We don't have to put up with this. We simply choose to. But our laws could be whatever we want them to be.

Unfortunately, "we" is often those with the monetary means to make their voice heard.

Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.

Folks want Facebook or whatever to be regulated into some perfect idea they have in their heads of how it should work and how it should be regulated. Sorry, many people have many views on that, and you're never going to be happy with an outcome. Even this article - Facebook is complying with EU rules/regulations and now you're not happy that your voice isn't heard through your preferred form of political activism. If Facebook allows this content, they break EU laws, or they have to allow some content you disagree with and now you're mad.

I don't know why people, right, left, or sideways keep putting up with this stuff.

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pixl97 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit

There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement. While I am a person who doesn't use those services (and recently stopped using reddit), a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.

Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them.

Individual boycotts rarely work, even ones that attract attention from a good number of people, companies are better at waiting than individuals seem to be. Political action has a much higher likelihood of success when driven by smaller motivated groups.

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ericmay 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There is a particular amount of economic privilege in this statement.

Good, I am pro-privilege and support being privileged. I'm not sure how and why we came to the point in our society where if someone says "hey these products suck and I'm not going to use them", someone has to come along and attempt to guilt them into using them? You want me to create a Facebook account and post pictures of funny cats because Joe and Sally podcaster need eyeballs for their rage-bait podcasts or quirky coffee mug they drop-shipped from China?

Sorry, not buying it. Don't like the products? Stop using them. Reliant on them? Go complain to regulators. Not my monkeys, not my circus.

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tygon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

For many, it is less silly cat pictures and more listing products for sale from a legitimate registered business (catering is a common one for example). Gotta do what you gotta do sometimes. If you do not take advantage of tools afforded to you, someone will and because social media like facebook is "free," that is a go-to.

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tescreal 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The "someone will" arguments never work for me.

I live in a community (outside USA) where it is common to advertise offline or alternative outlets.

There's no dependence "because others do". That is just defeatism. If people choose en masse to change their habits, the world has to follow suit, imho.

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>If people choose en masse to change This is nearly saying "If people stop murdering each other we won't have murder any more". Well, yea no shit, a tautology is a tautology. The question is how do you elicit social change in an environment that is actively fighting back against you doing so and has a massive amount more information than you do. One of the key points here is you live outside the US so it's much more likely that your communities are far less digitally integrated and have a much different history of social change and dynamics. For example car culture presents an absolutely massive amount of friction to social change. It literally physically separates us at much larger distances than states that do not have car culture. There is also the fact the modern social media swept over the US first drawing in most of the population long before we recognized the dangers of it. Government agencies and businesses moved a healthy amount of their communications to things like social media platforms. The network effects are powerful. The next thing I'd like you to do is get on social media where all these people you want to change are and tell them to get off.... oooh, your account was banned. These companies are organisms that will fight back against what your trying. You forget the tobacco companies fought in the US for 30+ years inventing entirely new methods of propaganda before we developed laws to protect the rest of us against smoke in public. You are not talking about a choice. You are talking about a war that is actively being fought.

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ericmay 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, folks can do what they want. I'm not disputing that, but this idea of "privilege" in this context, to me, is quite ridiculous.

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

> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job

Okay, but their job is a net drag on our society, so you haven’t quite convinced me.

Counterproposal: ban influencers

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Counter-counterproposal, ban influencers without attempting to ban advertising triggering an immune response from a multi-hundred billion dollar a year industry.

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

> a large number of people are required to use those services for their job, so they can get money, so they can put food on the table.

You mean 'influencers'?

Nothing of value has been lost.

> Worse these companies ingrain themselves into a lot of physical locations and data collection from other sources so your not free of them

Please can you provide an example. I can't say I've ever experienced such a thing (and would never GDPR opt-in to such data sharing even if the opportunity was there).

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tygon 4 hours ago | parent [-]

While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.

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pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yea, I think among a fair portion of HN there is a misunderstanding of how economically connected social media is to businesses and people. For example Meta is one of the largest advertising agencies on earth.

My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.

And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.

So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.

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ericmay an hour ago | parent [-]

Sounds like the coal miners in West Virginia whose livelihoods depend on coal production.

