(for 90 minutes)

Which reminds me of this month's HN post about Lula's FB account getting taken down https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49864642 , which turned out to only be for a couple hours after some content post got auto-flagged, before being restored by Meta. But the HN thread was a long discussion about it being a conspiracy by the US government to conduct election interference in Brazil.

▲

PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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...

	▲	dmix 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		According to Meta their account was deactivated "for just over 1 hour" before being restored https://about.fb.com/br/news/2026/10/a-meta-nao-esta-interfe... The rest of the complaints are around exact term search/AI results which are notoriously inconsistent if you've ever done SEO/AEO. So not exactly the strongest evidence. I'm not fan of Meta or their severe lack of transparency in moderation, but this stuff is so political it's basically impossible to debate on facts. Likewise Brazil's courts are notoriously political, notoriously pro-censorship of social media (including fining FB well before Trump for not deleting posts on gov demand), and your first link is a judge appointed by one of Lula's ex staff (Dilma Rousseff).

▲

phendrenad2 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	dmix an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I miss being able to dismiss right wing QAnon posters as just dumb American Facebook boomers. Conspiracy posting is now sadly fully mainstream in multiple countries, especially (ironically for Meta) among the youth raised on social media, and it's exhausting reading it all them time. When news is only consumed before any facts are established this is the end result...

▲

ImPostingOnHN 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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...

▲

dmix 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> what do you think you're adding by repeating what the article said?

That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this? This was always a predictable outcome from aggressively moderating social media with algorithms. Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).

The only reason this is newsworthy is that the media could spin it as some sort of intentional move by humans at Meta, without evidence, because it happened to vaguely coincide with some event date. Otherwise this happens every single day if you search social media for "my account was suspended".

▲

ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> That auto-moderation of social media always has false positives like this?

Only it doesn't. We don't see right-wing politicians being blocked on Facebook. No Bolsonaro blocking. Only left-wing political causes. Can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking right-wing candidates or right-wing mainstream political movements, immediate before an election?

> Humans only ever get involved after the fact (in this case after 90 minutes).

Several hours, not 90 minutes, but even then, that doesn't excuse it -- the human intervention should come before blocking of political causes. Moreover, this doesn't seem coincidental, given the above point of how infrequently and selectively it happens.

> The only reason this is newsworthy is

...because people find it newsworthy. Simple as that. Sorry if you personally prefer that it not be reported, personally I'd prefer that it didn't happen.

▲

dmix 2 hours ago | parent [-]

So your theory is Meta let some protest organize on their social media for years, then 90 minutes before one of their many protests start they'd take down a single page on only one of their platforms (Instagram), as a way to stop the protests from happening? Then Mark Zuckerberg told them to restore it within a short timeframe for plausible deniability?

▲

ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I go where the evidence points. Meta has not provided sufficient evidence to conclude that this was an accident. Given their track record of blocking left-wing political politicians and causes over the last couple years (and their even longer track record of malfeasance and deception), they do not have the benefit of the doubt, especially when they are not transparent about what happened.

The article makes it pretty clear: Left-wing political figures blocked from posting to facebook for several hours (not 90 minutes) right when the event occurred. Can't get much clearer than that. Then enough furor erupted to unblock them, or the event ended and then they were unblocked.

It fits with their track record, e.g. blocking/hampering Brazilian left-wing candidate communications for weeks until a court ordered them to stop. If you have a theory about both these things being an accident (while the corresponding right-wing causes were all conveniently given a pass), we're gonna need more evidence from you to back that theory.

▲

dmix 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between a) Some conjecture that a social media account was briefly taken down as part of a right-wing conspiracy by a major publicly traded US corporation OR b) yet another example in a long history of accounts being auto-flagged by overly-aggressive algorithms and then later being restored by a human moderator without proper transparency.

	▲	ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Strong claims need strong evidence. So the choices are between: a) oops, they accidentally blocked ONLY left-wing political candidates and causes right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes, totally a coincidence, people, or b) yet another example in a facebook's history of blocking left-wing political candidates and causes, right before an election, ever since the US started having a right-wing president with a track record of interfering in elections on behalf of right-wing causes Obviously Facebook does not have the benefit of the doubt, given their long history of malfeasance, deception, and nontransparency, so A is a pretty strong claim, and thus we can go with B until you have strong evidence otherwise. I don't think anyone here on HN can say "I trust facebook to be honest and transparent, to admit, explain, and atone for their malfeasance without prompting, and to always make choices that best reflect the will of the people" with a straight face these days. In fact, we still don't even have transparency into the very incidents we're discussing (likely due to deception and malfeasance, if we're going based off past behavior and proper Bayesian priors). Indeed, if it was actually an accident, then that means that after Facebook's Lula scandal, they had the opportunity to stop this sort of thing from happening, and made the choice not to do so. That was their choice, making it no longer an accident in this case. There's no escaping accountability for that choice. Back to our earlier request: can you give some examples from the last couple years, of Facebook blocking major right-wing candidates or major right-wing mainstream political movements, immediately before an election? If it was just an accident, and these accidents happen all the time without respect for politics, we should expect to see an equal number of blocks applied to both sides in the same situation. Do we? I don't think so.