A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave:
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents?
2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
Trying to change things materially from the inside against the wishes of the higher ups probably means your career stalls or you'll be fired anyway. From the perspective of your career, you may as well find a new job while you have the leverage from the current one and then make your statement as you leave. There is almost nothing a non C-suite person can do to change things in this context.
I'm not pretending there isn't very real risk of retribution, but I do think this can be done under the protections under the NLRA so long as it's done right (as in, seek legal guidance first).
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
I also think your comments diminishes the actual impact lots of folks have had, such as stopping donation to certain PACs. Relative to many other groups of workers, tech workers actually have more leverage.
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
I wonder if an alternative could be found - for example the state funds an independent news organisation that gets access to everything they are doing by law, and turns up at offices, and asks questions, joins meetings, etc. Refusing to share information counts as criminal and a director gets shipped to prison every week until the situation resolves itself.
> 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
I hope I will never be in that situation to make that decision; but seeing the fate of the different whistleblowers (in the USA) it seems you need to be almost suicidal to blow the whistle.
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
People who work at Facebook and complain about this strike me as incredible naive. They work for the devil in exchange for huge sums of money, but are then shocked that the devil partakes in devious acts.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company.
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
Your argument would carry more weight if the employees weren’t getting paid absurd sums of money. It’s very easy to stick around and keep getting rich while signing petitions and virtue signaling on social media.
Okay. So the idea is to keep helping to overthrow democracy hoping that you'll get a chance to leak something?
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
That's because you have some idea of morals and ethics. If people were ethical to begin with they wouldn't have to denounce anything: they wouldn't be working there in the first place.
Yeah this is one of my biggest questions from a lot of the high profile departures during the Trump admin early days (both times probably). Sure, you save face a little maybe, and you register your protest, but then you are replaced with a yes man almost certainly, which is significantly worse.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I get the sentiment but basically you say that people need to join corrupt fucked up organisations to make them better.
Like if you don’t join and improve things, some kind of psychopath will join in your stead and make things worse.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?
He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.
The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.
If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.
At least you're being honest about the fact that you're selling out. Many people working there believe that they're making the world a better place, or think that Meta is just another amoral company like the many others, or that they as an individual aren't contributing to the negative impacts. Money will do strange things to good people.
there's a reason this is a meme and not one of the Ten Commandments haha
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
Yea, but they don't have to act like they are doing society a big favor. People are angry because they said "We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy". When we all know what they are creating....
The fewer people that are willing to work there, the dumber and less effective metas bullshit continues to be. Look at the Trump Admin - anybody who is still there sucks at their job. The damage they’ve done is immeasurable but it seems to be backfiring pretty significantly. Meta is successful because of the smart motivated people who continue to work there. Turn it into a confederacy of dunces. Quit your job.
You don't know how many people have already quit. You don't know how many will quit. But you do know that someone that quits also loses any influence they have on the decisions.
Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.
Palpatine is quite mesmerizing. He will invite to his yatch, island, show you toys etc. "You want to be like me do what I say". Works on most of the chimp troupe since the dawn of time. #TheoryoftheLeisureClass
That's not completely realistic. A lot of people are attracted to companies like Meta because of unusually large paychecks. The whole "making the world a better place" schtick is just the whitewashing to help make them feel good about it.
The situation everywhere looks dire. These aren‘t social media platforms anymore but tools for propaganda and repression against opposition groups across different countries.
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
The American propaganda platforms have for a long time been helping the US regime to undermine democracies around the world. More and more Europeans are realising that the Nerd Reich are supporting the far right movements in Europe, helping Trump and his friend Putin in destabilising European democracies.
Hoping that Brazil and Lula will issue an international arrest warrant for Zuckerberg for being a foreign agent interfering in a sovereign state's election.
Germany should do the same with Musk.
Meanwhile, a couple of oligarchs are positioning convenient AI summaries in between us and all of the world's information. Talk about a useful tool to control people...
"International election observers have raised concerns about Meta’s platforms. Incidents include temporary interruptions of one candidate’s campaign account; differences in audience engagement, user feeds, view counts and reach; restrictions on that campaign’s Instagram posts; and differences between the main political parties in AI image generation, WhatsApp channel search results, candidates’ Stories and the distribution of political content potentially benefiting the opposing candidate’s campaign."
