Hacker News

Meta censored the No Kings Instagram account during a nationwide campaign(paulfwalsh.substack.com)

285 points by slowin 1 day ago | 76 comments

[–] gnabgib 1 day ago

Discussion (600 points, 11 days ago, 424 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136881

[–] slowin 1 day ago

Why on earth is that flagged?

[–] slim 1 day ago

Some king with flagging power flagged it

[–] nekusar 1 day ago

Its honestly one of the biggest problems with this site. Some large post, 400 comments in, gets flagged cause of a few snowflakes got their feelings hurt.

And instead of the article just not being shown to them, their whim is forced on everybody.

And even if it is an incendiary news article, the discussions are usually still better than average. But no, a few whinys kill it for everyone.

[–] fhdkweig 1 day ago

> gets flagged cause of a few snowflakes got their feelings hurt

correction: some guy got his wallet hurt.

It is clear to me that monied/political interests are on every platform, including this one.

[–] slowin 1 day ago

Indeed, flagging should be disabled for any post with more than like 50 upvotes.

[–] cowlevel 1 day ago

Then you'd see the opposite - you'd see brand new attack posts with 51 upvotes and no comments.

[–] slowin 1 day ago

Sounds better than flagging a post people are interested in.

[–] nekusar 1 day ago

I was looking more at quantity of posts, and not as much upvotes.

But nope, my original comment is flagged. Le sigh.

[–] alex1138 1 day ago

A bunch of people working in the industry with a vested interest in shaping narrative being able to flag any comment or post whenever. What could POSSIBLY go wrong

[–] aleksandrm 1 day ago

Not the first time, and not the last. They just did it again yesterday to Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon.

https://newrepublic.com/post/217281/meta-suspend-democratic-...

[–] Ancalagon 1 day ago

Getting the sense Meta's internal slogan is literally: "Be Evil."

[–] curt15 1 day ago

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/25/whistlebl...

[–] _doctor_love 1 day ago

I think what Zuck actually said was "companies over countries."

[–] arcanemachiner 1 day ago

That and "They trust me. Dumb fucks."

[–] altmanaltman 1 day ago

"No Kings, Just a Few Techno Lords" [0]

0 - provocative title of a blog post I wrote on this: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/no-kings-just-a-few-techno-lo...

[–] ks2048 1 day ago

“Move fast and break democracy”

[–] 40four 1 day ago

Meta can act like they don't know what's happening, but they do. As do all the other tech giants. They've been censoring and curating people feeds for a long time. This story is amusing since it's one instance where a "Team Blue" was affected. In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored.

There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices (https://americasdigitalshield.com/). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum.

Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.

[–] thrance 1 day ago

> In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored.

Source? They're certainly the ones whining about it the most, but studies show algorithms have been favoring their messages basically forever.

https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/more-evidence-that-cons...

[–] 40four 1 day ago

Source is the link that I posted. They study this specific topic, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a better data set out methodology I think.

https://americasdigitalshield.com/

The only major tech platform that leans red is Twitter after musk bought it, unsurprisingly.

Mind you, I’m not taking sides here. I gave up on both teams at least a decade ago. I just don’t think this is behavior we should allow from tech companies either direction.

[–] everforward 1 day ago

My not is that having a slant is perfectly acceptable, having tech companies so large that their comment policies affect the Overton Window isn’t.

I don’t have to care if the Washington Post or Financial Times have a political leaning, there are alternatives. Less so with Instagram. You can pry Facebook out of my mothers dead hands when that day comes.

[–] felixgallo 1 day ago

the 'team red is being silenced' nonsense was, and is, a transparently synthetic attempt to promote right-wing discourse no matter how ridiculous it was. You may remember that Elon "free speech absolutist" Musk was the champion of this meme, claiming that Twitter was suppressing right wing views, and that every single one of his and Matt Taibbi's claims turned out to have been false or overblown.

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

Except the team red messages were demonstrably false and related to factual claims. No kings is pure opinion.

[–] kaldev 1 day ago

I felt like this whole thing is extremely inorganic. Funded by a WalMart heiress, website went up hours before a massive NYT ad buy, and (in my opinion) what felt like lot of coordinated / paid / botted engagement.

Idk, I don't want the internet to be dictated by followers/engagement that can be easily botted via a SMM panel for pennies.

[–] jfengel 1 day ago

How do I get in on that gig? I showed up because I thought I was protecting democracy from a felon who is taking billions in bribes. Like a chump!

[–] kaldev 1 day ago

Gambling companies literally pay people to post on twitter?