	▲	pixl97 24 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean it's also the same thing we're starting to see with programmers and AI too, which is highly ironic after tall the "lrn 2 code" stuff that was posted online around that time. If a programmer says I'm not going to use AI and the company says use AI, the programmer can absolutely walk, but god, I would not want to try to find a new job right now. This is why things like unions and consumers pushing for consumer protection laws are fought by companies so hard. They are far more effective than individual actions because the incentives are against individual success.

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tjpnz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If your business requires the use of one of these platforms in order to exist I would question its viability. Willingly giving a single company that much power over you is a horrible position to be in. Maybe it does put food on the table this month, great! But what happens if Zuck (or a piece of dumb automation) decides next month to boot you?

	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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

That has absolutely nothing to do with the EU regulation that requires to label political ads and restricts targeting technics

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ericmay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes it does. You're using the product and seeing the ad. You and others are mad that the product is complying with the regulation in a way you don't prefer. Stop using the product, and no ad is there to be seen and none of this matters.

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dgellow 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t use meta’s products. The issue has absolutely nothing to do about an ad ban. There is no ban of political advertising in the EU.

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ericmay 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Ban/regulation, whatever. It's in the article and comments. Whatever you want to call that.

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dgellow 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> When the newly reopened Teatre Raval, which seats 193 spectators, asked Meta, the parent company of the two social media sites, why its publicity had been blocked, it was told “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.

That’s Meta response. There is no mention of any regulation in that article.

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ericmay 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just because The Guardian intentionally didn't mention the regulations or role they might play and you want to be pedantic about their existence doesn't mean there aren't any.

Businesses are allowed to and routinely comply with regulations to their best ability even if it wasn't as intended based on the act of the regulator/government.

For ex:

[1] https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/transpare...

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dgellow 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re the one who mentioned it was in the article.

Have you read that regulation? Because I did, and it’s not any form of ban on political advertising

	▲	ericmay 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It wasn't in the article. Ok we can move past that now. You can ban something by requiring excessive compliance with a regulation that is unobtainable or very unprofitable. The Guardian failed to even mention the regulation or what may have motivated Meta's actions.

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

That's a problem. That the Guardian doesn't mention the regulation and doesn't give us the wording of the advertisement.

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

Meta go one further and literally spell it out with an equivalent example of advertising for an equivalent event in their own published guidelines on Slide - in this case a 'Civil Rights Exhibition' - as eligible to run in the EU.

https://efa-net.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/META_EU_Update...

This was either an automated filter set to 'anti-woke' or some childish attempt at malicious compliance, or both. Thousands of such plays are advertised on numerous platforms across Europe every year without incident or comment.

	▲	dgellow 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, it’s so transparent I cannot fathom how so many people directly assume it’s the EU fault. Meta isn’t subtle at all in their lobbying

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LorenPechtel an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's Meta's response to advertising rules that they find too onerous. Governments keep trying to regulate businesses to appease the voters, sometimes they go too far and the business decides the sensible thing is to leave the market.

This is especially an issue with insurance in disaster prone areas. Insurance company comes along and notices that in the east it's houses very close to the beach (hurricanes/storm surge), in California it's wildfires. Insurance companies raise the premiums in such areas to reflect the risk, the people living there scream. The state does things that mandate spreading the risk--now the dangerous behavior continues but others pay the cost. And those others start screaming because they are paying insurance rates way above the value delivered. And sometimes we insurance companies simply pull up stakes and leave--and we see states responding by saying if you want to do any business in the state you'll provide the homeowner's insurance at a "fair" (not fair, it's a price they're losing money on) rate. I'm not aware of any insurance companies completely leaving a state yet.

We have seen this with malpractice insurance for doctors, though. The biggest carrier simply quit and the market went crazy. Locally we had doctors who would pay more for malpractice insurance for delivering a baby than the insurance payment for delivering said baby.

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bryanrasmussen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So how exactly is an ad for a play by an author who died 85 years ago political and requiring regulation? A person who died so long ago that, even in the EU with its onerous copyright regime, her work is in the public domain!?

It is a general thing that people only want to ban or regulate things that are against the social standards of their political organization, feminism and civil rights are two things that are pretty central to the EU. I know they must be, because I always read American right-wing commentators say about how feminism and civil rights are destroying the EU. For this reason I do not believe it is actually normal compliance with any regulation, it is malicious compliance meant to undermine the regulation.

I am sure some person who is glad for the malicious compliance would like to make a statement to the effect that it is the EU's fault that Meta has done it this way, so allow me to forestall it with some other observations.

