In 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.
You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook. When you invest your life into platforms run by for profit corporations, you agree to play by their rules. Merging state and big tech is not going to help.
> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.
For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.
Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.
Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.
It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.
Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
I'm british, so I am not an absolutist by any stretch of the meaning. I just know that whenever I have queried why companies like facebook are not held liable for the content they promote, I am told that the 1st amendment allows them to do pretty much what they like, along with Section 230
Agreed but Meta also banned a standing US president, under pressure from other Americans that claim they believe in free speech. It's clear that Meta doesn't stand for free speech and will ban anyone. It's also clear that many in the US don't want free speech, they only want their speech to be free.
Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms. There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
There are laws the restricting speech. There are laws for preventing people from platforms in some cases.
Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
> Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms.
A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
There were plenty of "specific, articulable reasons" to ban that account for rule violations
There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
When the standing president uses his speech to incite violence at the capital, attempt a coup, spread proven lies about health issues directly harming citizens...
oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
I think your comment, perhaps unintentionally, downplays the seriousness of the January 6th coup attempt.
America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.
He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.
If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.
You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.
That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.
Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.
Which is true here, except "do anything you want" is "be displeasing to Kuwait".
It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
> It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.
This is either an "ought to be* statement or it is a deliberate misreading of section 230 and case law. Representatives have proposed enacting this, many times, but platform neutrality is not a requirement under current law.
In a sane world the Twitter files published out of X would have had more attention. The FBI having Twitter deleting posts and banning accounts sounds like the most blatant violation of the First Amendment I've ever seen in my life, but here we are in a world where nobody cares about that. It's only bad when the other side does it will wind us all up in a world where there is no more free speech to go around because we've sold it all off for politics.
I 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.
So 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.
Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The US is only a bastion of free speech when what is said aligns to their thinking and goals. UK is the same - if not worse.
They also try to drive to canada with their guns, and believe they can't be "foreigners" because they're american. 30% of americans are functionally illiterate, no surprise really.
Embarrassing, but the statistic cited there is 6 cases in 2017 for a single crossing point, looks like there are ~1.5M visits a year[1] so I would imagine even if we're talking hundreds of cases (generous), still not too common?
I've seen plenty of waiters, taxi drivers, etc., be quite happy to receive tips in USD in many countries where USD is not the official currency. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I've seen such a tip be rejected because of its currency.
That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
US currency is accepted in a surprisingly large number of countries abroad. Just not in Europe proper. US dollars are even accepted in some European sovereign territories outside of Europe.
It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
I 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"
"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)
This seems to be "unverified accusations from critics". It's not really fair to accuse someone from this.
Do not underestimate Meta for being purely immoral. I'm pretty sure they would assisted russians with persecution if they wouldn't now about potential backlash.
It 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.
This is ridiculous. The only ones afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood are Middle Eastern dictatorships, who would rather not see a political movement take popular hold.
The British invaded and subjugated Egypt, and we're still there in the 1940s, when the British Empire starved millions of Bengalus to death, just like they had done in Ireland a century earlier. Yes the Muslim Brotherhood were against their colonial oppressors, the British. They even started friendly relations for the power then opposed to their colonial oppressors, Germany.
Crazy 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.
Elon 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.
I 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.
Right, 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.
They 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.
The 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.
Well, 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.
Google (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:
Fascinating 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
My 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.
Did 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.
Then 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.
In 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.
You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook. When you invest your life into platforms run by for profit corporations, you agree to play by their rules. Merging state and big tech is not going to help.
You have many constitutional protections that do apply in business relationships. Extending that list is at minimum worth considering.
> You don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
> requires companies to provide a specific, articulable reason for suspending accounts
wouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?
You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
i disagree, this just leaves the door open for whatever your preferred manipulation style is. Moderation was added with a purpose
just take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content.
Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?
To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.
I'm also not a lawyer, I was making that as a more vague moral distinction on the topic of free speech and accountability.
For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".
Even spam filters are problematic.
At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.
Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'
Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".
> Aha, now this is an interesting distinction.
It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
> You can be protected by safe harbour provisions, or you can editorialise your content. I don't think you should have both.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
“The business can’t survive if it has to ay by the rules” is not a compelling reason to not make rules in my opinion.
Maybe platforms shouldn't be allowed to grow too large to manage themselves. Maybe, if strong self-regulation were a requirement, Meta and other companies wouldn't be market behemoths throwing their weight around in lobbying money to guarantee themselves monopolies while avoiding as much real scrutiny as possible.
Meta is enormous because it's useful. It's mostly useful now because of network effects. If it has no other use, Bluesky proves you can start a social media company in the time of Meta and have it be successful, given its slanty take on politics.
facebook of course, has the money to be responsible for its users comments and posts
No. We compel and restrict commercial speech all the time.
Requiring a provider of a public accommodation to explain their decisions and have standard policies for implementing them is no restriction on free speech.
It shouldn't. But under this Supreme Court it might.
Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
Don't conflate the broad concept of free speech, with the specific attempt at its defense that is the 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
I'm british, so I am not an absolutist by any stretch of the meaning. I just know that whenever I have queried why companies like facebook are not held liable for the content they promote, I am told that the 1st amendment allows them to do pretty much what they like, along with Section 230
Agreed but Meta also banned a standing US president, under pressure from other Americans that claim they believe in free speech. It's clear that Meta doesn't stand for free speech and will ban anyone. It's also clear that many in the US don't want free speech, they only want their speech to be free.
Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms. There is no constitutional right to post on Facebook.
Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
There are laws the restricting speech. There are laws for preventing people from platforms in some cases.
Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
> Free speech is fundamentally about the government restricting your speech, not private platforms.
A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
There were plenty of "specific, articulable reasons" to ban that account for rule violations
There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
I figured the speech part was ok until it declined into an active coup but that's just me.
When the standing president uses his speech to incite violence at the capital, attempt a coup, spread proven lies about health issues directly harming citizens...
oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
bull shit.
I think your comment, perhaps unintentionally, downplays the seriousness of the January 6th coup attempt.
America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.
He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.
If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.
You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.
That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.
Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.
“Free speech” has never meant you can say or do anything you want.
Which is true here, except "do anything you want" is "be displeasing to Kuwait".
It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
> It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.
Thats quite simple.
This is either an "ought to be* statement or it is a deliberate misreading of section 230 and case law. Representatives have proposed enacting this, many times, but platform neutrality is not a requirement under current law.
Unfortunately we live in a world where any attempt to regulate "big tech" is met by massive campaigns to prevent it.
Just realizing that being a lobbyist is job security these days
Becoming? It has always been this way.
In a sane world the Twitter files published out of X would have had more attention. The FBI having Twitter deleting posts and banning accounts sounds like the most blatant violation of the First Amendment I've ever seen in my life, but here we are in a world where nobody cares about that. It's only bad when the other side does it will wind us all up in a world where there is no more free speech to go around because we've sold it all off for politics.
I 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.
So 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.
The US are an oligarchy with the PR department being instructed to claim they are thr bastion of free speech though, so ex falso quodlibet.
Oligarchy and oligopoly as well.
In a sane world, hackernews wouldn't shadowban accounts for wrongthink.
citation?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21081770
> the US as a supposed bastion of free speech
Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The US is only a bastion of free speech when what is said aligns to their thinking and goals. UK is the same - if not worse.
My point is that Americans claim this, but it’s partially propaganda.
Do Americans often try to use dollars in Europe?
They also try to drive to canada with their guns, and believe they can't be "foreigners" because they're american. 30% of americans are functionally illiterate, no surprise really.
https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...
Embarrassing, but the statistic cited there is 6 cases in 2017 for a single crossing point, looks like there are ~1.5M visits a year[1] so I would imagine even if we're talking hundreds of cases (generous), still not too common?
1: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/as-canadian-visits-to-t...
Yes.
Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.
I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.
I've seen plenty of waiters, taxi drivers, etc., be quite happy to receive tips in USD in many countries where USD is not the official currency. In fact, I can't think of a single time when I've seen such a tip be rejected because of its currency.
That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
US currency is accepted in a surprisingly large number of countries abroad. Just not in Europe proper. US dollars are even accepted in some European sovereign territories outside of Europe.
It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
I 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/
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://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.
Context: the popular account is a promoter of Muslim Brotherhood, banned by US and many Mideast countries.
This seems to be "unverified accusations from critics". It's not really fair to accuse someone from this.
Do not underestimate Meta for being purely immoral. I'm pretty sure they would assisted russians with persecution if they wouldn't now about potential backlash.
It 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.
This is ridiculous. The only ones afraid of the Muslim Brotherhood are Middle Eastern dictatorships, who would rather not see a political movement take popular hold.
Are Zionists fascists, and (religious) racists? Just a yes or no will be fine.
> Long ago they were a supporter of Adolf Hitler
The British invaded and subjugated Egypt, and we're still there in the 1940s, when the British Empire starved millions of Bengalus to death, just like they had done in Ireland a century earlier. Yes the Muslim Brotherhood were against their colonial oppressors, the British. They even started friendly relations for the power then opposed to their colonial oppressors, Germany.
And 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.
That'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.
Crazy 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.
Elon 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.
I 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.
Right, 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.
In 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.
They 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.
Kuwait cannot do any of that unilaterally. They are a vassal state in the american hegemony.
> 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.
are 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.
We fought what, two wars for this vassal? Deleting an account is a pretty minor favor compared to that.
If you’re Elon or Bezos you know how to make the request in a plausible deniability way.
The 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.
It's crazy that mega corporations follow the country's regulations.
Bad stuff. I know.
Well, 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.
Access to Kuwait's market is far more valuable than anything Elon or Bezos has to say about how meta operates its business.
Google (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/
> 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.
Link via xcancel: https://xcancel.com/ryangrim/status/2055992439031185782#m
To 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
Fascinating 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
My 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.
> 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.
Did 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.
Yes but this is different - a Muslim country enforcing its own rules against an Islamist activist, and Meta complying.
Then 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.
Yes more clarity better. Here is summary of Kuwait laws
https://www.lawgratis.com/blog-detail/media-laws-at-kuwait
I cannot open this link.