You can go to an SMM panel right now and get a bot farm to rebrand tens of thousands of accounts on any platform to align with your messaging and spam the fuck out of replies to manufacture consensus. There is a very high chance this exact playbook worked on you lol.

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

Bs. The facts are clear and independently verifiable. The Dutch government saw Jared k laundering money in real time. Trump is literally bribing voters from the stump. We literally invaded Venezuela took their oil and gold and transferred it to an a foreign bank account controlled by the executive rather than congress. There is an actual active market for bribery to buy pardons and get insider information about presidential policy for trading activities. I can go on and on.

[–] nitwit005 1 day ago

The call to protest at some specific location and time might be "artificial", but people have to want to protest. Trump has simply managed to inspire millions to do so.

[–] dualvariable 1 day ago

I feel like your reply is extremely inorganic.

And how come criticizing left-wing protests is fine, but bringing up right-wing botting/trolling operations on this website isn't?

"Curious..."

[–] jeremyjh 1 day ago

It’s really hard to believe how much people hate that dumb motherfucker?

[–] kaldev 1 day ago

People def do and that's totally fine. You don't feel like the fact that this "movement" is funded by a WalMart heiress is fishy? Full page NYT ads trying to mobilize people into protest?

Organic protests of any sort is fine. Between this shit and the "ChaoticGood" marketing operation ran for Geese, you cannot begin to understand how much of the interaction you see on the web is bought and paid for.

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

This is an ad hominem attack. It doesn’t matter what the origin of a fact is if it is verifiable and accurate.

[–] delecti 1 day ago

Elon is the largest individual political donor ever. I think a billionaire funding counter-protests is not that fishy in contrast.

I don't think a movement having a bit of funding for the organizers is that big of a deal though. The actual protesters are there because they want to be.

Edit: He's actually the largest individual political donor ever within a single political cycle, which is still quite significant (he's outspending the next largest in this cycle by about 3:1), but also very different. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/tracking-the-money...

[–] CGMthrowaway 1 day ago

I think Elon's big political contributions didn't begin until 2024, so pretty recent.

Do we know who was the largest individual political donor prior to Elon?

[–] delecti 1 day ago

I misheard the figure. He's actually the largest individual political donor ever within a single political cycle. I've updated my comment.

I'm not really sure who the largest cumulative donor would be. I tried to find that, and didn't feel like I was getting close to the answer.

[–] anigbrowl 1 day ago

It is inorganic, but no more so than the MAGA rallies. They're not trying to hide that they're organized by and on behalf of the Democratic party.

I also think they're pretty cringe, but that seems orthogonal to the question of why Meta is censoring their accounts. I haven't seen any suggestion that they violated meta's policies.

[–] NicoJuicy 1 day ago

I think a guy selling his own bible is more fishy.

Or a million dollar lottery ticket if you vote republican.

Or Oracle buying news stations and papers with the son of president.

But that's just my opinion

[–] stickfigure 1 day ago

How does it feel to be part of Putin's disinformation campaign?

What, you don't enjoy having your opinions dismissed because someone famous shares them?

[–] foobarchu 1 day ago

> Full page NYT ads trying to mobilize people into protest?

You don't think the fullblown fascist takeover of the American government warrants that? Agree to disagree I guess.

[–] cosmicgadget 1 day ago

The headline is old news but the shifting explanations is entertaining.

"Claude's fault."

[–] jey 1 day ago

I'm not a Meta fan or anything, but this does seem kind of tricky to deal with. Specifically that pages/topics which get sudden influx of activity at once can look similar to a coordinated spam campaign. Especially if combined with being flagged opponents who don't want to see that content. It seems like it could be hard to tell the two apart, or at least the false positives seem hard to control.

Can anyone with more experience on these kinds of spam/fraud detection systems could chime in?

[–] MiroslavPokorny 1 day ago

What a shock, who knew Big Tech was owned by the US gov.

[–] blooalien 1 day ago

> ... who knew Big Tech was owned by the US gov.

And vice-versa. Their parasitism flows both directions.

[–] Kalanos 1 day ago

such hypocrisy because free speech is always their excuse not in intervene in algorithms

[–] bensonperry 1 day ago

one thing i rarely see discussed here... okay, let's assume that meta intentionally has people internally that do things like "bring down the No Kings page specifically at this specific time for political gain." this is like conspiracy level stuff. do you think people at meta aren't liberal and care about this as well? if they were actually doing this people internally would be whistleblowing like crazy

[–] Ancalagon 1 day ago

have you met some of the upper management at companies?

nevermind that. you know companies like Palantir and Flock exist, each with hundreds or thousands of employees?

There's plenty of sociopathy and apathy to go around.