I found that Lula's team was unable to pay to boost posts for about 24 hours, which was a bug that affected other accounts too.
Meta also changed the search algorithm to trigger account matching after 5 characters, which would make "@lulaofficial" not the top recommendation for everyone who only typed "lula".
The rumors about what happened are crazy. These things would be so easy to report in any of the news articles, but instead everyone is just guessing and sharing rumors.
Sorry all. I'm very slow here. The linked story only talks about a group within Meta showing concern with concernable events. What was the event?
I'm slow because this article doesn't describe it: and believe it or not, I use this website as a source of "breaking" news, so I sincerely would like to know.
Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations
Really depends on the political climate. Such a ban is very difficult for two main reasons:
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
Short-term is the only thing that matters for billionaires. If they cared for the future they will not do the things that they do.
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.
I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.
There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted".
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
> If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
And it works! Nearly every comment here is just riffing on how this was definitely intentional and further evidence of the commenter's preconceived notions of Meta, etc, etc.
Tech fascism is panicking universally as the algorithmic manipulation doesn't seem to work anymore as people are getting more and more aware of the tactics.
Honestly, in 2018 Meta *allegedly* interfered in the other direction. It basically goes along with who the US President is. This discourse is just to stoke division and promote censorship and bigger government control.
Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.
> Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.
I couldn't figure it out from this link or any other English news articles. After some searching and translating Brazilian language articles I found some complaints that they were unable to pay Instagram to boost their posts for a day, but that outage applied to many accounts. There was another problem where Instagram changed the search algorithm to only trigger account matching after 5 characters were typed, making "Lula" harder to find, but that's a global change. There are scattered additional complaints about IG stories losing a few seconds and political restrictions on AI tools not triggering equally for both candidates.
Here's another example, where Meta's AI was asked to make a voting poster for the election, made it about voting for Bolsonaro unprompted, then when asked to make one for Lula said it couldn't make one for political candidates: https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
It’s easy to hand wave that stuff as mysteries of the LLMs. Much stronger case now that these employees have spoken out about it. I hope they can point to specific cases.
This will damage Meta's business. As the meme that they cannot be trusted spreads alternative methods of communication will revive, and start to flourish
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
yes, it's measured roughly with "financial wealth". Finer details like "number of baby momma's" and "number of dollars donated to political groups" can be used to break ties.
> If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
Well, no. If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
> If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
> I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
That’s a rather binary and extreme way to see things. It doesn’t scale well if everyone acted like that.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
If we're just wishing for everyone to behave exactly how we want, you might as well just wish for the company operators and executives to behave exactly how you want as well. And then you don't need to coordinate the much larger employees group.
That's the point. You can denounce something easily enough. But there is no pricetag attached to that so it means absolutely nothing if you continue to enable the company that does these things. Like the 100's of times before that 'Meta' (Facebook) did stuff that was despicable. They continued to work there.
A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company. The question is, if the people that actually care and push back leave:
1. Will this increase or decrease the incidents? 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future? 3. Will anyone else inside work for or against this happening?
Which way do we want things to go?
I don't mean to say it's clearly this or that. I think it's a genuinely interesting and challenging dilemma. Do I continue working someplace that is involved in something evil but try and provide a voice, push, influence, or, if nothing else, a voice to the outside of the goings on inside, or do I separate myself and work only from the outside?
We can imagine the same for law enforcement, military, defence contractors, government, and any number of other vectors and industries.
Snowden was working from the inside before he leaked what he did. Every single whistleblower was involved first.
Trying to change things materially from the inside against the wishes of the higher ups probably means your career stalls or you'll be fired anyway. From the perspective of your career, you may as well find a new job while you have the leverage from the current one and then make your statement as you leave. There is almost nothing a non C-suite person can do to change things in this context.
I'm not pretending there isn't very real risk of retribution, but I do think this can be done under the protections under the NLRA so long as it's done right (as in, seek legal guidance first).
This also isn't to fault anyone who instead chooses to leave, instead.