If Meta feels the law requires them to remove ads for any art that supports a cause, including causes that are considered mainstream and accepted in the EU, then almost no art can ever advertised.

Guernica may not be shown, as it was anti-fascist, AND I should note Picasso's works are still under copyright so we know that's got to be regulated STAT!

The works of anyone who has ever been against slavery must not be mentioned, no Twain, Melville, Stowe, etc. etc.

But let's not stop there, surely Shakespeare's Richard III did not support that fellow's claims to the throne of England and we should not discuss it, don't tell me anything about it being a long time ago - if for Meta Virginia Wolf springs eternal then surely Shakespeare should get the same benefit of censorship. Dante's taking sides in the civil wars that damaged the Italy of his time should allow us to throw him off the platform as well!

There is very little art and few artists in this world that have been so anodyne that Meta could not censor them for having supported a social issue. I certainly hope they will do so, and quickly, so that people may be persuaded to abandon the platform. I also hope that this post is clear enough that I don't have to hear any more about how Meta had to do it the way they did, as I have recently been talking with my ex-wife, so my allowance for hearing dumb stuff is all used for today.

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eithed 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same here - idk why are people jumping on the wagon of attributing the restriction to EU regulation. Looks to be a US compliance banning social topics that Trump administration is pursuing (but again, idk if that's the case, this is guesswork on my part)

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worik 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Well you can also just stop using these products

True. But there is a social cost, for now

In my neighborhood Facebook became the defacto "town square" where community organising happens. A bad idea in hindsight, but there it is

I nolonger use Facebook. Not my choice, my account disappeared and I decided not to reconstitute it, and now I pay the price

But the price gets less as time goes by as Meta killed the goose that lays the golden eggs. Their greed and carelessness is making the service less valuable or useful

This (ban Virgina Wolf FFS) is another example. If you cannot advertise what you are doing as part of your community, then what is the point?

Why be part of a service that no longer links people without fear or favour (Facebook of fifteen years ago) but solely exists to market at you?

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TacticalCoder 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Well you can also just stop using these products. I don't have or use Facebook, Instagram, Whats App, Reddit (since they removed old.reddit.com unless you have an account), TikTok, Snap, or anything else.

I don't have any of those but I do need one messenger to communicate with my buddies in the EU. As I'm a "fuck the Zuck" person and an "ABM" (Anything But Microsoft), Telegram is my poison.

I don't have any doubt: I know it's not E2EE (and I doubt that one-on-one encrypted communication --it's a setting you MUST turn on-- in Telegram is actually really E2EE).

But Telegram is neither from the Zuck nor from Microsoft, so that's a big win for me.

Also basically everyone in the EU has Telegram now.

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alt227 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"We" is a massive group of people who all have wildly different ideas. Saying "laws could be what we want them to be" is highly subjective depending on who the "we" is at that current time.

	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea, people use We as the royal we quite often. What "people" miss about the royal we is it works much better when you have lots and lots of money.

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p-e-w 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

At this point, I suspect that comments like this one are part of an astroturfing campaign by the ruling class.

It’s the same bullshit as “we could stop climate change if only we bothered to bring cloth bags to the store instead of picking up a disposable plastic bag each time”.

“We” don’t have any power. And once you accept that, you can stop blaming yourself and your neighbors for the world you live in, and direct your anger where it belongs.

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chneu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The power is with the people. It only takes about 1/4th of a community enact massive change.

Your take is exactly what keeps people apathetic and reliant on others.

"It's someone else's fault and someone else's responsibility" is what you're saying.

It relieves the individual of the outcome of their actions. 8 billion people matter.

If I were an abuser, I would LOVE to hear my victims say they are powerless. Think about that.

