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> An independent body which hears disputes from social media users in the EU says Meta virtually never replies when it raises cases of people who say they have been wrongly banned from their accounts.

Yup, "victim" of exactly that here. Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page, as bunch of people find new places that way apparently, maybe 20-30% of the people we talked to found us via those properties, so hard to just give up even if you disagree, unless you're in a really great location already, which we weren't.

At one point, our Instagram page was banned, no reason provided, and impossible to reach a human, the Facebook page continued working without issues. Must have reached out and "appealed" like 10 times, eventually we gave up and the page seems to remain banned today still.

> Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page

But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.

The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost. That would be something. Everyone gets a homepage for free, say, one business per EU citizen. Why is the system screwing us over to depend on US companies here?

The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird. On the one hand, they have extrajudicial private entities they outsource censorship requests to ("trusted flaggers"), which the companies have to follow at the threat of massive fines and which therefore creates the incentive to ban quickly.

On the other hand, there is stuff like this where they created another arbitrary "voluntary" mechanism to punish the companies for banning too much. I think ultimately the EU just wants a set of rules to use as a pretense to levy fines on big tech.

You assume that the EU acts in a coherent manner.

I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.

There are no fines, this is about having recourse when big tech randomly bans you. Which you will remember, is a very common outcry on this very page.

This is just an uninformed EU rant.

I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.

Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?

If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?

The problem is that the EU politicians do not want the think about the problem. They want to outsource it and make someone else to pay it.

But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.

Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.

The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.

It's almost as though they want to be the government making the rules, rather than sitting back and letting the likes of META do whatever they want. The imperfect approach comes down to the reality of politics.
There are no fines at all in this story.
The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

> The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird.

At the core, what the difference is is how "free speech" is interpreted. In the US? Unless you literally fake-call "fire" or call for Luigi'ing someone, it's protected free speech, even if it's a bunch of Nazis holding tiki torches and showing the Hitler salute [1].

In Europe? We have been through 1933-1945. Almost every country in continental Europe was either occupied by Hitler's Germany or lorded over by one of his allies (e.g. Spain's Franco, Ante Pavelic in what would be Yugoslavia or Mussolini in Italy). An awful, awful lot of people died thanks to these regimes, and our collective learning from that history is to either ban such speech entirely or at the very least ostracize its followers. The Eastern Bloc countries who had been occupied by authoritarian pseudo Communism in the decades after WW2 added the Communist symbols (e.g. Red Star) for the same reason. Generally, we do not want a repeat of these eras.

Now with social media, we saw Americans (and people of other non European countries, but mostly Americans) openly post symbols we see as symbols of hate, we saw them call for a repeat of what happened between 1933 and the 1990s, and US platforms did barely anything against that. We tried the soft way as we almost always do, announced "hey we don't like that", platforms didn't get it under control (and some, like post-Musk Twitter, openly announced they DGAF)... and similarly to GDPR or USB-C, we acted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally

> massive fines

What are you smoking? Any fines against these megacorps are at best a tiny fraction of their quarterly profits. They get booked as cost of doing business.

As an EU citizen I am glad there's at least some overwatch and control over these companies. I don't trust them at all. In the US unregulated capitalism is fine: everything and his mother are for sale. Here, not so much.

Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.

EU is an organization of bureaucrats. They want rules, first and foremost. Rules that they can lord over you and that justify their continued existence. What those rules are about is a secondary matter.
I know a person managing social media for an elected politician in Poland.

On the first day Meta banned the account for impersonation. Protest was closed automatically within a hour with the usual "sorry you aint happy with this but the ban stands" response.

There was no way to contact a human about this... unless you buy meta premium support or whatever that is called. That will give you a human handler to contact!

This person asked for a paper work to verify. Next day after receiving the paper work, account was unbanned. For 15 minutes. It was then banned automatically for impersonation.

At this point the handler suggested not naming the account after politician but instead making it "Fans of the Jane Doe " page or something like that.

My understanding is that this was then escalated to one of ministries who did reach out Meta in Poland with request for explanations, after which account was unbanned and flagged as verified by Meta to exclude it from future automatic bans.

except you dont' get a "human" when you buy "premium support", you get a chatbot with elevated access. source: ex-colleague who use to work at CSE team for IG and Whatsapp.
> It was then banned automatically for impersonation.

Sorry, but if it wouldn't have been banned then there would be 1000x legitimately looking fake BOT accounts impersonating every politician in Europe, which IMHO is a lot worse considering the disinformation campaigns of trolls and foreign adversaries, so of course Meta would err on the side of caution here and assume every account of a politician is 99,9999% gonna be a bot and just ban it instantly.

The only correct solution is META having human support staff on call for such situations which i thought they did in Dublin, at least last time I checked ~8 or so years ago.

The EU should ban his yacht from being serviced in the EU.

https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/launchpad/location/#TRPL...

Careful, we've seen with Russian oligarchs they really don't like it when you mess with their boats.
The ideas behind these bodies is really cool, and is actually a policy that is a great start to build further on.

The idea is that users can send moderation actions to be reviewed to an independent body. Users pay 10% to 20% of the cost and the platform pays the remainder.

The out of court settlement body then reviews the case, and provides a verdict.

This way there is actually an avenue of recourse that isn’t just the platform, and its external review.

I do not believe there are any penalties that can be issued.

They came into existence about a year or two ago, so they are pretty new, so room for improvement exists.

Not sure that's isolated to the EU, all these companies seem to snub everyone when it comes to banning.

