This has been a bad week for Democracy/freedom of speech
All Elon needs to do is have a legal representative in Brazil for his commercial venture. He chose this.
I don't really understand the pro-authoritarian stance.
Brazilian court orders suspension of X
41–50 of 388 posts
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a court arbitrarily impose fines on users like this?
They can't. I can easily use a Brazil endpoint to establish a tunnel elsewhere and browse X, formerly Twitter. I suppose they could try fining the VPN service provider. (But even then they won't be able to prove what's going on.)
Can't you just ban public VPN services in the country?
China has nailed it.
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a court arbitrarily impose fines on users like this?
They can't. I can easily use a Brazil endpoint to establish a tunnel elsewhere and browse X, formerly Twitter. I suppose they could try fining the VPN service provider. (But even then they won't be able to prove what's going on.)
What if you're a public figure, maybe one critical of the government and you're still tweeting while in Brazil?
Seems pretty easy to enforce to me regardless of the technical ways people circumvent it.
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can't. I can easily use a Brazil endpoint to establish a tunnel elsewhere and browse X, formerly Twitter. I suppose they could try fining the VPN service provider. (But even then they won't be able to prove what's going on.)
The logical next step would be putting you under investigation for using a VPN “because only criminals need privacy”
Getting really close to that
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#45In judicial systems like the Brazilian (and sadly many European ones) a judge that’s sufficiently high up in the judicial ladder gets to be judge and jury. He is technically bound by the law, but he also has the power to interpret the law as he sees fit (many such cases in Portugal for instance). This system puts too much power in the hands of a single person and as such is ripe for abuse for personal causes… or wors…
I don't think it is about judicial systems and what not. The judge is only able to take dictatorial powers in Brazil because the society as a whole is not in a position to fight against it and kind of accepts it as something unfixable (lots of people might even support it). I doubt the Brazilian Constitution gives him such vast power.
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#46Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defying a court order can get you arrested in any country.
The orders of the brazilian court are just too arbitrary, and not just in this case. At some point it ceases to be a judicial court and becomes more of an Emperor's court where the Emperor is making laws as he is going on.
Defying court orders can get you arrested in any country even if you and others deem them to be “too arbitrary”
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#48for non-Brazilians trying to understand the situation: (1) a supreme court judge ordered X to remove some political profiles saying they are spreading misinformation (2) coincidentally (or not) most (if not all) profiles are from the opposition (3) Elon said that that was censorship and closed the office in Brazil (4) The judge applied hefty fines but those couldn't be fullfied since X doesnt have a bank account in B…
What's the structural link between X and Starlink?
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
All Elon needs to do is have a legal representative in Brazil for his commercial venture. He chose this.
The courts threatened to arrest his legal representation if he didn't comply with their demands to take down accounts accused of spreading misinformation and hate speech. So Elon closed all offices in Brasil. You think he should risk having an employee thrown in jail?
It feels fairly arbitrary from the outside because they complied with similarly gross takedown demands in Turkey and India;
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
Re: Brazilian court orders suspension of X
#50Well this is fun. Nice to see a government with some teeth for once instead of bowing to the whims of every multibillion mega corporation or agitated billionaire.
Yes very nice to see a court acting as judge jury and executioner all at once and fining random VPN users random amounts without needing boring things like law. Maybe Plato was right and philospher kings work best.
/s