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Vancouver strip club's Instagram taken down over sign featuring lake joke
- msie 1mo agoI thought MAGA supported freedom of speech? Didn’t they have a meeting with Zuckerberg about censorship many years ago? What a joke the US has become.
- gfv 1mo agoVancouver is in Canada.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- conception 1mo agoInstagram is not.
- anonzzzies 1mo agoFreedom of speech only for a small part of only the US then? So not the ideal of freedom of speech, but the dictatorial version of freedom of speech?
- fsckboy 1mo agothere is a Vancouver, Washington, down near Portland, Oregon
- zenethian 1mo agoI didn’t realize that someone from Washington State would think of Lake Ontario as theirs?
- btilly 1mo agoThe much larger Vancouver, and the one that this is about, is in Canada. There is also Vancouver Island, which is separate from the other two. All are named after Captain George Vancouver. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Vancouver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Vancouver
- defrost 1mo agoNeither the city of Vancouver B.C. nor the country of Canada took down the Vancouver nightclub's Instagram account though. That was either accidental auto moderation or a testy and likely MAGA aligned person of influence (inside or outside of Meta). Either way, not a good look for Freedom of Speech.
- ForOldHack 1mo agoI am sorry that you had to explain that, and even sorrier that many people failed the third grade. The fault lies not with the teachers, but the parents who do not know who's geologic fact either... it's stunning, but par for the course given the countries leadership.
- defrost 1mo agoThey had no need to explain what most already knew and which had little bearing on the apparent actions of a US company. The fault lies not with the geological bedrock underpinning Vancouver B.C. nor with it's geographic location although it is indeed a visually stunning part of the world. It's also less an issue with the leadership of the two countries involved, more an issue with the fish rotting from head of one country's leadership.
- grebc 1mo agoOnly if it doesn’t embarrass his orangeness.
- roenxi 1mo agoSince when has Facebook been associated with MAGA? They were famously part of the attempt to get Trump banned [0] from social media that led to Truth Social. Their moderation team tends anti-MAGA to the point where it is an international political concern. And, assuming that the article is accurate, obviously they shouldn't have banned an account for posting "Can't handle a pool, but wants our lake?". I think everyone would agree outside the Facebook team. That would be a classic Facebook over-moderation. Extreme to the point where I'm going to assume there is more to the story. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Trump#Banned_from_both_platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...
- samudrijan 1mo agoFacebook/Meta happily hires GOP operatives and has done so for years.
- schiffern 1mo ago>Since when has Facebook been associated with MAGA? That's easy. January 20, 2025: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgpqeq82rvo
- Terr_ 1mo ago"Oh, being bribed/extorted by the government we took control-of doesn't count, because internally the lügenpresse still has unreasonably-biased employees who keep accusing us of being bad people who'll abuse government power. But don't worry, we will fix that soon..." /s ____ P.S.: I wanted to add something that wasn't ironic, but I'm having a surprisingly hard time unpacking my own sarcastic-intuition into arguments. Perhaps: 1. The MAGA bloc angry at companies moderating Dear Leader have already struck back, and they will not be satisfied by less than a reversal into cheerleading. 2. It can be hard to judge what most employees think when the corporation itself is under some duress. 3. Sometimes the circumstances of a "reversal" demonstrate that the original concern was extremely valid.
- elonfboy 1mo agoHave you been living under a rock? https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-oversaw-cambridge-analyticas-collection-of-facebook-data-according-to-former-employee/2018/03/20/8fb369a6-2c55-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bannon-oversaw-cambr...
- freitasm 1mo agoRight. Freedom of expression when MAGA, but not for others. Who is the snowflake now?
- schiffern 1mo agoLadies and gentlemen, meet the party of "fuck your feelings" and "humor is legal again..." And please, no fake canned complaints about "politicizing." The story is nakedly political from top to bottom (no pun intended).
- SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago[flagged]
- kdkirsch 1mo agoWhat? Is there a logical explanation for this other than exactly that...a conservative attack because they got their snowflake feelings hurt by calling out their Daddy Donald's glaring and incontrovertible incompetence with a fairly clever call out?