I also think your comments diminishes the actual impact lots of folks have had, such as stopping donation to certain PACs. Relative to many other groups of workers, tech workers actually have more leverage.
Sometimes people have to choose between doing the right thing and doing the easy thing.
"Which way do we want things to go?"
Well ideally we want companies and governments to be trustworthy and that only works with trustworthy individuals, but here in this case I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution.
Remember how it started? Zuckerberg literally said about his users: ‘They “trust me.” Dumb f--ks’.
This is the base the company has been operating since the beginning, just got better at hiding it, but now some masks are slipping again.
> I can only see Meta dissolving as a solution
I wonder if an alternative could be found - for example the state funds an independent news organisation that gets access to everything they are doing by law, and turns up at offices, and asks questions, joins meetings, etc. Refusing to share information counts as criminal and a director gets shipped to prison every week until the situation resolves itself.
> 2. Will we know more or less about these incidents in the future?
The letter was from a UK communication worker's union and no article I can find includes the number of employees who signed the letter or their roles a Meta.
With how much is being obscured about the signers of the letter and their location, I think it's unlikely they were involved with the incident at all.
They're just signing a letter protesting it.
I hope I will never be in that situation to make that decision; but seeing the fate of the different whistleblowers (in the USA) it seems you need to be almost suicidal to blow the whistle.
Like your life will basically be ruined for a long time, maybe forever.
People who work at Facebook and complain about this strike me as incredible naive. They work for the devil in exchange for huge sums of money, but are then shocked that the devil partakes in devious acts.
Neither leaving in protest nor staying would really change much. As long as someone is willing to do the dirty work, it'll continue to get done.
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company.
Yes, that sounds awfully suspicious and counterproductive. It sounds like they actually want to silence any reference to wrongdoing, as if potential whistleblowers and offenders must be held accountable to deeply contrasting morality bars.
To me, asking people who object to their employer's moral, ethical, and/or criminal violations to resign and go away has the same vibes as calling for people who criticism the government to exile: their goal is not to fix things, is to silence dissent.
Your argument would carry more weight if the employees weren’t getting paid absurd sums of money. It’s very easy to stick around and keep getting rich while signing petitions and virtue signaling on social media.
Imo the highest leverage thing they could do is unionize
This made me remember the DHH and the 37signals drama, showing how hard it is to go against the management: https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hand...
Okay. So the idea is to keep helping to overthrow democracy hoping that you'll get a chance to leak something?
And yes, working for META means doing your part to overthrow democracy. It's company strategy to do so, and like it or not, working for META means you are "just following orders" in this enterprise.
I couldn't live like that for long.
That's because you have some idea of morals and ethics. If people were ethical to begin with they wouldn't have to denounce anything: they wouldn't be working there in the first place.
Yeah this is one of my biggest questions from a lot of the high profile departures during the Trump admin early days (both times probably). Sure, you save face a little maybe, and you register your protest, but then you are replaced with a yes man almost certainly, which is significantly worse.
But also, then, I know exactly how I would feel about continuing to work if my purpose is now to just be a roadblock. It must be pretty demoralizing and can you really ask that of someone else or be upset if they aren't up for that? I would certainly be tempted to jump ship for a chance to get paid better doing something I enjoy.
I get the sentiment but basically you say that people need to join corrupt fucked up organisations to make them better. Like if you don’t join and improve things, some kind of psychopath will join in your stead and make things worse.
I don’t think that’s a helpful way to think about it.
You’re not required to improve things anywhere and you can leave a toxic (work)relationship if that’s what you need.
The problem is not that power corrupts; it’s more that power attracts corruptible people
> A lot of people are implying that people that object should leave the company
Another obvious point is: those computer programmers, and related professions, are now precarious employees.
Times have changed, there are redundant computists all over the place. Telling people they should leave the job that feeds their family because of short sighted management is cruel
Meta employees still cash checks from evil company not realizing all the interference is possible due to them showing up to work every day.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Yea Meta is the only possible company you can work at…
> Yea Meta is the only possible company you can work at…
If you care about preventing Meta from doing evil things, you have far more influence and power over that if you work for Meta.
How are lower-level workers supposed to influence a crank like Zuckerberg?
