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.
bombcar•32m ago
If you’re Elon or Bezos you know how to make the request in a plausible deniability way.
warumdarum•23m ago
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.
csallen•18m ago
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. There is more to power than money.
ameliaquining•16m ago
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.
csallen•3m ago
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.
stefan_•4m ago
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.
like_any_other•13m ago
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.
tgv•39m ago