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.
J-Kuhn 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
vrganj 2 minutes ago [-]
I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.
Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
If no, then why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to override the will of the people?
petcat 11 minutes ago [-]
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?
dgellow 19 minutes ago [-]
There are no fines at all in this story.
stefan_ 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
EA-3167 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
Ralfp 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
joe_mamba 3 minutes ago [-]
> It was then banned automatically for impersonation.
Sorry, but if it wouldn't have been banned then there would be 1000x legitimately locking fake BOT accounts impersonating every politician in Europe, which IMHO is a lot worse considering the disinformation campaigns of 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 instant.
The only correct solution is META having human support staff for such situations which i thought they did in Dublin, at least last time I checked 8 years ago.
embedding-shape 28 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
shevy-java 24 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
john_strinlai 20 minutes ago [-]
>The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost.
the benefit to the business is not that they have a homepage. its that facebook/instagram bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to the page that otherwise would not see it.
embedding-shape 15 minutes ago [-]
We had a website, that's besides the point. You want to be where people already are, which for American tourists, will be American social media. It's not a choice between "be on social media and survive, or don't", it's "reach the audience you're trying to reach or don't", not a matter of survival.
x86cherry 11 minutes ago [-]
That won't change 20-30% of their customers using Facebook/Instagram to find them.
The only way I've seen around the impenetrable US social media network effects is to isolate your people either through restricting access or naturally occurring low bilingualism.
The western world speaks English online, so the latter is unlikely to happen and the former would be a final admission that our cultural values mean nothing in practice.
SiempreViernes 5 minutes ago [-]
> But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
EA-3167 20 minutes ago [-]
Do people in the EU want to see their tax money used for that purpose rather than other far more pressing needs such as healthcare? I really doubt it.
jmye 2 minutes ago [-]
... How much tax money do you think it would actually take? I think this is a false choice.
(Not that I think it's a good suggestion, but this is a bad reason not to do it).
genxy 19 minutes ago [-]
The EU should ban his yacht from being serviced in the EU.
Everything is absolutely for sale, if we did things The American Way but luckily we aren't, so good luck buying it :)
bluegatty 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 23 minutes ago [-]
It would be replaced by other avenues.
'Because Advertising' has to be the worst reason imaginable to keep a system in place.
embedding-shape 7 minutes ago [-]
But how would these "other avenues" be legal if your hypothetical scenario makes the "previous avenues" illegal?
jmye 31 seconds ago [-]
Why are you assuming GP is saying literally anything other than "Ban Meta"? It's maybe a dubious response, but there's no reason to conflate social media with advertising via websites other than to try to create false cover for Meta.
lxgr 25 minutes ago [-]
For better or worse, several economies would currently come to a screeching halt if WhatsApp were to be banned.
bluegatty 18 minutes ago [-]
WhatsApp is totally fine. Also, if it were gone, it would immediately be displaced by something else.
The features of 'WhatsApp' should be a standard or de facto standard, that comes with every plan globally.
WhatsApp only exists because Carrier incumbents are unwieldy and stupid - I worked with them for years, they're incapable of an ounce of innovation, and tried to control the entire mobile web.
If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.
They fought desperately to control every inch, the iPhone broke their control, it would have been slow moving without Jobs breaking their hold, now Apple has a similar control, ableit much more capable.
surgical_fire 22 minutes ago [-]
They would not.
Plenty of options for chat apps where your account is essentially your phone number. People would quickly organize around one of the options.
Beretta_Vexee 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
cryo32 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
camillomiller 12 minutes ago [-]
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).
kypro 41 minutes ago [-]
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?
GJim 30 minutes ago [-]
> ChatGPT seems to think this isn't true
Please don't do this.
Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~hallucinating~ bullshitting.
This goes double when dealing with such an emotive subject.
segh 18 minutes ago [-]
gpt 5.5 thinking is more reliable than the median internet commenter
vanviegen 3 minutes ago [-]
Yes, but one wouldn't quote these as if they were trusted sources either.
dgellow 12 minutes ago [-]
Their quote the source gpt 5.5 gives you
drstewart 25 minutes ago [-]
>Quote an authoritative source
What authoritative source did the parent post for their assertion?