He owns the company and all of its decisions. He is literally accountable to no one, from the board down.
The only viable action here is to do what the Brazilian government are going to do - document the abuses, and fine the company into oblivion and/or ban it if it doesn't behave itself.
If the US ever recovers democracy itself, pass the documentation on to the new US government.
How? If you don’t follow orders you get fired eventually. No one has any real power at Meta other than Zuck.
I'd sell out and work for them if it means I can retire at 40.
At least you're being honest about the fact that you're selling out. Many people working there believe that they're making the world a better place, or think that Meta is just another amoral company like the many others, or that they as an individual aren't contributing to the negative impacts. Money will do strange things to good people.
Believe it or not if you can work at meta you can easily choose to not do that
there's a reason this is a meme and not one of the Ten Commandments haha
people are not questioning whether or not the goal is good or bad. they're showing that the Concern is really a Concern Troll. that is, their concerns aren't really sincere.
that said i think the appropriate meme for this is the Big Chin guy
Even if 500 employees refuse to show up to work because of this, Meta will easily replace them within a month if not a week.
If Meta keeps those positions at all.
Yea, but they don't have to act like they are doing society a big favor. People are angry because they said "We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy". When we all know what they are creating....
The fewer people that are willing to work there, the dumber and less effective metas bullshit continues to be. Look at the Trump Admin - anybody who is still there sucks at their job. The damage they’ve done is immeasurable but it seems to be backfiring pretty significantly. Meta is successful because of the smart motivated people who continue to work there. Turn it into a confederacy of dunces. Quit your job.
You don't know how many people have already quit. You don't know how many will quit. But you do know that someone that quits also loses any influence they have on the decisions.
That's true, but I think it's much more effective for them to protest than just leave. And personally I prefer there's more decent employees at Meta.
Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done
A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26184/pg26184-images.ht...
TBH I question the ethics of most big tech employees, but Meta is definitely the grossest money-grubbing hog pit of them all. I instantly lose respect for people who sell themselves to carry out the wishes of the billionaire elites like that. They'd be powerless without their legions of storm troopers.
Palpatine is quite mesmerizing. He will invite to his yatch, island, show you toys etc. "You want to be like me do what I say". Works on most of the chimp troupe since the dawn of time. #TheoryoftheLeisureClass
Nah, not like this. It's mostly brainwashing into thinking you are doing good things.
Banality of the evil. Hannah Arendt.
Banality of evil hits the spot on so many things these days.
That's not completely realistic. A lot of people are attracted to companies like Meta because of unusually large paychecks. The whole "making the world a better place" schtick is just the whitewashing to help make them feel good about it.
The situation everywhere looks dire. These aren‘t social media platforms anymore but tools for propaganda and repression against opposition groups across different countries.
> 25.10.2026: Meta removed three prominent satire pages from Facebook the day before presidential elections in Bulgaria.
> Shortly after the deletion they were recreated and gathered tens of thousands of followers within hours. Less than 24h later Meta removed them again. Due to past incidents involvement of security forces is suspected. No meaningful response from Meta as usual.
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/yurukov.yurukov.net/post/3myozobbcy...
The American propaganda platforms have for a long time been helping the US regime to undermine democracies around the world. More and more Europeans are realising that the Nerd Reich are supporting the far right movements in Europe, helping Trump and his friend Putin in destabilising European democracies. Hoping that Brazil and Lula will issue an international arrest warrant for Zuckerberg for being a foreign agent interfering in a sovereign state's election. Germany should do the same with Musk.
Lula is a friend of Putin. The other candidate is a friend of Trump.
Meanwhile, a couple of oligarchs are positioning convenient AI summaries in between us and all of the world's information. Talk about a useful tool to control people...
No actual details or evidence of favoritism backing the claims.
"International election observers have raised concerns about Meta’s platforms. Incidents include temporary interruptions of one candidate’s campaign account; differences in audience engagement, user feeds, view counts and reach; restrictions on that campaign’s Instagram posts; and differences between the main political parties in AI image generation, WhatsApp channel search results, candidates’ Stories and the distribution of political content potentially benefiting the opposing candidate’s campaign."
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/10/meta-must-pr...
Sounds like they spoke to their lawyers first.