	▲	constantius 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Parent is not saying to be apathetic, but to stop trying to change the system while safely abiding by the system's rules. As I read it, it says: once we understand that the system is rigged, we'll turn our attention to those who rigged it (the ruling class), instead of making small useless acts these comments usually call us to do, like using cloth bags or voting for liberals (as opposed to the left). And no, the power is very much not with the people: 4/4th of the pop sure as hell don't want to have precarious lives, yet they don't seem to manage to change that since forever, except if you squint.
	▲	p-e-w 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 8 billion people matter I doubt that even 8,000 people “matter” in the sense of having meaningful power.
	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"Please ignore the person above, they are a child abuser and you can look up evidence of it online (posts list of crusty questionable sites that seemingly popped up out of nowhere). Chneu, when did you stop abusing your wife? When did you stop posting racist remarks on reddit on anonymous accounts? Why are you a member of the communist party. Why do you support trans rights? Why do you support the gays. Why do you hate the gays. Why do you hate minorities. Why do you support illegal immigration" The above is just a tiny sample of what will happen to you when you start challenging people with power. You see, powerful "bad" people don't care how many accusations you make against them. They will flood the field with noise so people just ignore it. Now you, because you're a good guy have to be the most perfect little angel or all your followers will run away in disgust. You know nothing about power and how to wield it. There better not be any skeletons in your closet because I will surface them. Hell, it doesn't even matter, I will plant them there. Of course all the above is fictional, I'm not going to do these things to you because I'm not a person with millions of dollars threatened by your actions. But don't think threatening people with billions of dollars comes without cost.

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

> direct your anger where it belongs.

Where does it belong?

	▲	alt227 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Where does it belong? Their argument is so generic they would probably say something equally as generic and useless like 'The billionaires"

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

Are you doubting the power of cloth bags and reusable drinking straws? Ethical consumption matters! I only buy products with green colors and “natural” looking fonts, that way I know that I’m not contributing to climate change. (Oh and although I drive a Tesla, I bought it before Elon went crazy, tee-hee.)

If only everyone would round up to the nearest dollar at checkout, we could end poverty!

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

“We” do, we could, if organized. Per your first point, that is the problem today - agreeing on a shared goal rather than infighting about all the peripheral issues.

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alt227 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Whos "We"?

I would hazard a guess theres stuff that I don't agree with you on, and we would want certain laws written differently. Its important to remember that we all vote for what we think is right, based on a system evolved over thousands of years to cater for human fallibility. The modern rhetoric of "us against the billionaires" is simply not how the world works, despite how much people want it to.

	▲	constantius 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The modern rhetoric is indeed reductive if you put words in the poster's mouth. The comment was about 'us vs the ruling class', which is very much how the world works. Your knowledge of history is equally flawed, if you believe modern democracy is some kind of evolutionary apex tenderly nurtured for the greater good for thousands of years.

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david-gpu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What looks like a peripheral issue to you is somebody else's central goal. And vice versa.

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

>“We” don’t have any power.

<Ned Flanders' father>: We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!

People who say this have never tried, do nothing themselves to contribute to improving the problem or to convince others or the government to improve the problem besides perhaps complaining on the internet in a bubble of likeminded people who don't need their minds changed.

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lynx97 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What is the problem?

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colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There are many of them, whatever it is you feel needs improvement.

	▲	lynx97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm pretty much fine, thank you. And I am pretty sure that is true for most HN users. Most of us are not hungry. The rest is a bunch of first-world problems.

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ajkjk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it's the opposite? the person you're replying to is exactly correct... the giant delusion that sustains this whole shitty thing is the public's disenchantment with politics; everything feels bad but no one seems to believe in "passing different laws" as the method of changing it so instead they just vent their frustrations in hopes that someone who already has power will by the goodness of their heart decide to do a better job. when in fact the lever fox fixing things, democracy, still (for the most part) exists, but almost nobody is coordinating to pull it.

causally I think this is because we all grew up watching government operate glacially and so nobody really believes there's an alternative... but I eagerly await the day that millennials realize they can just win every election and fix everything that sucks about their world by basically trying really hard and coordinating with each other.

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constantius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Your optimism and faith in the power of the people is laudable, but I think you misread the comment (see my other replies in this thread).

The public's disenchantment with politics didn't appear out of nowhere: most of them have personally experienced voting for one thing and getting the same old.

And I'd disagree that democracy still exists [0], if it ever did. The most speaking example, among many [1], is the Gaza genocide: I've never in my life seen as much 'trying really hard and coordinating', the vast majority of the population of almost every country wants this to stop, and yet, 3 years in, it doesn't, and the split on this between the population and the ruling class (politicians, the rich, what have you) is stark and the position of the ruling class very much correlates with the outcomes.

[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/16/vilificatio...

