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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

#531

Post by notahacker »

dageshi wrote: post #445
jdietrich wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when the Toyota Prius was a potent symbol of everything that was wrong with smug liberals. Lazy comedians still use the Prius as a punchline. Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage? Why don't right-wing conspiracy theorists consider Musk to be part of the "WHO/WEF globalist elite", despite the fact that he's a tech billionaire who is literally trying to plug people's brains in…

If you want an honest answer to Prius vs Tesla, it's because Prius was seen as a slower and lamer version of existing cars for people who didn't care about cars. While Tesla's could get from 0-60 faster than hypercars of the time. Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.

Yep. And he could have effortlessly achieved tolerability in most right wing circles that reflexively dislike "smug liberals" simply by not saying "smug liberal" stuff whilst encouraging right wingers to talk up what a great capitalist innovator he was, running red state targeted ad campaigns and making a pickup truck that people that normally drive gas-guzzlers would actually want to drive. His aspirations for colonies on Mars were already at least as appealing to much of the right as they ever were to the left.

Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.

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

#532

Post by zoilel »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #487
wkat4242 wrote: post #400

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

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#533

Post by janalsncm »

kshri24 wrote: post #519
janalsncm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between what a person is legally allowed to do and what is wise for them to do.

Oh so it is now "wise" to "keep mouth shut". No wonder the West is so screwed. It has a lot of "wise men". Very few, like Elon, who will put their money where their mouth is. What you consider "wise", in this context at least, is basically to just put your head down, accept the diktats of authority, entertain the crazed loonies in society and it is all sunshine and rainbows!

If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, yes, nothing is usually best.

> accept the diktats of authority

Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.

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

#534

Post by luckylion »

ben_w wrote: post #439
extheat wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is much more story that you’re either uninformed about or willfully ignoring. The correct move was to remove people from harms way for decisions they have no control over, hence their staff exit from the country.

The threats were themselves due to failing to follow a court order. I'm not qualified to tell if the judge giving them is a partisan hack or not, just like I can't make that distinction with the judges that Musk appears to shop for in the US with what others describe as SLAPP lawsuits. But obeying a judge isn't optional in either case.

> The threats were themselves due to failing to follow a court order.

To the individual representatives of a company? That's very rare, and not common like you make it sound.

"The company you're representing in this legal process hasn't complied with my orders so I will have you personally arrested".

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

#535

Post by wkat4242 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #487
wkat4242 wrote: post #400

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

[flagged]

That only works if you think transsexualism is a fad and people are talked into it. I don't agree and these treatments are not provided lightly.

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

#536

Post by kshri24 »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #529
kshri24 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.…

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

That was a BS reason chosen by Twitter. Twitter Files exposed that already. You are late.

> 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.

Yeah you clearly haven't read the Twitter Files. It shows.

> And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue.

Because it clearly was and now even Zuckerberg has come out admitting that it was interference.

> (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes)

Sure. But if FBI is involved, it does not become a Twitter issue alone but it becomes Government censorship through a private company. That is election interference and a first amendment violation.

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

#537

Post by nunobrito »

consumer451 wrote: post #524
nunobrito wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

And yet it is what happens. Humans do generalize based on repeated pattern observation.

Get used to it.

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

#538

Post by eertami »

ryzvonusef wrote: post #462

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…

Most people in real life aren't using twitter actively at all, and they survive just fine? The only people I know who use it are tech workers in the conference scene, in my real world social circles there is nobody.

Personally I would check my providers website/status page in such circumstances.

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

#539

Post by the_why_of_y »

mikrotikker wrote: post #431
input_sh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else is there to blame for Twitter refusing to designate a representative, leading to a ban? I'm sure pre-Musk Twitter wouldn't have lost the entire market in the 7th most populous country.

Better to stand strong in the principles of the 1st amendment than bend the knee to a foreign government. Free speech is the milk of the gods, the US constitution is something to be coveted...

Twitter routinely complies with censorship demands by foreign governments, especially right-wing authoritarian ones.

https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them. Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.

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

#540

Post by pavlov »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #498
pavlov wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I said as much in my comment, pointing out that these scientists with differing takes were not the bad guys: “These scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies.”

The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.

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