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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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cannot appeal (and you probably can't, since this was a judicial order by the Supreme Court), then you have to comply (or face the consequences of ignoring judicial orders). If the argument is that it is illegal to "censor", due to the Brazilian constitution, then Twitter is already engaging in illegal behaviour whenever it bans accounts (or auto-removes tweets) for using terms Musk dislikes (like "cis" or "ci…

> If the argument is that it is illegal to "censor", due to the Brazilian constitution, then Twitter is already engaging in illegal behaviour whenever it bans accounts In the US first amendment protections only apply to the government. Is that different in Brazil?

Exactly. It is perfectly legal for a private entity (such as Twitter) to engage in censorship, as they regularly do so. So, the argument that "we can't do that, because that would be illegal" doesn't really fly.

Furthermore, there is already a precedent here: both Telegram and Meta have been previously (temporarily) banned from Brazil until they decided to comply with judicial orders (after which, they were unbanned again). Why does Twitter think they are special in this regard?

If the judicial order is (correctly) justified by an inconstitutional law, then it's that specific law that has to be challenged, not the judicial order.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's partisan/political because Musk is partisan/political. And it's not just Musk. We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in. So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tec…

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…

I quite like charter cities, at least in theory, and I'm a little annoyed that everyone sees them as an attempt at world domination. They could let us A/B test legal frameworks, and I think that's neat.

Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.

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

#523
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk’s Twitter actively censors and promotes content based on the personal whims of the billionaire owner. Is that really better for democracy? The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution. Props to Bluesky for trying something else, a…

The opposite was true before Musk. Some friends have an ancap libertarian and they were targeted before. Woke content is not censored and you can find it on X, it's just that most left-wing people left for alternatives. I went to bluesky briefly and I was inundated by transgender explicit content. I didn't open it again.

Musk censors mentions of his own daughter on X — the same person who he claimed was dead on a recent interview, but who is very much alive and posting on Threads.

That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.

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

#524

I am surprised no one mentioned nostr. https://nostr.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr supposedly more distributed and censorship resistant than bsky. https://thenewstack.io/bluesky-vs-nostr-which-should-develop...

[flagged]

> It's OK. Liberals, lefties and pseudo-rebels tend to jump from one walled garden to another.

It is very difficult to take a statement seriously when it includes sweeping politicized generalizations like this.

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

#525

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…

I think people see Musk differently from how he actually is. Or at least how he sees himself. He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society. I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, an…

> he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society

If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.

Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.

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

#526

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…

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...

> Musk is not perfect by any means

Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.

His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.

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

#527
post #76

Copying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outa…

I'm just trying to work out why I'm seeing so many posts in Portguese when all my settings are set to English

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

#528
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so strange for you to blame this on Musk. Twitter was already super partisan long before he took it over

> 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…

I really effing hate the idea that competition is created not because people with entrepreneurial spirit think they can do what SpaceX does cheaper and better, but because the guy running the show is politically undesirable and untrustworthy.

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[flagged]

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...

Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.

Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn't really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.

And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes).

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

#530
It’s obvious by now that this law will only get selectively enforced. Several members of the ruling socialist party continue to use X to push electoral propaganda aimed at the upcoming election (which would be funny if not tragic). [1]

Any law that’s only selectively enforced, is ripe for abuse by any kind of government. More so by a government that’s descending into autocracy.

[1] https://x.com/sofiafonsoferre/status/1830181842898530650

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