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Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

economictimes.indiatimes.com

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Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#91

Post by larrled »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #83
matheusmoreira wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again. This "storming" amounted to little more than a protest. If only that had been enough to fix things. I watched those judges censor political speech as "fake news" throughout the entire 2022 election. Then they showboated in public about how they had been personally responsible for th…

> Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_January_Bras%C3%ADlia_attack...

I feel like coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries. An American coup at this point seems very unlikely to work thanks to “learning from past failings” and stuff like advanced weapons systems. I mean heck, we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building. Seems crazy to worry about that so much for years and years.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#92

Post by matheusmoreira »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90
matheusmoreira wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored. A military coup is attempted when armed forces actually show up to overthrow you. When the heroic brazilian military showed up, it was to arrest the protesters.

> Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored. Wat. (EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.) > it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them Rioters who broke into the federal bui…

> Wat.

Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship.

Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once.

I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is essentially the world's soy farm, to say nothing of the endless corruption scandals and crushing taxation.

> Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state

Protesters from the current ruling party have set fire to those buildings before. It's nothing new.

> I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval

I would approve of their resignation.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#93

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nindalf wrote: post #84
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you’re thinking “good”, it will make the public discourse sterile Maybe those topics shouldn't be discussed on general-purpose online forums?

Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all. If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhe…

> YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape.

I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsements are better considered, is superior for these matters.

We don't, by analogy, randomly launch into suicide and rape in the middle of a cocktail party. Instead, we naturally seclude ourselves with the people we want to discuss it with, people we tend to have chosen thoughtfully, and usually with some warning that what we want to discuss is weighty. Not doing any of that online strikes me as, if not a problem, a legitimate concern.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#94

Post by JumpCrisscross »

larrled wrote: post #91
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_January_Bras%C3%ADlia_attack...

I feel like coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries. An American coup at this point seems very unlikely to work thanks to “learning from past failings” and stuff like advanced weapons systems. I mean heck, we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building. Seems crazy to wo…

> coups are more likely in developing or socialist countries

Developing, yes. (Socialist, I don’t know.)

> we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building

Protests are pretext.

The Brazilian protests didn’t anticipate overthrowing the government themselves. They wanted the military to depose the elected government. In America, a protest would be used either as an excuse to impose ersatz martial law or a sign that the people don’t agree with the election (or whatever). The actual killing moves are rendered by those who can command guns.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#95

Post by JumpCrisscross »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #92
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a problem. They wanted to be ruled by the military. That's a valid political stance which should not be censored. Wat. (EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.) > it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them Rioters who broke into the federal bui…

> Wat. Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship. Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once. I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is…

> Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship

Fair enough. I imagine the military dictatorship wouldn’t be too happy with folks trying to overthrow it. Part of designing a stable state is maneouvering against such volatility.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#96

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
close04 wrote: post #15

There's probably a lot of politics behind this judgement that shaped it. But to a certain degree it's fair. Why would social media companies only make money from what users do on their platform but be spared any accountability? Everything a user does on a social media platform is visible to the company and is monetized. Is any other sector spared any accountability when they know the customer is breaking the law? Thi…

> Everything a user does on a social media platform is visible to the company and is monetized. Well, it's visible to the computers. It's potentially visible to a human, but no company has humans actually reading all that content. And no, an AI is not adequate to filter it, either.

[deleted]

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#97

Post by FirmwareBurner »

mlinhares wrote: post #35
logicchains wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany is a country without freedom of speech, where people can be fined for criticising politicians online. It's not something anyone should be aiming to emulate.

That is up for Germans to decide, not foreign social media platforms.

Here's the thing, Germans don't get to make that choice, their politicians do it for them. Sure, you can vote on some politicians, but what do you do when freedom of speech is not on anyone's menu as they all share different views than you on what freedom of speech is?

Having something like the First Amendment in the constitution means no politician can fuck with your freedom of speech too much. It's one of the things that makes the US the longest running democracy to date.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#98

Post by nindalf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #93
nindalf wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all. If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhe…

> YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsem…

Who is going to join a forum dedicated to discussing rape? Absolute weirdos, that's who. But you're not going to enact any kind of broad societal change by talking only to those weirdos. You need to reach a broad audience and convince them this is a problem worth tackling.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#99

Post by thrance »

Censorship is no longer the tool of choice of wannabe dictators. Instead, the focus is now on editorializing of communication channels. Open up the front page of X in a private tab, and see how everything is far right propaganda. Who needs to censor anything anymore? Simply downrank whatever displeases you into oblivion.

Good for Brazil, maybe they can slow down the fascist disease that rots our democracies from the inside.

Re: Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content

#100

Post by ryandrake »

esperent wrote: post #32
AndrewStephens wrote: post #21

Personally I think that social media companies should be at least in part liable for content posted by their users. There is a tendency to treat social media as a mere conduit, like the post office, that should not be responsible for content but the post office doesn't decide who sees what or profits from advertising inserted into mail. I thought about this a few months ago and came up with this rant completely reaso…

> There is a tendency to treat social media as a mere conduit, like the post office I don't think anyone thinks of them like a government service (post office). Rather, when they talk about social media being a conduit/provider, what they have in mind is a variation on a search engine. Do you think search engines should be liable for content? That's a slippery slope. A stronger argument is that they are claiming to b…

Social Media is more like the old newspaper "Letters To The Editor" than it is like the post office or phone system. On social media, you send your "post" to the S.M. company, the company reads it and decides whether or not to accept that "post" and then some time later, they publish it to the site's readers. The review process is done by a computer instead of an Editor, and takes no time at all (measured in milliseconds) but that's what's happening under the hood. They are absolutely curating and deciding what to display and what not to.
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