Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brazil already has laws allowing it to censor websites, what is new here? It seems the judge is targeting accounts related to gangs of misinformation run by supporters of Bolsanaro and may have been involved in their Jan 6 (Jan 23). What context is missing? If anything it seems like Musk seems to be attacking the sovereignty of a nation because he agrees with anything far right these days.
Banning a company from doing business in your country is one thing, free speech be damned. But immediately threatening your own people with ungodly fines is authoritarianism pure and simple. Love or hate Musk, it's still not justified.
Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
581–590 of 855 posts
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
From the Brazilian position, it's better for them not to bend to a foreign non-government organization which has been assisting people trying to overthrow the Brazilian Constitution. But HN seems to think that Brazilians are NPCs without politics or constitution of their own.
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's frustrating that anything related to X/Twitter is such a predictably-partisan tinderbox because this is really interesting technical information. Thank you for sharing it!
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…
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
"while Musk is a proponent of free speech, he believes that moderation on Twitter should ‘hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates"
India has laws on content moderation, so does China, Turkey and other countries listed in the article. What Law in Brazil did X break? Or was it the whims and fancies of the Judge?
Quoting from X post below [1]:
“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.
We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that.
In the days to come, we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.
Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.”
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#585Earlier 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...
But Musk doesn't care about free speech, he is actively and eagerly suppressing it as well, just for the other team.
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 under…
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Twitter refused the order, which means that Twitter is interfering with the legal process in Brazil. This sounds like "contempt of court" to me, which is a thing which results in a judge sending people to prison — no idea what it is in Brazil, but IIRC the maximum penalty in my country of birth is 2 years' imprisonment.
Brazil's legal system requires companies like Twitter to have an office in the country in order to receive such orders, which I think means it's literally her job to make those orders happen. Regardless, by closing the office Twitter was directly violating Brazilian law.
As companies cannot themselves be imprisoned, I do not see what alternative there would be than directing obligations onto a specific human. Buck has to stop somewhere, and while I know a lot of people who would celebrate if this judge decided that the correct somewhere was "international arrest warrant/request extradition of Elon Musk personally", I suspect this judge would have to go through a few more checkboxes before that doesn't get "major diplomatic incident" written all over it.
(Perhaps less of an incident if it's concurrent with the EU saying "We're issuing Twitter with a 6% fine on their global annual turnover for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act", which seems to be another battle Musk is Leeroy-Jenkins-ing himself into).
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#588Twitter 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
#589Earlier 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…
Musk blames 'wokeness' for his daughter rejecting him after he didn't accept who she was. His entire conflict with the left and the 'woke' is centered around this one issue. He can't accept that he was rejected because of what he has done, so he needs someone else to blame and fight with. He bought X as his propaganda tool, he doesn't care about the consequences of his actions on society—he only wants to win.
> Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex
I don't think that's correct, it seems more likely that he was always driven by an inferiority complex.
Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Europe is actually resisting better than US due to election system. Here in best case scenario they are number 2, and took them a long time to get there after Trump In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties. Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is jus…
The extreme right won the Dutch elections though - and they’re not the only country - so your argument that “best case (...) number 2” isn’t true. They can and do win elections.