6 ms·
Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request
- tgv 5mo agoLink via xcancel: https://xcancel.com/ryangrim/status/2055992439031185782#m https://xcancel.com/ryangrim/status/2055992439031185782#m
- mw67 5mo agoCrazy that these mega corporations still bow to the requests of countries. Would they do the same of any important actor requesting censorship? like if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored, even though they're more powerful than Kuwait.
- bombcar 5mo agoIf you’re Elon or Bezos you know how to make the request in a plausible deniability way.
- warumdarum 5mo agoThe fact it gets public shows you are a b-tiwr customer, the bigbs have a sort of psychological warfare suit available. You dont loose your account, you loose your sanity.
- csallen 5mo agoElon and Bezos aren't more powerful than Kuwait. Kuwait is a sovereign government, with authority to write laws, raise an army, and do whatever it wants with its 5M+ citizens (draft them, imprison people, execute people, etc.) with pretty much no consequence unless they're absurdly reckless. There is more to power than money.
- ameliaquining 5mo agoI think the argument being made is that they don't have any meaningful power over Meta's corporate decision-makers, even if they do have power over some other people.
- csallen 5mo agoRight, but if you control access to a market of millions of people, a lot of companies will do what you say (i.e. follow your laws) in order to retain access to that market, as well as protect their local employees from jail. I would say that counts as meaningful power.
- benoau 5mo agoIn theory, but the last two years have also seen Zuckerburg, Musk and Cook openly defying the EU, one of the largest markets on the planet.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> the last two years have also seen Zuckerburg, Musk and Cook openly defying the EU, one of the largest markets on the planet I think it's fair to say the chances of Kuwait acting decisively against Zuckerberg, Musk or Cook is far higher than the EU.
- stefan_ 5mo agoThey also shipped 0 barrels of oil last month, the basis for 90% of gov revenue, 50% of its GDP. Clearly their faux workforce of subsidized "natives" and "indentured servants" is heading for a fulminant blowup, with no one in charge with the faintest clue towards mitigation. So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoKuwait cannot do any of that unilaterally. They are a vassal state in the american hegemony.
- mountainb 5mo agoWe fought what, two wars for this vassal? Deleting an account is a pretty minor favor compared to that.
- KaiserPro 5mo agoare we talking in theory or practice? Kuwait's sovereign fund has about 1 trillion under management. A couple of phone calls about disposals and its surprising what changes. However, its my understanding that this page was promoting/representing the Muslim Brotherhood.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago> They are a vassal state in the american hegemony. Whatever happened to just calling a country an ally? "Vassal state in the American hegemony" does sound a lot cooler I guess.
- pessimizer 5mo ago> these mega corporations The US would "bow" to the requests of Kuwait, too. Because it's less "bowing" than that they don't care about you, and Kuwait now owes them a favor. > if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored Not a chance. Elon and Bezos could probably tell Kuwait to kill somebody and they would.
- ergocoder 5mo agoIt's crazy that mega corporations follow the country's regulations. Bad stuff. I know.
- tamimio 5mo agoWell, homosexuality is criminalized in Kuwait for example, do we see Meta banning accounts because of it? Suddenly the company doesn’t follow the country’s regulations. Meta aligns with israel narrative (notorious against anything that goes against that), and it seems that person account wasn’t aligned with that, so they got banned, that’s the real reason, it’s never about following other countries’ laws or whatever, just a legal justification so the company isn’t directly blamed for it, selective censorship.
- ergocoder 5mo agoYour point is that Meta should selectively follow on a part o f the regulations of that country? That wouldn't end up well.
- root_axis 5mo agoAccess to Kuwait's market is far more valuable than anything Elon or Bezos has to say about how meta operates its business.
- leephillips 5mo agoGoogle (including YouTube) has black-holed content at the request of the Chinese and Pakistani governments and in response to domestic Muslim pressure groups. This effects content shown everywhere, including within the United States: https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/ https://lee-phillips.org/youtube/
- rexpop 5mo agoDid you forget that Elon literally bought out an entire major international social media platform and fundamentally re-oriented its algorithmic editorial policy? He did a lot more than "ask". He literally took the thing over and personally dictated censorship.
- like_any_other 5mo agoMy favorite part is all that Meta will say is "account doesn't follow Community Standards" [1]. Impossible to defend against such a vague accusation, and they get to keep the real reason secret. [1] Really they're Meta's standards - it wasn't "the community" that wrote them.
- 737min 5mo agoYes but this is different - a Muslim country enforcing its own rules against an Islamist activist, and Meta complying.
- like_any_other 5mo agoThen Meta can write "account disabled due to legal order by the Kuwait judiciary", or wherever the order came from, instead of hiding behind "Community Standards". I see this all the time in such cases - deflections about the legality of censorship, to avoid the issue that they want to keep the censorship itself, or the source of it, secret. "They" in this case being Meta, unless they produce a legal order compelling them to deceive us.
- 737min 5mo agoYes more clarity better. Here is summary of Kuwait laws https://www.lawgratis.com/blog-detail/media-laws-at-kuwait https://www.lawgratis.com/blog-detail/media-laws-at-kuwait
- KaiserPro 5mo ago> it wasn't "the community" that wrote them. Have you read them? they are acutally quite good. its a shame they are not enforced evenly.