- SV_BubbleTime 1mo ago[flagged]
- avaer 1mo agoWould be useful to know who gave the order (article doesn't say). It could be an Insta mod messed up, a blame the AI situation, the company self-censoring, or maybe a threatening DM from the government. All of which have precedent. Hard to have an informed opinion without more details.
- kennywinker 1mo agoThe purpose of a system is what it does. Incidents like this are common enough, that this is what the system does. If it’s AI, or rogue mods, or zuck himself, it doesn’t matter because this is what the system is doing - and if this wasn’t an acceptable outcome to meta the system would be changed.
- parineum 1mo agoHow do you know it isn't being changed?
- kennywinker 1mo agoI don’t. But given it didn’t change the last n times it happened, i’m doubtful. Whats makes you think it is being changed?
- parineum 1mo agoWhen you say "it", what are you referring to? I don't know anything about the internal workings of meta to confidently state that situations like this do or don't cause internal change. What I can say is scores of people on Meta's various platforms are saying very negative things about the US administration and are not being banned.
- kennywinker 1mo ago"it" = people being banned for innocuous things. Just because you don't always get banned for political speech, doesn't mean random political speech bans don't have a chilling effect.
- anonzzzies 1mo agoHope it gets more countries to do their own thing; it's rather insane companies are dependent on social media for marketing while they control 0% of that social media and can be wiped out by some silly AI (aka cheap; you don't want Astra/Fable scanning all our photos, you use some lobotomised model which barfs out false pos/neg all day long) or Stasi Ministry of Censorship. At least locally I can just get in a car and drive up to hear what's up and I understand the laws and know what my rights are while in the US, I have 0 rights.
- Bedlow 1mo agoAnother red flag of bigtech domination being terrible for digital democracy. At least Europe has now got this message loud and clear,and some govts/etc are using self hosted Mastodon (and Nextcloud, AI models...). Eurosky might be good but we have to wait and see, though it can also be self hosted through AT protocol. Decentralised, federated social media is now bottom line essential for diverse opinion with different, independently controlled moderation systems.
- accountrequired 1mo agoSo "it appears" ... Not enough actual facts in the article to form an opinion or even write the article about.
- jdlshore 1mo agoThe facts are quite clear: 1. A Canadian business posted an image of a sign criticizing the US administration 2. Soon after, their Instagram account was suspended. 3. This has happened before with their Twitter account, which they were able to get restored after a week. But you already knew that, and instead are making passive-aggressive insinuations. If you want to make an actual argument, make it. As for me, that along with the other facts I know about the Trump administration are more than enough to form an opinion: this isn’t evidence of a politically-motivated takedown, but it certainly fits the administration’s character, and I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
- accountrequired 1mo agoBut maybe it was because they started getting lots of attention and someone noticed they are promoting a strip club?
- jdlshore 1mo agoYep, that would make sense.
- derektank 1mo agoMeta is well known for having strict rules on nudity[0], particularly the display of women’s nipples. I would want to know the base rate at which the instagram accounts of strip clubs get suspended before assuming the motive was political. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g734pj22zo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g734pj22zo
- jdlshore 1mo agoThat’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis. The article says that they’re careful with what they post, but I haven’t actually looked up their content. It’s also possible that Meta just doesn’t want strip clubs on their platform at all, regardless of what they post.
- hougaard 1mo agoDrove past the club yesterday, the sign is still up with the lake joke.
- niemandhier 1mo agoThat is why less capable clones of US services get so much attention at the moment. Every time these end up on HN, someone says something along the lines of: ”I would not host in a country without 1st amendment rights.”
- wood_spirit 1mo agoAre the tech companies actively censoring or subtly deranking pro-Canada sentiment on their platforms? Or is this some activist doing takedowns?
- mukmuk 1mo agoCan one of the undoubtedly many meta employees reading this comment section speculate on why this happened?
- mukmuk 1mo agoWhy was this flagged?!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Walf 1mo ago'Murrican flagged.
- kwar13 1mo agoWhy is this 'flagged'?
- general1465 1mo ago[flagged]
- Cameri 1mo agoI’m sure lots of egos were bruised by that one neon sign.