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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

#551

Post by latexr »

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!

> Oh so it is now "wise" to "keep mouth shut".

That’s been true since the dawn of communication. It’s called picking your battles. You don’t badmouth a judge while he’s considering your sentence or insult a robber while they have you tied up with a gun pointed at a loved one.

> accept the diktats of authority

You mean like Musk does.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/elon-musk-censors-twitter-in...

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

#552

Post by Wytwwww »

fjkdlsjflkds wrote: post #521
Wytwwww wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed). Obviously I'm not fully aware how exactly this works in Brazil but I doubt if it's fundamentally different.

> both Telegram and Meta have been previously (temporarily) banned from Brazil

That's still unreasonable.

Also you're still dodging the VPN ban order...

Anyway.. I understand that authoritarianism has a certain appeal to some people and actually might lead to some positive outcomes in some rare cases.

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

#553

Post by the_why_of_y »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #510
bobbruno wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of illegal speech. In Brazil you can go to jail for a slur against a queer person. That is not the case in the U.S. The question is not about Freedom of Speech, it is about changing the laws on what is protected and illegal speech. I do not like Musk as a person, but what he is doing is an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the active, and…

Civil disobedience means breaking a law in order to argue in court that the law is bad, thereby deliberately putting yourself at risk of serious consequences. This is not civil disobedience, because Elon Musk is not in Brazil, nor a citizen of Brazil, and is not personally at any risk.

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

#554

Post by XorNot »

torginus wrote: post #528
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #328

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 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.

But that's not the issue: the issue is that Musk alienated almost the entire core demographic who wanted to buy Tesla's, wanted to support electric cars and were more or less completely primed to freely promote the entire brand.

He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.

There's competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it's valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed - correctly - a market opening. No one I know recommends "buy a Tesla" anymore for your first electric car - they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.

People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there's a growing market for "anything but a Tesla...". And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.

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

#555

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#556

Post by johnisgood »

pfraze wrote: 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…

Hmm, it is something I would use Elixir for.

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

#557

Post by bluescrn »

dspillett wrote: post #526
mikrotikker wrote: post #429

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...

> 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.

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

So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?

He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.

(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)

Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.

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

#558

Post by the_why_of_y »

kshri24 wrote: post #536
the_why_of_y wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Oh, the Twitter Files! Oh my, how I haven't read anything related to the Twitter Files!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-t...

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/10/after-matt-taibbi-leaves...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-tru...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/12/tech/twitter-files-yoel-r...

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/13/the-anti-twitter-files-j...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/twitter-fi...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-files-hucksters-are-co...

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/20/no-the-fbi-is-not-paying...

https://www.cip.uw.edu/2023/08/23/starbird-house-judiciary-c...

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

#559

Post by fjkdlsjflkds »

Wytwwww wrote: post #552
fjkdlsjflkds wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expre…

> These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed).

Sure, but we are not discussing the first amendment, or US law in general. As you must be aware, protection of freedom of expression rights are different in different jurisdictions.

> Obviously I'm not fully aware how exactly this works in Brazil but I doubt if it's fundamentally different.

I would not be so sure. For example, it is not legal to display a swastika in Germany (even though Germany is usually considered a democratic rule-of-law country), even though it might be legal to do so in the US.

> That's still unreasonable.

Just stating this (without any further argumentation) doesn't make it so. My only point is that, apparently, there is legal precedence for such kinds of things (i.e., banning a certain social network when it refuses to appoint a legal representative in Brazil).

> Also you're still dodging the VPN ban order...

I'm not dodging anything... that is a different issue, that we can further discuss, if you want to have a discussion in good faith. Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made could be seen as moving goalposts, though.

> Anyway.. I understand that authoritarianism has a certain appeal to some people [...].

Ad hominem argumentation is not the best approach to argumentation, if you want to be taken seriously and have a discussion in good faith.

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

#560

Post by flakeoil »

kelnos wrote: post #450
n_plus_1_acc wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Executives have, by definition, cobtrol over everything inside their company.

That's not even a little bit true. Even the CEO is at the mercy of their board, and their shareholders. Other CxO positions are subservient to the CEO. Often VPs are considered executives, and they certainly don't have control over everything inside their company. If Twitter/X were to hire a rep in Brazil, regardless of the title they're given, that rep would have little to no power over the moderation choices of the…

In the US the CEO is often also the chairman of the board so they are accountable to themselves.

Which is kind of weird and illegal in many countries, but in the US it is almost the norm.

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