me. It's not like I can't say Signal does great things for privsec and metadata reduction.
Yet I've never felt as though I'm missing out. We communicate via alternative forms (texts, calls, hanging out in person) and I have never felt disconnected.
The whole trope about people being worried about missing out is misplaced - that feeling is exactly what these products are designed to imbue in their users. Ultimately, if you value others, you'll make the effort to connect somehow, and if they value you, they'll return that energy. If that two-way street doesn't exist, if they're not willing to give back a similar effort, then why do we need to know what they're doing or thinking every day?
Or you can do what I did and simply say “fuck it”. Get rid of your account anyway and deal with the consequences. I don’t even have WhatsApp (because, you know, Facebook) but don’t feel like that’s been a detriment to my social life. The people I care about understand and I see most of them on the regular. SMS and phone calls still work. I do know some people who live abroad that fortunately I can communicate via iMessage, but if that weren’t an option then email would have to do. I've been doing this for over a decade and while there was some friction at first, it’s been long since it has been an issue. It probably helps that these days most people understand that avoiding Meta is a good thing.
If you don’t care about people you personally know in your social media, then pick whatever you want depending on features. I recommend Mastodon. It has quirks (what doesn’t) but it’s fine. Chronological (not algorithmic) time-line, open-source, you can even subscribe to people with RSS feeds. If there’s someone you’d like to follow from e.g. Bluesky, there’s often a Mastodon bot for their posts. Or you can subscribe via RSS there as well.
Social is where the accounts are, many of which have a nonhuman substrate with the goal of coercing alignment out of you.
That's just social media. Wait until CBDCs are rolled out globally and we'll what else can get blocked.
Who writes a carefully worded statement like this, in multiple languages, but then "accidentally" forgets to include details about who was blocked and why?
Why does this company deserve tax-breaks on their AI data-centers again?
Who's naive enough to think that big corporations like Meta would care about human rights?
Zuck doensn't care. His motto is 'dumb fucks'. And that wasn't a joke. It's how he sees people
All that masquerading as a paragon of privacy but it never works where it's actually needed.
Meta also had to block legitimate coverage in the US during the Covid pandemic because it conflicted with whatever the mainstream narrative was at the time, due to government forcing their hand.
If you're mad at any company that's following laws you don't like, you should direct your ire at the government that created the laws or policies, not at the companies that have no power to overrule said governments.
On one hand HN gets mad when big tech is perceived to have too much power, then on the other hand HN gets mad when big tech doesn't have enough power. It doesn't seem very coherent, just a mob getting angry at random emotional triggers.
I would take most of these comments seriously if the respondents acted like they knew that
But in the demand from the article, I agree that it would be helpful to know the rules behind the censorship requests, but if they are remotely similar to the rules in democracies and republics that people are inspired by, then it comes with a gag order
It is useful, because instead of being surprised and reading this article, you can nod your head and go about your day because you already knew they were a company that was rotten to its core.
Why make it sound like it's a UAE problem?
Since y'all are pro at censorship, you may have the answer to my question?
Zuckerberg proves otherwise IMO. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to how low they can go.
Or is the content simply absent, and unless you directly visit the banned accounts, you don't even know anything was censored?
I'm shocked.
Mexico?
I agree there are a lot more low quality comments, though. It depends on the article.
Something happened during the pandemic where too many normies got hired into tech and then started larping around here.
The quality of comments here is now just emotional mainstream nonsense, compared to the annoyingly autistic (but often intelligent) analysis that used to be commonplace.
Nothing you can do about open forums really. They all regress to the mean user who has enough time to spend hitting the up and downvote arrows on the website all day.
My position is that these companies are already violating Section 230 so that's the first thing you could attack them on. Section 230 shields "interactive computer services" from strict liability for third-party content. It's enabled the likes of Wordpress and Geocities and the original version of Youtube so they caqnq't be sued for defamation for what users post. This is distinct from, say, CNN, NYT, WaPo, Fox and other media companies that do have strict liability because they're first-party publishers.
My position is that an algorithmic feed and selective distribution turns such companies, which includes social media companies, from platforms into publishers (Section 230 doesn't use that language specifically; it's paraphrased).
Twitter pushes Elon Musk onto everyone's feeds. That's not a "platform". Twitter should be legally liable for doing that. Meta's Jordana Cutler essentially boasted about suppressing pro-Palestinian content [1], in effect consciously pushing pro-Israeli content. How is that different to just publishing the exact same content? I don't think it is.
The other way to handle this is as a product liability issue. Just like tobacco companies, social media companies should be sued for the foreseeable and known harm they produce, such as targeting minors, allowing advertisers to target minors, addictive behavior, pushing dangerous ideas (eg eating disorder content) and so on.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti...