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ajkjk 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think you understand my position. I don't think I've seen anything like coordinated democratic action attempted in my lifetime (not in the US at least). Everyone doesn't believe it's possible so they don't even try it. People defer the job of organization to their (demonstrably impotent) political party and then act surprised that nothing happens. (Of course I am thinking about Democrats here; actually Trump's rise to prominence is a lot more like what actually rallying people is supposed to look like. Of course it is disappointing for others reasons...)

"Everybody" wants something to stop and yet nobody goes out and takes power and stops it so nothing changes. People experience voting doing nothing and then they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing so it does nothing tomorrow as well.

The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency. It is not hard for a group of coordinated people to win for example a local election. Well, it is hard in the sense that they have to agree to do it and actually put effort in. But it's not hard to get the requisite numbers---very few people are voting anyway. But if they don't believe in trying and instead post memes about how mad they are, of course nothing changes.

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constantius 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If I misunderstood your position, then you indeed misunderstood parent's, as you two (and I) are then arguing for the same thing: the system cannot be changed by following the system's rules, as people are blinded and limited by these rules.

> The only way this changes is a widespread shift in belief in personal agency

Yes, but this also implies a paradigm shift on the subject of this personal agency.

> very few people are voting anyway

There are countries where voting is mandatory (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Turkey): they're not utopias and they suffer from the same polarisation, corruption, inequalities, threats of fascism, and disenchantment as other countries do.

> they do nothing about the fact that it did nothing

Because doing something about it is either against the rules of the system or requires such an effort in coordination that it'd be effectively indistinguishable from a revolution. A tiny example, the EU Commission tries to pass Chat Control every 6 months: when it does pass (all.according to the system's democratic rules), you won't get referenda on maintaining it every 6 months, I assure you. The power imabalance between the 99% and the ruling class is so massive that positive outcomes from voting alone are effectively flukes, not representative of future performance.

	▲	ajkjk 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I guess my stance is that: 1. yes, it will require a widespread shift in people's beliefs for anything to change significantly. So such a shift is necessary. 2. I also personally believe that such a widespread shift is sufficient to fix a lot of this stuff. Nobody has any recent data for this because it hasn't happened in our lifetimes, but there is plenty of further-back historical evidence for it. 3. A prerequisite for the shift to occur is for everybody to believe both (1) and (2), such that they are motivated to try. 4. Anecdotally it seems like most people really believe (1) but severely doubt (2), which unfortunately means they have no motivation, so nothing has any hope of occurring right now. 5. Therefore I would encourage everyone to at least try out believing (2) as well. After all without it we have no data on what is actually possible with it. And yes, the actual result probably looks like some form of revolution, but it is not required that such a revolution be violent. Of course it might turn out to be, but that is more about how the entrenched power reacts. You need the movement first, and then you can see what the reaction is. re chat control or similar things---it seems to me that if your system's democratic rules pass it, then things are working as intended. Complaining about the democratic system is rather a joke when it is operating and doing things legitimately (I don't live in Europe, though, so I don't know anything about how legitimate it actually is.) In general one "votes" in this paradigm by actually convincing large groups of people that they should take difference stances on issues, not by casting a single vote themselves. If a person's reaction to political outcomes they don't like is not "campaigns of influence" then they're not really playing the game at all, are they? And to be clear, such a campaign of influence is not only available to powerful people. In fact they are cheaper to carry out than ever---we even have a new job title for them, "influencer", and it is revenue-positive for many people! So when someone complains about legitimate political systems but they don't personally decide to influence others to change the outcomes... they are just a non-entity in the system, that's their problem. (I do not have anything charitable to say, however, about illegitimate politics, e.g. the Trumps administration's widespread illegal behavior. That seems like a failure of basic rule of law that might be considerably harder to dislodge. But, as much as I hate it, their winning an election and then fucking everything up on purpose is largely allowed... the underlying problem is that so many people seem to be okay with that. If a country wants to cut its own limbs off itself I guess that's fine at a level of politics. Not so good at a level of morality or philosophy---so I guess it shifts the battle to be at the level of hearts and minds instead of democracy. But the general point still stands: campaigns of influence are how you affect this, not individual votes.) (edit: i did not, however, reread the other comments here to see if I actually misunderstood anyone. I'm just ranting)

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frumplestlatz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only “genocide” in history where the population actually increased.

This is another “if everyone just …”. Everyone will not “just”. We can’t even agree on basic facts like your claim of genocide.