This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.

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rileymat2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not opposite, a different problem.

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.

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philipallstar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The platform deciding to obey local laws is not "on the platform". It's on the local laws.

	▲	rileymat2 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The choices between not operating in that jurisdiction, accepting the legal consequences that jurisdiction can enforce or obeying the laws in that jurisdiction is certainly on a choice of the platform. And the resulting product is their responsibility and a reflection on them for better or worse. There have been numerous cases of companies ignoring local law for both good and bad.

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cmiles74 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).

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.

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diydsp 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. The worst of both worlds..

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.

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SoftTalker 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure what anyone expects Meta to do differently here. Meta has basically two choices: they can obey the local law in places where they operate, or they can choose to not operate there.

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stephenhuey 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So why not make the positive choice?

Zuckerberg claimed time and time again he wanted to connect the world, and it was part of the earliest mission statements:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/02/mark-zuck...

It was on the hoodie!

https://www.cnet.com/culture/zuckerberg-hoodie-makes-mountai...

Mark said, "But there’s this mission belief that connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet."

https://www.thedrum.com/news/ads-not-short-term-solution-int...

He also said he wanted to make an impact, but I always felt like this was misguided, because what matters is whether the impact is positive or negative.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/mark-zuckerbe...

If we give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually wanted to achieve something positive, maybe he sadly became subdued by having to make an outsized return from VC money. I don't know that we should give him the benefit of the doubt, but imagine if he had sold to Yahoo for a paltry billion dollars and then created a site to truly connect people with a foundation or some other entity that gave him more freedom to ignore profit.

Meta has more luxury of choice than most companies. They can choose to make positive impacts if they so choose. "He chose poorly" and "You have chosen wisely" comes to mind from the the ancient knight in the 3rd Indiana Jones film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-_BH7x7Dl8

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe he's choosing to connect the 99.998% of Facebook users in Saudi Arabia and UAE who have not been ordered blocked by their governments.

But, honestly, I think all he ever really wanted to do was make money, and control the narrative. The connecting the world stuff makes a nice sound bite, and it was the motivation for some of the others at the company though. Read Careless People.

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philipallstar 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Meta took less than $100m from VC money over a decade ago. It makes billions in profit a quarter.

	▲	JohnMakin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And, additionally, it should be noted the corporate structure gives Zuckerberg near absolute power. So you can't really blame the decisions on anyone but him.

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ericmay 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The United States and its businesses are continually faced with a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation when it comes to operating in countries which have poor human rights records claims, whether that's China or Saudi Arabia or others.

If the company doesn't operate in the country, a competitor will, and the United States in particular will be criticized for failure to compete, losing ground to China (or some other actor), and of losing soft power. If the American company does decide to comply with the laws of the host nation, they're evil and bad, and they're an example of fascism or being complicit in human rights violations. These charges are never levered at other countries or their companies, strictly American ones. For example, France sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.

Certain loud groups also like to complain when the United States takes forceful action to prevent those same human rights violations. They want the US to withdraw from the world, but they also want the US to be at fault for withdrawing and leaving others to suffer. We should ignore what they say and do what we think is right and in our best interest.

We're not going to change these countries by refusing to operate in them and we're just going to cede ground to a competitor for on change and no advantage. We're unwilling to fight or go to war over these things either, so we might as well learn to live with some countries doing some bad things or having some human rights violation and hope we can change them over time. In other words, it's fine that Meta operates in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia even with the human rights violations.

EU member states are happy to sell weapons to these countries. Who cares if we let them on Facebook too?

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cmiles74 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My preference would be that they choose not to operate in areas where local law and policies make them complicit in hurting people.

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Barbing 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Force Zuck to take FB to a sole proprietorship

Only if we want a utopia

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j_horvat 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed, the company chasing infinite growth convinces itself that it must work with these repressive regimes. How could we not acquire these users! We need to keep growing, and growing! It shows that under capitalism there are no morals, no humanity, only profit and growth. When push comes to shove human rights abuses are forgivable, failure to maximize profit is not.

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mohamedkoubaa 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

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Aunche 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.

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pear01 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But is it not consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

	▲	flawn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate. That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate. That would mean regulation of social media companies seems appropriate.

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AlexandrB 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So what? Very few organizations are morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. Especially in 2026 where political polarization is the norm.

Despite Meta's self serving actions here their morals are significantly better than those of Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

	▲	mohamedkoubaa an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm not complaining about it I'm just pointing out that widely held assumptions are false
	▲	pear01 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Very few? Try none. Unless the moral position is something akin to realist self interest, in which case the apparent "inconsistency" is actually internally quite consistent. Perhaps the lack of consistent moral positions in competing paradigms is less an interesting phenomena to point out and more a tell that someone is laboring under an extremely naive conception of human morality.

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autoexec 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The private company would gladly connect everyone.

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.

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marricks 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.

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.

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bayindirh 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.

Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.

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b65e8bee43c2ed0 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The private company would gladly connect everyone.

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.

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chadgpt3 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Which viewpoints?

	▲	b65e8bee43c2ed0 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		the ones that corporate eunuchs had implicitly decreed to be banned.
	▲	tadfisher 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The ones that got a million Americans killed

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throwaw12 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company.

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

	▲	nixon_why69 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's more complicated than that. The US government is currently at war with Iran, alongside UAE and the Saudis as allies. Meta is a US 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?
	▲	Aurornis 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship? 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.
	▲	marcosdumay 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		They can't operate there. AFAIK, that's the only difference. A company can not operate in a country and not follow its rules.
	▲	8note 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		i dont think meta does business in those two countries? thats not a very relevant comparison.
	▲	lotsofpulp 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Does Meta do business in either of those jurisdictions? If the answer is “No”, then it makes sense they would not follow laws they do not have to.

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tclancy 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.

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.