[–] jeremyjh 1 day ago

Upper management usually do not personally have direct operational control of systems. Sometimes they will have a flunky, but these are heavily audited systems. Other people can review what happened without asking anyone's permission.

[–] solid_fuel 1 day ago

After the crap they pulled in the latest Brazilian election, there is no reason to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. They are obviously and intentionally trying to use their extreme influence over online communities to influence elections.

Watch for more fuckery during the current US election season.

[–] pino83 1 day ago

People give away our planet and our souls to Facebook since decades now. Everyone knew someone who was uncomfortable with that and who asked whether a little less Facebook wouldn't be more healthy. These ones got ignored.

So, well, I don't like fascists. But if Facebook now makes use of the fact that you gave our world to them, it's hard to blame them for that.

People failed in that regard. Not Facebook. They succeeded. People failed.

[–] freejazz 1 day ago

Oh yeah, no murderers, just a system that makes them...

[–] yodsanklai 1 day ago

"Never attribute to evil that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

[–] lioeters 18 hours ago

"Always attribute to evil that which pretends to be incompetence but results in political or financial gain"

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

Remember when zuck considered a presidential run when he saw how Facebook could sway voters and elections? And then Elon bought twitter for the same reason? We are fortunate for their awkward detestable personalities, otherwise they would have had a shot.

[–] dabinat 1 day ago

Luckily Elon was born in South Africa and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although he has enough money to pull the strings of whoever’s in power, so it probably doesn’t make much difference.

[–] dcl 1 day ago

Remember when <obviously equally detestable but probably far less capable person> from <party> ran for president and had the support of <the mainstream media> to sway voters and elections?

[–] digitaltrees 1 day ago

Conveniently left out the most important fact: also has voting control of the world's largest distribution channel and social network. Try again.

[–] gigatexal 1 day ago

When the Dems take Congress good ol’ Zuck will be woke again. The man has no spine. And because he doesn’t his share price has skyrocketed.

[–] jfengel 1 day ago

Congress is largely impotent. Even if Democrats take both houses, it won't be by a veto-proof majority. Congress was designed to be "deliberative", so it has ceded more and more power to the executive branch just so anything actually gets done.

Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.

[–] gigatexal 1 day ago

Step 1 take Congress. Step 2 in 2028 take the White House. Step 3 start fixing all the damage of the last 2 Trump administrations. I’m long the US. We will get there.

Of course he knows where his bread is buttered. And he will cozy up to the new powers too. He has no spine. No moral code. It’s all power and money and meta. Fine. Good for shareholders. Bad for young men everywhere trying to pattern themselves after these barrons of industry.

[–] laweijfmvo 1 day ago

they’ll probably get Congress, and hopefully the presidency in 2028. then they have two years to convince the people who begrudgingly voted for them that they’re doing well, all while those people sit down and watch Fox News every night tell them how awful everything is now.

[–] karmakurtisaani 22 hours ago

"Look how badly the democrats are handling the Iran war! They have completely failed to restore the trust of our allies in Europe! They did not even televise the execution of the treasonous Trump administration!"

Ok, the last part is wishful thinking, but for sure the dems will be blamed for not fixing Trumps failures fast enough.

[–] gigatexal 22 hours ago

Yup and amidst all this chaos giant companies (the new east India companies) will run roughshot over everything. I still hope a new administration would have taken Elon to task for giant nitrogen oxide spewing gas turbines for his data center in lower income largely black towns. I can hope I guess.

[–] aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 1 day ago

Step 1.5 subpoena everything.

[–] alex1138 1 day ago

I have to agree. The man has always been accused of stealing from others going back to the Winklevosses. He'll take any side is expedient regardless of what you (general 'you') think politically

[–] nodesocket 1 day ago

Welcome to the party. Remember during covid if you even questioned the lockdowns, mask effectiveness, vaccines you were shadow blocked or even banned. This is why Elon buying Twitter was such a big deal.

[–] alex1138 1 day ago

I don't know whether to reply to you or slowin's reply but this is correct. And I tend not to think it was Dorsey's fault. And apparently Musk has indeed made a mess of Twitter but it's also wrong to assume there weren't massive problems with old Twitter too

[–] slowin 1 day ago

Musk's Twitter censors people constantly. Look at the Elon jet tracker account. Many people have also been banned for questioning Israel.

[–] dualvariable 1 day ago

Meta just pushed some Heritage Foundation post on me today.

I aggressively block/hide anything right-wing, and yet somehow "the algorithm" thought I'd be really into that...

[–] pino83 7 hours ago

Everyone with a Meta account is either right-wing or a "useful idiot" (that's the common term, right?).