GJim 22 minutes ago [-]
'Whataboutism' isn't a valid criticism of my post.
SlinkyOnStairs 34 minutes ago [-]
Respectfully, do a Google search and not a ChatGPT one. Facebook's recent nonsense is fairly well documented. (They have also gone back and forth on this a few times)
Meta is a garbage company. An absolutely fetid cancer on humanity that offers zero good and all bad.
Most companies have good and bad. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and so on. They have the things that should be criticized, but have some good they bring to the world. Meta -- just a malignant, cancerous venue for stupidity. An organization that exists on the backs of scammers, cons, hate, disinformation, and so on. Like use Instagram for a day and it's just amazing that this hive of villainy and scum hasn't been banned every country worldwide but the one where the plutocrats run the country.
drivebyhooting 26 minutes ago [-]
Well they did release torch…
alex1138 26 minutes ago [-]
I'll add that Meta doesn't actually physically work on top of that
What do we want from companies? Companies tied to a real identity, social networking. You want a way for people to message you -
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.
riffraff 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
camillomiller 24 minutes ago [-]
Fuck Zuckerberg, fuck its ilk of careless evil billionaires.
krunger 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
nonethewiser 52 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
snowpid 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
skeledrew 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
TheOtherHobbes 18 minutes ago [-]
You can't use Meta without agreeing to "some legally binding contract."
mrits 41 minutes ago [-]
The US is moving rapidly away from EU towards Asia. EU acts like they are driving this.
kaveh_h 32 minutes ago [-]
Asia will ignore US deals, especially on social media. Look at Australia are even more hawkish than EU.
Japan and South Korea are more culturally close to China when it comes to social harmony and the will probably follow suit when it comes to be strict on social media even if they allow US media it will be by much stricter rules than US.
Japan is also already in the world's largest free trade agreement with the EU[0] and in a joint development program for a next generation fighter plane with Italy and the UK[1].
The US has squandered a massive amount of goodwill since the first Trump presidency.
>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.
skeledrew 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
sbarre 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
skeledrew 2 minutes ago [-]
In any case it's the users who built these companies by using their platform. It's users who need to rally and migrate away in solidarity with those being banned or whatever it may be. I'd say expecting companies to not do whatever they consider is in their best interest is what's not reasonable nor realistic. A company exists to make money; if banning certain users advances that mandate then it's free and expected to. Again, unless there's some legal basis to counteract that decision.
Barbing 7 minutes ago [-]
It’s hard to wrap up the past couple decades of tech building out their utility-like selves, showing how it breaks a heuristic of “it’s their business-just don’t use it”, so I’m impressed how well you’ve done it.
drtz 6 minutes ago [-]
> Having an account on a company's platform is a privilege, not a right.
Businesses can lose a lot traffic by not being present on Facebook and Instagram, so being unjustifiably banned is doing measurable financial harm in many cases.
Even as an individual it can be a huge pain to not have Facebook. The local individual sales market (e.g. classified ads) is dominated by Facebook Marketplace now, for example, and not having access to that market makes it difficult to sell things.
Meta has a responsibility to the community because of their position as the de facto platform for many activities. They've even intentionally positioned themselves to dominate. Having laws requiring them to act responsibly is totally justifiable.
suburban_strike 10 minutes ago [-]
"Whims" skew discriminatory.
Enough of the real world interfaces with online services that arbitrary bans cause actual damages, more harm than banning an annoying player from your obscure MUD.
Barbing 50 seconds ago [-]
Disabled passengers who take a long time to load into rideshare vehicles are an example here where we want oversight on platform bans. Getting banned from both Uber & Lyft in the US with no recourse, even no human review, can disenfranchise.
dgellow 14 minutes ago [-]
From what I understand nothing in the EU regulation prevents a company from arbitrarily banning people. You can read it in full here: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act.... It basically just establishes how the dispute should be handled between the parties
TheOtherHobbes 15 minutes ago [-]
Then there's no reason why a government shouldn't regulate these companies, and use sanctions of all kinds - including fines, and the potential for an outright ban - to enforce those regulations.
john_strinlai 15 minutes ago [-]
i would support this if local/state/provincial/federal governments were not allowed to post exclusively on social media. other companies should also not be allowed to use social media as their only method of customer support.
exe34 14 minutes ago [-]
Then there should be a law that requires the platform to interoperate with independent clients. You can't have both. The social network is a common good. If you want to benefit from it, then you need to treat people fairly.
