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Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

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Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#51
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to the NYT in China or X in Brazil could destabilize their societies. One could argue that their current development status necessitates authoritarianism until a transitional event happens (which took the west many centuries).

Free speech destabilizes society. It’s a suitable price to pay, I think. The goal is absolute harmony. Especially at the expense of rights.

That might be your goal. But that does not mean it needs to be everyone else’s goals.

For me, freedom of speech is part of what brings societies forward, and that includes deep changes which obviously means unstable societies at some point.

Humans would be stuck in Stone Age if we would have had only stable societies.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#52
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad they didn't comply. I don't want social media platforms banning people just because some national government told them to.

I also don’t want companies to have to have offices in every country where they operate. X is big enough but it’s silly of Brazil to require a literal physical presence. They can serve whatever they need electronically to wherever X is these days.

It's not about serving them. They have already been served multiple times, refused to comply, got fined and refused to pay the fines. Pulling out their office was simply a means to avoid paying fines, that's all. There's no big motive there but cash.

One can argue about the politics of this all day. There are political views to be discussed about the morality of the requests to ban accounts versus the morality of keeping the accounts online, but the law is the law. If you want to operate on a certain country you need to abide by that country's laws, there aren't really any exceptions anywhere in the World.

Lots of platforms operate in Brazil without a legal representative, the country is actually very lax about that. There's no Substack or Medium office as far as I know, and I'm writing this comment on Hackernews without any issue. Generally, the legal representation is only required when someone takes legal action against the platform for some reason.

Obviously larger platforms like Twitter, Instagram and their likes have lots of legal actions in local courts. They also collect a shitload of ad revenue from local companies, and in both cases they are required to have a local representation. Twitter has laid-off all their engineering and marketing in Brazil when Musk bought it, and just recently decided to close down their legal and finance office to avoid paying the said fines. Whatever the political stand-off that brought them to this, there's no reasonable justification to stand with Twitter now.

"I don't aggree with your laws" is not a valid reason for a company to break these laws in any country, for any law.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#53
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad they didn't comply. I don't want social media platforms banning people just because some national government told them to.

I also don’t want companies to have to have offices in every country where they operate. X is big enough but it’s silly of Brazil to require a literal physical presence. They can serve whatever they need electronically to wherever X is these days.

[deleted]

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#54

Apparently Brazil only asked for Twitter/X to have a local office (so they could be dealt with inside Brazilian law) and ban like 7 accounts.

They threatened X employees with jail time.

Bunch of reasonable folks these Brazilian judges.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#55
post #2

Twitter is not a fundamental right, as access to users isn't a right to a company. If the company wants the product to be available, then it should respect local laws the same way it did in Turkey and India.

> Twitter is not a fundamental right

Before Musk bought Twitter there were plenty of people arguing on here that in the age of the internet Twitter and places like it are essential as forums of public discourse, and access to them should be as unlimited as possible.

Twitter refusing bans and continuing operations in a hostile country was some people's wet dream just a couple years ago. I guess it's a lesson to be careful what you wish for.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#56

I'm not sure I agree with Brazil wanting to compel platforms to ban accounts and I don't agree with fining people who try to access the service and if Elon is to be believed, I really don't agree with threatening Twitter's legal rep with prison. Elon is also a hypocrite having done the exact thing Brazil is asking for with India and Turkey in the past and he clearly has no problem inventing reasons to ban people who…

I don't really get the idea behind fining people for using Twitter over VPN's either. That reeks of lawyers unable to understand the basics of how the Internet works.

Threatening their legal rep with prison is, however, perfectly reasonable. They have refused to comply with the law several times, were fined several times and have refused to pay such fines several times. With that, they have committed multiple felonies and it makes absolute sense they are faces with the consequences of that.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to read stuff written by other people is pretty close to a basic human right, though. At least in the liberal Western tradition.

Between Elon deciding who to block (and he blocks quiet often) and democratically elected governments deciding, I prefer the one that's got at least some checks and balances.

I don't. Governments are very powerful and the necessary checks and balances may be either nonexistent or weak, or corrupt, or very slow.

Individual rights should be safeguarded against abuse as much as possible. Maybe it means that Musk should block less, but it certainly means that governments shouldn't muzzle people too easily.

In this case, an entire country of 200 million is threatened with massive fines for the horrible crime of using VPN to access a social network.

Yeah, Brasil really makes a good member of BRICS with this judgment.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#59
post #45
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don’t want companies to have to have offices in every country where they operate. X is big enough but it’s silly of Brazil to require a literal physical presence. They can serve whatever they need electronically to wherever X is these days.

It may seem strange, at least to me, but the company Lumen Orbit (YCS24) [1] aims to offer data centers in space. If they, or another similar company, succeed in the future, it could change jurisdictional rules. [1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lumen-orbit

Lots of companies are (or will be) offering "cloud services" in LEO, including SpaceX. However, none of that is relevant to this situation.

Re: Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to read stuff written by other people is pretty close to a basic human right, though. At least in the liberal Western tradition.

There are other places than Twitter to read stuff written by other people. Even in the conservative exotic orient.

That is like saying that unless you ban the entire library, people shouldn't complain about books being banned.
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