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Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

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Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech is all that matters. Musk is not perfect by any means here but he is better than the rest. He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms. Which is what Twitter should have been doing, instead of kowtowing to the likes of the German and Saudi govts among others...

Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term (just like we can't have pure democracy) because it would erode public confidence and destroy our democratic nations in the process. And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand…

It is sad that free speech became a dog whistle. Post WW2 up to at least 2000 free speech was a strong position of the left, Noam Chomsky being one of the most prominent examples.

Musk isn't hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.

I can't understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.

Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter was already super partisan long before he took it over Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and--by the looks of it--he's chosen a bad one. (In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he's good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America's EV standard bearer. I…

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I can’t believe people think that the FBI or the Biden and Trump campaigns asking for disinformation to be taken down during an election and the people at Twitter making a call on that request is somehow a smoking gun showing some kind of conspiracy. It’s ridiculous!

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#493

Twitter is 'banned' in Pakistan for very similar reasons (requiring a local representative, requiring censorship, etc) under the guise of 'national security concerns'. We are all still using it via VPN. We get all the govt related info from it, and no one is asking, how come the govt dept themselves are using twitter when it's banned? No one will move to bluesky/threads/mastodon because as I said everyone is on twitt…

In my country electricity provider sends text message if there is an outage, but if I need to check something, I go to their website, they have nice map showing what areas are affected etc. Does twitter even work without account anymore?

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right. This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitati…

As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.

It happens in multiparty systems as well. All it takes is a significant portion of the population feeling like their voices are not heard, and then one of the parties taking up their banner as one part of the overall campaign (which doesn't even have to be in their new constituents' interests).

This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#495
post #412
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A supreme court judge clearly acting against the laws of their state, but somehow Musk is the bad guy.

We arrived at the point that people are celebrating censorship and authoritarianism because of their irrational hatred of one guy.

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Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so much for supporting your children in their chosen life path :'( Imagine having to completely break contact with your own father because he hates who you are so much :'( https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61880709

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That's his description of events, as told to Jordan B. Peterson.

"The child", now 20, responded that Musk was “cold,” “very quick to anger,” “narcissistic,” and described him as an absent father.

and further said

    that her father’s comments had “crossed a line,” and she countered that he “knew what he was doing when he agreed to her treatment” when she was 16
~ https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender...

~ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/business/media/elon-musk-...

It's not so cut and dried as you make out, it's a heated issue with strong opinions on either side.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope Im Brazilian. And all of this started way before. These orders were not imbalanced -- the blocking of X accounts -- (Ok VPN now is). Musk after several court decisions decided to not comply, even after all involved received due process. It's not, in the slightest, censorship at all. What really happened was violation of ellection rules on daily basis, specially on X but many other social also were fined. META, T…

Nope, I'm Brazilian and this is "censorship at all"!

Also brazilian here. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of illegal speech. One is allowed to go public and speak their minds, but if their speech is illegal (hate speech, conspiracy to overthrow the government, political campaigning during embargo periods), there will be consequences for those, and that does not constitute censorship.

Initially, consequences were not that bad (take down of some illegal posts), then they went to removal of recurring offender profiles.X ignored those Supreme Court Justice orders - their only legal course of action being to comply and file an appeal to the Supreme Court as a whole. That led to further escalation against their legal representation in Brazil and their executives (which is according to Brazilian law), which led to Musk shutting down the local representation rather than following the local law. Which put X in a non-compliance state and led to the order for its blocking.

If you understand the initial order to take down posts of defamation and illegal speech as censorship, you comply and appeal. Ignoring a court order is not a legal option.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#498
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird how pointing out climate change inaccuracies destroyed scientific debate. In any thread about climate change they are desperate to tell you that you’re a climate denier when you point out inaccurate information. For those who remember the vicious attacks on science, we called that the dark ages.

In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. This was at a time when effective drugs were already approved and saving lives. Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you…

> In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS

This is how science works. Being right is not "science". Science is verb. If the questioners were right we would be calling them heroes.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech is all that matters. Musk is not perfect by any means here but he is better than the rest. He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms. Which is what Twitter should have been doing, instead of kowtowing to the likes of the German and Saudi govts among others...

Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term (just like we can't have pure democracy) because it would erode public confidence and destroy our democratic nations in the process. And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand…

The Soviet Union supported anti war, peace protests and free speech in leftist groups, but most of it was organic.

Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.

Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.

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