Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE

skeledrew

Well, it's that or the accounts get removed completely. Sometimes you have to pick your fight, and this doesn't look like one that's worth it.

graemep

The title should read "Saudi Arabia". Cutting a country name in half (unless its an accepted way of abbreviating it) is not a good say of modifying a headline. What is next? Zealand ?

some_furry

Disappointing but not surprising. This is what happens when you're a billion dollar company and your ethical bone is tied to "we fully comply with the law". You get compliance by default , even if doing so would exacerbate human rights abuses.

anonym29

I look forward to the day that society finally decides to hold Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Apple etc accountable for their transgressions against humanity. Some say it will never happen, but they said that about the now-dying tobacco industry, too.

ktm5j

Do folks have a suggestion for a Facebook alternative? I'm about fed up with the state of things, but still want to feel connected to social circles (even if they're online only) and politics (ideally without the hate spam bots).

rvz

"principles", "Big Tech", "morals", "money", "ethics" and "I work at a big tech company" are all oxymorons.

nalekberov

That or they will be blocked completely. Who's naive enough to think that big corporations like Meta would care about human rights?

0x5FC3

Social media companies post record earnings year after year from their ads business while increasingly proving to be harmful to society. They do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots while priming the algorithms to maximize revenue. The good ol' privatized profits, socialized harm model. In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.

AussieWog93

Maybe I'm fatigued by a decade straight of people co-opting the language of human rights and progressivism in order to push the most insane agendas possible, or maybe I'm just the particular brand of contrarian that is common to HN, but I find it hard to take either the title or the article at face value. Who writes a carefully worded statement like this, in multiple languages, but then "accidentally" forgets to include details about who was blocked and why?

cs02rm0

The UAE is in Arabia. It's not in Saudi Arabia.

bogota

Is HN just reddit now? The comments on this are beyond stupid and add nothing of value or thought.

mmastrac

Meta is the worst of the worst. I don't use it other than a tombstone account with some family connections and a separate burner account we use for Facebook marketplace.

dbvn

A pro-democracy group in a non-democratic country got banned? whaaaaa? ... I mean their ideal outcome would be the toppling of the current government, so ya

groundzeros2015

What is a “human rights account”? Another reading of this headline is “Meta blocks western propaganda…l

throwaway5752

Every developer, and particularly every developer at Meta or who is thinking about working at or with Meta, should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People It is useful, because instead of being surprised and reading this article, you can nod your head and go about your day because you already knew they were a company that was rotten to its core.

nephihaha

Social media and Google tends to agree with the government of the place wherever they're in. That isn't democracy and we should probably realise it has done that in the west as well.

LogicFailsMe

The AMC TV series The Audacity has a scene where one of the tech sociopaths says that if one of the other tech sociopaths goes through with a plan to utterly destroy privacy (as a service) that it will cause the government to finally pass real privacy laws and then all the other sociopaths will gang up on him. Zuckerberg proves otherwise IMO. There doesn't seem to be a bottom to how low they can go.

booleandilemma

Trashy behavior from a trashy company.

dotcoma

Remember when they told us that social media would "spread democracy" ?

GeoAtreides

Let's not forget about the slave markets mobile apps: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50228549