Is there a description of what Meta to help Flavio? The article just makes vague assertions.
If I recall, they banned Lula's account and promoted Flavio super hard in the recommendations feeds.
I don't think you recall correctly
I found that Lula's team was unable to pay to boost posts for about 24 hours, which was a bug that affected other accounts too.
Meta also changed the search algorithm to trigger account matching after 5 characters, which would make "@lulaofficial" not the top recommendation for everyone who only typed "lula".
The rumors about what happened are crazy. These things would be so easy to report in any of the news articles, but instead everyone is just guessing and sharing rumors.
Sorry all. I'm very slow here. The linked story only talks about a group within Meta showing concern with concernable events. What was the event?
I'm slow because this article doesn't describe it: and believe it or not, I use this website as a source of "breaking" news, so I sincerely would like to know.
EDIT: ahh p2detar has something real: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50248577
Feels to me it was established in 2021 that the major platforms had the power to place potentates and pretenders under Interdict.
Company influences politics for shareholder value, not a surprise at all. This was just the time they got caught and I bet the other MAG7 are doing it in some form too even if its just massive donations
These behaviors are only short term beneficial for the company. Eventually they will just get banned in other nations as a threat to sovereignty.
Really depends on the political climate. Such a ban is very difficult for two main reasons:
1. It's going to be very unpopular, enabling the domestic opposition to take advantage rhetorically. Without a local mandate it's political suicide, so you'd need to build up to it for a while and turn the public against Facebook/Instagram. Tricky if that's their primary mode of engagement with community/news/entertainment.
2. An attack on a powerful private company tends to scare other capital owners. If you depend on donors and local (or international) businesses to maintain your lifestyle or electoral viability then it can be tricky to convince them that your ban is limited in scope and won't prompt additional regulatory action or contribute to a social shift of people expecting more from their leaders. If you fail to provide adequate assurances then capital is likely to side with Meta and sink you for trying to cut them off.
Short-term is the only thing that matters for billionaires. If they cared for the future they will not do the things that they do.
Also, if you help a dictator-wanna-be to take power you may get a election short-term but a country long-term. Billionaires are not very friendly towards democracy or the working class.
"I'm fine with this"
Probably Zuckerberg's gravestone
He probably made hundreds of millions off it.
And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.
I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.
There are so many English articles about this topic that never explain what happened. I clicked on everything from Reuters to Al Jazeera and they're all reciting the same line about "accounts restricted".
The best I could find was from some translations of paywalled Brazilian articles like this one https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2026/10/em-mensagens-int...
The "account restriction" was a period of about 24 hours where Instagram's "Boost Post" feature wasn't working for some accounts, including Lula's. The ads were still shown, but the part to add more money for the boosts wasn't working that day.
There's another complaint about not being able to search for "Lula" and get the exact account after they changed the global search to require 5 characters to identify accounts.
There are additional accusations of things like some stories posts getting cut short and the AI tool not applying political restrictions equally.
A lot of the articles imply the "internal communications" caught them red-handed doing these things intentionally, but as far as I can tell those internal communications are just them responding to the issues? If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
That's the context I could find after not getting much useful information from this link. I know this comment is going to make some people angry but to clear I'm only trying to figure out what these articles are talking about.
> If there was a leaked internal communication about them disrupting elections, the news stories would probably lead with that instead of dancing around the subject.
And it works! Nearly every comment here is just riffing on how this was definitely intentional and further evidence of the commenter's preconceived notions of Meta, etc, etc.
Far from every comments.
There’s a lot of yous…
Tech fascism is panicking universally as the algorithmic manipulation doesn't seem to work anymore as people are getting more and more aware of the tactics.
Honestly, in 2018 Meta *allegedly* interfered in the other direction. It basically goes along with who the US President is. This discourse is just to stoke division and promote censorship and bigger government control.
Related:
Meta employees say Lula’s accounts restricted in Brazil election
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227639
Lula wins election after final votes tallied
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237485
Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares. You have to have reforms around that first. Cambridge Analytica, the Metaverse, the New Mexico judgment... all examples of things that would have gotten any other CEO canned due to their damage to the bottom line, but Mark doesn't have to worry, because he's not going to vote himself out.
