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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

But this law may be impossible to comply, without basically shutting down Facebook. The complaints include that Bolsonaro is first in politician search results (someone has to be first), and that asking Meta’s LLM for a random number gives Bolsonaro’s ballot number before Lula’s.

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> But this law may be impossible to comply

How come? If it is an algorithm, change the algorithm. Newsfeed used to be based on timestamp. Then, lots of weights and statistical analysis went into it to show you what the algorithm thinks will drive most engagement.

It hasn't been that simple since Google early days, after Altavista.

Content ranking algorithms, specially on social networks, are very complex and usually engineered towards generating engagement.

And it seems to work as intended given the amount of engagement is post.

What if the algorithms “newest” or “most upvoted” still promote Bolsonaro, because his supporters outnumber opposition? Facebook’s algorithm is more complicated, but that may be the core reason it favors him.

Or they could explicitly promote Lula, but that would be biased towards him…

You say this like it would be a bad thing to shut down Facebook, or at least stop serving Brazil. I think they’d manage to think of solutions if it came to that. But yes, if their final argument is their product can’t comply with the laws of Brazil then it can’t exist in Brazil.

Shutting down Facebook would be excellent, but it would be nice to have better specific justification, which would not apply to almost any site (oh no, what if this comment section has more Bolsonaro comments than Lula ones?)

The justification is that a Brazilian court found it was operating in violation of the laws of Brazil. Thankfully, the justifications don't have to convince you or anyone else on HN. They only have to convince the court.

For reference, Musk tried a similar thing a few years ago, resulting in Twitter being blocked in Brazil, it becoming a punishable crime to use Twitter in Brazil (you could still get there with a VPN but if you were anyone important someone would call the police on you, so they didn't) and Elon complied within days.

side by side search results would solve a lot of problems it seems.

Let's take your argument for a moment and apply it to a different industry and see if it makes sense.

In this universe, it's perfectly identical to our current universe other than Meta being a company that makes lawnmowers. They're not the only company that makes lawnmowers, but they're popular.

It turns out though that meta has been making lawnmowers illegally unsafe, but meta's business model that let them outcompete everyone else was cutting corners on safety. If meta made their lawnmowers comply with the legal requirement for safety it'd be an existential threat to them.

Now, I ask you, should Meta be allowed to continue selling illegally unsafe lawnmowers?

A more accurate analogy is: Meta’s lawnmowers are “illegally unsafe” because they statistically get stuck less on Bolsonaro supporters’ grass, which just so happens to statistically have less weeds. It’s a stupid law that could be applied to any lawnmower Brazil’s court selectively enforced it on, so no, it should not apply.

Your "which just so happens to" is doing a lot of carrying, when you should also be asking "who measured the amount of weeds and how" and also "do weeds impact the likelihood of a lawnmower getting stuck". Answer those questions (and some others) and you'd have the transparency that we'd need to decide if that's actually the cause.

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