Seems unless you have enough followers to make the news cycle you're SOL when it comes to fighting those bans.

Here’s an idea: if you don’t or won’t have human customer support you can’t be in business. Not claiming its a good idea, just an idea. We’re capable of reining in this type of behavior. Its just that we don’t want to.
I don't know if the regulations are reasonable (often there is government overreach) but I don't mind if they were just banned outright.

I don't think Meta crates economic civic value.

The time spent away from Meta would be better used for almost any other purpose.

Feels 'authoritarian' but the same reason FB/IN is bad for teens is the same reason it's bad for regular people.

I mean, obviously we can't go around banning companies, but still ... it would be good.

When you have a business and you're trying to reach people, social media works surprisingly well, as long as you don't get banned for arbitrary reasons.
For better or worse, several economies would currently come to a screeching halt if WhatsApp were to be banned.
American corporations are in the business of turning their lobotomised users against governments. It's like a drug dealer sending an addict to steal from or attack their parents.
At this point, meta could buy the EU.
Everything is absolutely for sale, if we did things The American Way but luckily we aren't, so good luck buying it :)
Toothless regulation fails to yield meaningful change - shocker.
Meta on Facebook: posts about contraception, HIV or family planning will get you banned. Posting photos of drowned migrants on Italian beaches with hateful messages? That’s cool, bro free speech.
That's about right. Instagram is the worst.

"We won't remove this because it doesn't violate our content policy - just block the user if you don't like it".

Yeah just seen someone's head cut off with a machete. Not even joking. That'll stay with me forever.

There's more and worse. A friend has been making a point of sending me Instagram Reels of OnlyFans performers showing their genitals briefly without getting banned or without the reels being removed. Some of those stay up for months.

Don't judge, the friend is interested in the way they find interesting solutions to bypass censorship, more than the content. Or so he says. And LOL, no, I'm not "the friend".

This to say, that they are absolutely not in control of their platforms, except for heavily political content, and speech-related content. Flash a vulva quickly enough by using smart lighting, and they won't catch it. I guess we'll still have that in our dystopian future.

Zuckerberg social medias are but a cancer to society. That has become fundamentally clear. They need to be so heavily regulated that they become unrecognizable, or they should be destroyed with all means possible (legally, of course).

This is actually true? Facebook bans users who talk about contraception and HIV?

I don't use Facebook so no idea if this is true or not personally, but ChatGPT seems to think this isn't true and that if it does happen it's probably a mistake?

Fuck Zuckerberg, fuck its ilk of careless evil billionaires.
Honestly Meta is just plain stupid. These formats are an informal way to avoid strong regulation but solve problems and used in many settings of govermental regulation as a first try. Snubbing them will increase the chance of hard regulation.

I guess Zucki, Meta and SV folks (proofed on HN itself) just drunk too much "EU is declining because of regulation" and it will end like Lightning and Apple.

Stupid how? There's nothing regulation-worthy about banning users who aren't in some legally binding contract that'd make the action a breach of terms.
The US is moving rapidly away from EU towards Asia. EU acts like they are driving this.
Normally I'd go - more fines against Meta are great. So, no problem with that.

But ...

This whole "hate speech" is nothing but censorship. I understand that these greedy US giant corporations ruin a lot and abuse the heck out of everyone, but the EU is also incredibly incompetent here. What the heck is even "hate" speech? We are forbidden from criticism? The USA has the freedom of speech amendment. What's the EU solution here - arbitrary censorship? I totally disagree with that notion, and whether it is Meta or anyone else, this is a principle question. The EU should use all that money to invest into more important things than this fakeroy "hate" speech.

hate speech in the EU is "incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin"[0].

You should be able to see criticism is fine, while calling people "stupid monkeys" is not.

But this isn't even about the EU's definition: Facebook & co have their own definition of hate speech, and they are not holding it up.

[0] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...

The literal forum we are communicating on will ban you for hate speech. I’ve been banned on multiple social media cites for quoting the current president because he has full free speech and we do not.

Pretending that hate speech isn’t a known term is being actively ignorant even though there can be real arguments about where the line is drawn.

If you think calling black footballers monkeys isn't hate speech, there is no explaining anything to you about this topic.

Meanwhile if you're even slightly dickish to one of these people you will get immediately warned or shadowbanned. Meanwhile the post, get notified 9 months later that they reviewed it and found it doesn't violate their terms of service.

I hope they find them a billion dollars a day
They are not breaking EU law.

>Under EU law, online platforms should "engage in good faith" with the body, but its decision is not legally binding.

It's fine if you just want to see Facebook suffer but let's not pretend they are breaking the law.

Unless a user is paying money or otherwise in a legally binding contract that would be breached by a ban, I see no reason why a company shouldn't be able to ban them even on a whim. Having an account on a company's platform is a privilege, not a right.
This might feel like a reasonable take in isolation, but if you take it in context of today's society, and how everything actually works, it's not reasonable or realistic. Nor is it empathetic in any way.

These social media companies have created an environment where they are the dominant, near-exclusive, medium for communication in our digital age. If you are running a consumer-facing business in 2026 you *must* be on these platforms.

Given that these companies have actively pursued these positions they now hold, do you not feel they have a responsibility to be fair, reliable and trustworthy? That they have some obligation to their users, paying or not. They are choosing to offer the service for free, and they do make money on you regardless.

Losing your business accounts on Meta or Tiktok or Youtube can have catastrophic real-world consequences. And mistakes happen all the time, so you can't realistically assume every ban or cancellation is justified or correct.