> Any calls for Meta to change are useless until Mark Zuckerberg no longer holds a majority of voting shares.
That's not true. Zuckerberg blinked when the share price hit the 90s in 2022. Despite holding the vote, he started listening to external investors more.
For those not in the loop, what are the actions that "have been programmatically made user-facing to such an obvious and biased extent"?
I couldn't figure it out from this link or any other English news articles. After some searching and translating Brazilian language articles I found some complaints that they were unable to pay Instagram to boost their posts for a day, but that outage applied to many accounts. There was another problem where Instagram changed the search algorithm to only trigger account matching after 5 characters were typed, making "Lula" harder to find, but that's a global change. There are scattered additional complaints about IG stories losing a few seconds and political restrictions on AI tools not triggering equally for both candidates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227639
Here's another example, where Meta's AI was asked to make a voting poster for the election, made it about voting for Bolsonaro unprompted, then when asked to make one for Lula said it couldn't make one for political candidates: https://www.reddit.com/r/brasil/comments/1x965on/eu_n%C3%A3o...
It’s easy to hand wave that stuff as mysteries of the LLMs. Much stronger case now that these employees have spoken out about it. I hope they can point to specific cases.
This will damage Meta's business. As the meme that they cannot be trusted spreads alternative methods of communication will revive, and start to flourish
Trust does matter. Hard to win, easier to loose, and no matter how big you are, how mean you seem, you can still sicken and die
"We Meta employees want to build technologies and platforms that millions of people use and enjoy."
We Palantir employees want to build software tools for clients to combine, clean, and make sense of their own scattered datasets
Is there a competition among the tech pros for who becomes the most hated tech bro in the world?
yes, it's measured roughly with "financial wealth". Finer details like "number of baby momma's" and "number of dollars donated to political groups" can be used to break ties.
To me this is just virtue signaling while cashing a $200K+ salary from evil corp. plus probably puts a target on your back.
If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press. Climb the ladder as high as possible and infiltrate top leadership.
> If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press
I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.
meddling in elections and enabling genocide, the company
Armaments factory employees denounce bombs.
I think it's more they object to where the bombs got dropped.
So, they all resigned?
Yes we can say that and mock them. But you know what, if they did resign, Meta would replace them with a worse lot. With lower morals.
So we should rather want these people to stay on for as long as possible, and make it hard for Meta to pull off such shit.
Well, no. If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out.
Meta will not stop short of government action and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place. Zuckerberg may have some excuse (say, they showed him a documentary about Jack Ma) but he definitely either folded or just straight up decided to comply in advance.
> If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out
So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?
This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here
Fair enough, but wouldn’t you rather have someone accept complicity - but try what they can, instead of someone who follows blindly?
The world exists in shades of grey my friend..
> I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is happening at the request of that government in the first place
You wouldn't be surprised if the incumbent candidate requested that Meta platform and systematically encourage voting for their rightwing opponent? What do you think happened here?
And as for me, I want people with morals to stick around and try to influence things in a positive direction. It's so easy to get on one's high horse and say "then go elsewhere", but everyone acting like that is a short path to a worse world. Tend the gardens you are in while you can, but I don't blame anyone who just can't carry that torch day-in, day-out.
That’s a rather binary and extreme way to see things. It doesn’t scale well if everyone acted like that.
It's better that people in these organizations feel they can speak up. If they have to choose between saying nothing or resigning, many would simply say nothing. And how is that situation any better?
On the contrary, it would scale very well if everyone acted like that.
If we're just wishing for everyone to behave exactly how we want, you might as well just wish for the company operators and executives to behave exactly how you want as well. And then you don't need to coordinate the much larger employees group.
That's the point. You can denounce something easily enough. But there is no pricetag attached to that so it means absolutely nothing if you continue to enable the company that does these things. Like the 100's of times before that 'Meta' (Facebook) did stuff that was despicable. They continued to work there.
Perhaps some fired, others promoted.
I'm going to make a very bold claim here... block those 2 big ones and you will fix a lot of what's going on the planet right now.
That shouldn't be downvoted but keep in mind how many people cash a paycheck every two weeks from those places.