- like_any_other 5mo agoDid I say they're not good, or did I say the "community" (as if the wildly different groups that use Meta share a single community) didn't write them? And if they're so good, then Meta can take credit for them and call them "Meta's Standards", instead of gaslighting us into thinking there is some shared "community" that encompasses Kuwait and California and Belarus, and that this community has agreed on a single set of standards to be imposed on everyone across the globe.
- 737min 5mo agoContext: the popular account is a promoter of Muslim Brotherhood, banned by US and many Mideast countries.
- spwa4 5mo agoIt goes quite a bit further: the Muslim Brotherhood are fascists (as in actual fascists) and (religous) racists, of the supremacist kind. They are in control of the most famous university in islamic countries: Al-Azhar. Long ago they were a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and today are known for being the parent organization of Hamas and they are supporting the genocide in Sudan (meaning they are sponsoring Arabs committing genocides on black Africans (muslim black Africans if that matters), because they're black) They are considered a terrorist organization by most countries, including their host country of Egypt.
- regularization 5mo ago[flagged]
- spwa4 5mo agoAnd that's supposed to explain it? They knew about the holocaust and chose to support it. Was there a reason for that? Yes, of course. That's not the point. The point is they supported it, knowing full well what they were supporting.
- ipaddr 5mo agoThat's a silly point of view when the truth about the holocaust came out after the war. Time traveling point of views are not allowed.
- DSingularity 5mo agoOf course that is logical but you really should learn to distrust your logic. Logic can easily end up leading you to antisemitic ideas. Same with humanitarian ideas about Palestinians and such. It’s best if you just let the Zionists do as they will without any criticism.
- Tyrubias 5mo agoIn a sane world, the US as a supposed bastion of free speech and personal liberties would enact legislation that requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts due to rules violations and offer everyone the chance to appeal. That would serve as a counterbalance to more authoritarian regimes insisting companies like Meta censor people, even if the US can’t guarantee it for people not affiliated with the US. Unfortunately, the US seems more intent on censoring its own residents and becoming one of those authoritarian regimes than actually doing anything about it.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago[flagged]
- funimpoded 5mo agoI once spent an hour or so tracking down and reading parts of the twitter files specifically highlighted by people loudly complaining about them (as I figured those would be the worst bits) and it was mostly pretty yawn-worthy in context. That might be why they didn't get more attention.
- giancarlostoro 5mo agoSo you're saying that the FBI using Twitter as a proxy to violate US citizens First Amendment right is not an issue? Because that's my entire point. There is absolutely no context that okays the FBI doing this, once you open pandoras box, you allow other administrations (including the current) to use the same "power" that they should have never had to begin with.
- funimpoded 5mo ago“Yo, this violates your rules” and then twitter sometimes going “yep, true, we’ll do something” and sometimes “nah” is pretty low on my list of concerns, yeah. Then again I also don’t think any company should have the reach any of the major media companies do these days. But antitrust and media-diversity regulations and laws have been out of fashion since the ‘70s.
- ggoo 5mo agoI cannot open this link.
- bdangubic 5mo agoFascinating that “Meta did ______” makes the front page weekly it seems. I have long reached a point in life where “Meta did _____” is either interesting or surprising
- rock_artist 5mo agoI see a lot of discourse but without much context. With HN, I'd expect people to have more context than bashing what feels more politics than reviewing a banned or censored (still need more context). All I can find which isn't enough (at least for me), to have an educated conclusion is the following: Tweet re-tweeting Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: "After weeks of trying to regain access to my @instagram account, which was temporarily suspended by @accessnow while I was wrongfully detained, I FINALLY got a backup code which allowed me to login only to receive this prompt that my account has been permanently disabled" Access Now - that I can understand works for human rights. https://www.accessnow.org/about-us/ https://www.accessnow.org/about-us/ English Wikipedia: "On March 3, 2026, Shihab-Eldin was detained by Kuwaiti authorities for resharing news articles about the Iran war;[13][17] the previous day, he had posted images of a U.S. fighter jet crashing over the country.[18] The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that he had not been seen publicly in Kuwait, where he was visiting family, since March 2, and that he was under arrest over accusations of "spreading false information," "harming national security" and "misusing his mobile phone;"[13][19] the incident occurred as part of a wider wave of crackdowns targeting journalists across different Gulf states amid the war." Then mentioning his Kuwaiti citizenship was revoked on 29th of April 2026 and earlier some implicit hint? he was released. (though he's American born so I can assume he also has a US Citizenship unless he gave it away at some point) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shihab-Eldin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shihab-Eldin https://www.ahmedshihabeldin.com/ https://www.ahmedshihabeldin.com/ I see he has been a journalist and activist over the years within context of the Middle East. But if someone have more details about why he was blocked it would be much more helpful to understand this story.
- frm88 5mo agoThank you for your work.
- pbiggar 5mo agoTo get a flavor of what Ahmed Eldin speaks about, here is one of the last episodes of his podcast before his arrest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9poJrS_VgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9poJrS_VgI
- propagandist 5mo agoThank you for the important work you do.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- urza 5mo agoI'll just leave this here https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
- AkshatRaj00 5mo ago[dead]