Agree, especially given the suspension only lasted 90 minutes.

If Meta actually wanted to deplatform the No Kings, they would nuke it permanently and handwave terrorism or national security or something. (See also, Reddit's long track record of nuking inconvenient subs like /r/TheDonald, back in the days when they were out of favor.)

As if auto-moderation is an excuse? In past Meta/Facebook has heavily hired human moderators.

We're seriously not going to start abdicating responsibility to automated machines, are we?

Meta put it's thumb in the scale against Lula in Brazil. Why would this be any different?

What evidence do you have that it was an autoban?

Perhaps, but why were the owners of the account then unable to sign into it after it was restored?

Hopefully it's a lesson learned by those involved.

Don't use platforms like this to organize in the future.

Your hunch is right because most of them are frauds who only support free speech if that speech is the kind they agree with.

Have anyone in mind?

I feel completely certain folks like FIRE / Lukianoff will immediately and loudly condemn this.

I would bet very good money every right leaning pro-free speech justice will condemn this.

I would even bet money Elon would condemn it if pressed on the issue, but probably won't be loud about it (which is the technically correct PR since he owns a competitor).

Edit: I personally strongly condemn it as well, though admit to some small schadenfreude. It can be hard to believe when "the roles reversed" meme actually ends up happening. And I do expect this was a genuine automation mistake by Meta given the quick apology.

I've never understood the phrase "free speech absolutist." We either have free speech or we don't, there is no in between.

I personally don't think hate speech should be illegal. If someone feels that way I'd rather know it and act accordingly than them keep it to themselves.

Others may well disagree with my view there and that's totally fine, but they do want limits to what one can say which means they don't want free speech.

I condemn deplatforming regardless of who it's being done to.

Kind of a weird comment to make. Are you admitting they were right, or are you supporting the right for platforms to censor?

Or are you trying to elicit emotions?

Right winger and free speech absolutist here. I do condemn it. The fact that it was only for 90 minutes does somewhat lessen the blow, though.

What tells you that? Do you have evidence? Or just a vague sense that no one actually has any principles?

My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.

Why would pro free speech people be right wing?

Also Dark Money by Jane Mayer

It doesn't have what people want (an audience)

No-one cares, peoples family and friends are not on the Fediverse.

My realization that it was cooked was when I was doing my comp sci PhD where everyone in our group fully understood the implications of data, dependency, ads, surveillance capitalism but 3 out of 20 agreed to download Signal instead of WhatsApp/Messenger.

You are asking for too much sadly.

Fediverse is fine, are there any other platforms that work around such censorship?

the learning curve to understanding the fediverse is too high for most people. They just want to log in, have everything in one place, and not care how it got there.

The fediverse sucks and only people in their small tech bubbles don't seem to realize that the vast majority of people do not know or care about things like "federated social media".

We just need someone* to create a "WoW Classic" version of a social network so that we can get back on it and this time try to make it work. Social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity since the web was created. But it used to be good. So it's incomprehensible to me why no one has made a social networking site matching old facebook and without the awfulness added later.

* Maybe some of us can do it, send me a message.

The bright minds here are busy posting Trump inauguration photos, trying to “gotcha” free speech advocates, and talking about prison time for tech CEOs. Quite the imagination these guys have!

When you have possibly hundreds of thousands of followers organizing political action, one would hope there is an on-call that can respond in less time than an IT guy fixing a camera system for a SMB.

How weird still that that is the world we live in now. I would have never predict that photograph 1 year before it was taken.

I've noticed a number of your politically charged comments tend to rank highly on HN these days, jacquesm. So just to be clear, you are implying that this temporary account suspension is a plot by Mark Zuckerberg to suppress a major political group in the US and Meta is okaying this internally to gain preferential treatment from the US government?

Loss of accountability and deregulation leads to oligarchy. If we are lucky, this will take decades to clean up.

hn is becoming reddit every day

All of those people belong in prison.

They looks like degenerates - in the photo they really are sickeningly grotesque! It's not Felliniesque because they have their own, new style of hideousness: putrid, plastic, shiny, smug, weak, and radically vulgar!

They should be held accountable as long as they decide what to promote. If posts were still following a non-algorithmic approach of chronological listings for those you follow, seems like they shouldn't be held responsible.

In case people don't click the link:

>While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.

>Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all faced backlash for rejecting ads for the film. YouTube and Google quickly reversed course, calling it an “error.” However, TikTok and X have refused to change their stance, and neither platform has allowed paid advertisements for the film.

there's some pretty impressive delusion in this thread, but thinking reddit is going to astroturf hacker news i think wins the top prize

Yes, yes I do. that should be the standard.

I'm genuinely curious. Can you elaborate?

or maybe the leftist movements are also just as batshit insane as those they claim to "oppose" but so many people are brain broken these days it is impossible to have that discussion lol

Maybe if this was Dickson's party in 2008. A massive political event in 2026 is the hottest midterm to date? You can discount Hanlon's razor. It's not an infinite excuse any more than the book Infinite Jest was either unending or funny.

I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like

No. Hanlon’s razor explains that stupidity can cause the same amount of harm as intentional evil and is thus just as bad.

If harms are excused because they were not made with evil intentions then the Nazis who just liked making the numbers go up in a orderly fashion should be considered blameless.

Marx’ counter-Razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.

No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.

> Organizers of the protests estimated that the protests drew nearly 7 million attendees,[17][18] while a partnership between data journalist G. Elliott Morris and the Xylom, an independent Atlanta-based science newsroom, estimated 5 million to 6.5 million participants. Either estimate would make this one of the largest single-day protests in American history.[19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests

> Maybe this is who they always were

Absolutely. But they were super good at getting smart people to pull their carts.

Zuckerberg is the ring.

A judge in Brasil read the situation differently than you, it appears:

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/south-america/brazil-lula-wins...

and Meta employees have commented also:

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...

The complexity of the world is reaching the limits of the average human's cognitive ability, and this deficiency is manifesting as people actively rejecting facts and choosing to believe abstract generalizations. I.E. it "makes sense" that Meta and Trump are working together to overthrow governments, so they take the intellectual shortcut to believe that any similar fact is literally true.

the article already specified that the group was banned during the early 90 minutes of the march, and organizers were banned from posting for several hours during it as well.

what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said? you emphasize 90 minutes as if that makes it okay (obviously it does not).

also, the other example you cited of Facebook disproportionately blocking left-wing political causes lasted for several weeks[0], not several hours.

0: https://novaramedia.com/2026/09/28/facebook-blocks-lulas-cam...

Ask Ceausescu.

> This is yet another reason people in the US needs to get out and vote. People need to come out in mass to take back their country.

Like what happened in 2024?

> I expect the US will never recover from Trump and the very rich.

The thing is that they are also dragging many other countries into that misery. Just look at here at Latin America.

What is the value on trolling like this?

I have no idea what you are trying to dog whistle

> If these social media companies prove they're favouring the government

They favour themselves. And if to best position themselves they must suck up to the government then that's what they'll do. Every time.

> rather than their customers

Who do you think their customers are? They aren't the users. The users are the product, the cattle farmed by social media companies.

The customers are the advertisers. Advertisers don't want filthy protesters tarnishing their shiny brands.

But, they have built up moats via generally unregulated anti-competitive behavior. Also of note, the ISPs are owned by the same class of people, they aren't routing around anything, they are taking our money and cashing checks.

Which would be praise worthy if it was a net neutrality stance, but it's not.