Rendered at 16:13:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
If no, then why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to override the will of the people?
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?
This is just an uninformed EU rant.
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.
Sorry, but if it wouldn't have been banned then there would be 1000x legitimately locking fake BOT accounts impersonating every politician in Europe, which IMHO is a lot worse considering the disinformation campaigns of 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 instant.
The only correct solution is META having human support staff for such situations which i thought they did in Dublin, at least last time I checked 8 years ago.
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.
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 benefit to the business is not that they have a homepage. its that facebook/instagram bring hundreds of thousands of eyes to the page that otherwise would not see it.
The only way I've seen around the impenetrable US social media network effects is to isolate your people either through restricting access or naturally occurring low bilingualism.
The western world speaks English online, so the latter is unlikely to happen and the former would be a final admission that our cultural values mean nothing in practice.
Not really? The upstream problem is getting customers, and the concrete problem is that these humongous American advertising agencies are too big to care about customer services for their smallest clients.
Switching to a EU administrated advertising agency is not obviously better, because that's another big organisation but with even less ties to the local level. The one upside is that a EU level organisation can be legally compelled to fix problems, but even then don't expect it to happen quickly.
(Not that I think it's a good suggestion, but this is a bad reason not to do it).
https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/launchpad/location/#TRPL...
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.
'Because Advertising' has to be the worst reason imaginable to keep a system in place.
The features of 'WhatsApp' should be a standard or de facto standard, that comes with every plan globally.
WhatsApp only exists because Carrier incumbents are unwieldy and stupid - I worked with them for years, they're incapable of an ounce of innovation, and tried to control the entire mobile web.
If you're old enough, you'll might recall 10 cent WAP pages.
They fought desperately to control every inch, the iPhone broke their control, it would have been slow moving without Jobs breaking their hold, now Apple has a similar control, ableit much more capable.
Plenty of options for chat apps where your account is essentially your phone number. People would quickly organize around one of the options.
"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.
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).
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?
Please don't do this.
Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~hallucinating~ bullshitting.
This goes double when dealing with such an emotive subject.
What authoritative source did the parent post for their assertion?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/11/m...
Meta is a garbage company. An absolutely fetid cancer on humanity that offers zero good and all bad.
Most companies have good and bad. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Valve, and so on. They have the things that should be criticized, but have some good they bring to the world. Meta -- just a malignant, cancerous venue for stupidity. An organization that exists on the backs of scammers, cons, hate, disinformation, and so on. Like use Instagram for a day and it's just amazing that this hive of villainy and scum hasn't been banned every country worldwide but the one where the plutocrats run the country.
What do we want from companies? Companies tied to a real identity, social networking. You want a way for people to message you -
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712
...oops https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger...
...and a way to see people's status updates.
...oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
Seriously has any CEO of a tech company been caught doing what MZ has done? Oops. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122)
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.
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...
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 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.
https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/defense/japan-eyes-european...
The US has squandered a massive amount of goodwill since the first Trump presidency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan%E2%80%93European_Union_C...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Air_Programme
>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.
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.
Businesses can lose a lot traffic by not being present on Facebook and Instagram, so being unjustifiably banned is doing measurable financial harm in many cases.
Even as an individual it can be a huge pain to not have Facebook. The local individual sales market (e.g. classified ads) is dominated by Facebook Marketplace now, for example, and not having access to that market makes it difficult to sell things.
Meta has a responsibility to the community because of their position as the de facto platform for many activities. They've even intentionally positioned themselves to dominate. Having laws requiring them to act responsibly is totally justifiable.
Enough of the real world interfaces with online services that arbitrary bans cause actual damages, more harm than banning an annoying player from your obscure MUD.