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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

#501

Post by pmdr »

a_victorp wrote: post #472
pmdr wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misinformation has been rampant ever since social media has gained momentum, on both sides of the political aisle. The sad part is that some folks on the left would happily have a site banned now that Musk is a right-wing nut. They don't seem to grasp the implications this would have on free speech once other countries adopt Brazil's model. In their world, it's a 'nothing burger', as they'd been calling 'the twitter…

You guys really buy into this whole Twitter = 'free speech' bs

But if twitter != free speech, then what's the alternative? It was ripe with misinformation even before Musk's takeover. It wasn't balanced before, it was left-leaning, with arbitrary definitions of what counted as misinformation.

I think it's now only leaning right because, once Musk took over, the left-leaning users decided it was best to leave. In fact, they had already decided it's not worth staying on the platform even before Musk had made any changes. 'Fear' and 'safety' were being thrown around without any substantial proof.

I think misinformation should be fought with information, not hiding away in 'safer' social networks while cheering for censorship and authoritarianism.

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

#502

Post by kshri24 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #492
kshri24 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I can’t believe people think that the FBI or the Biden and Trump campaigns asking for disinformation to be taken down during an election and the people at Twitter making a call on that request is somehow a smoking gun showing some kind of conspiracy. It’s ridiculous!

[flagged]

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

#503

Post by kstenerud »

klrmvn wrote: post #491
kstenerud wrote: post #474

Earlier 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…

> Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

It's easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.

In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn't on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn't exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.

Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we're headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.

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

#504

Post by notahacker »

mikrotikker wrote: post #429
kstenerud wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right. This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitati…

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...

According to its own statistics, Musk's Twitter complied with 83% of government takedown requests compared with 50% in the year before it was taken over, and he's found plenty of novel grounds for kicking people off Twitter for things which annoy him.

Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because "you can't go beyond the laws of a country", Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn't have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.

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

#505

Post by chipdart »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #488
kstenerud wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right. This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitati…

As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.

> As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.

I don't think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.

The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a "us vs them" mentality.

How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like "they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc"?

Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.

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

#506

Post by FollowingTheDao »

123pie123 wrote: post #485
kelnos wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can you explain who has control over a company then?

There is no one entity who has control. It is a combination of the CEO, shareholders, governments, employees, and the customers.

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

#507

Post by chipdart »

petre wrote: post #316
chipdart wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saudi Arabia is of course Twitter's second largest shareholder. But Twitter is also owned by Russian oligarchs linked to Putin himself. https://www.dw.com/en/what-do-xs-alleged-ties-to-russian-oli... We're talking about Elon Musk's Twitter, who around the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was found to have hardcoded censorship of pro-ukraine content as well as users who posted pro-Ukraine content on Twitter.

This is just speculation. I see videos from Ukraine sticking it to the Russians like every other day from Twitter, shared with the news. Also from Telegram channels. The most recent one was with a downed Su-25. Here: https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1828661567094984774

> This is just speculation.

This is not speculation. When Elon Musk did that stunt on open-sourcing Twitter's source code right after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the source code explicitly included references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in hardcoded rules to downrank discussions on the topic.

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-musk-ukraine-crisis-open-source-...

This is just the stuff he accidentally leaked.

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

#508

Post by yokoprime »

Adrian_Ferreira wrote: post #290
Adrian_Ferreira wrote: post #287

I'm from Brazil and this judge is totally out of control. I agree that X needs to have a legal representative in Brazil, this is correct anywhere, but he threatened a fine of 200k and imprisonment to the person Musk appointed as representative if his stricture orders were not complied with. He threatened us to pay $9k in fines per day if we use VPN to access X. Unless you are part of the government base, it is diffic…

72% of Brazilians do not agree with the banning of X: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UleMSw8m3o

This is an excellent example of how statistics can be manipulated. Of course people don’t want to ban a service they use, but if the question had been “is it ok for foreign companies offering services to Brazilian citizens to ignore Brazilian law” the result would probably be different

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

#509

Post by a_victorp »

d0100 wrote: post #143
chipdart wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It saddens me the Brasil banned X because of racism, anti-semitism and hate-speech. But X is still not banned in the west. From what I've read, that was not exactly what's happening with Elon Musk's Twitter in Brasil. From what I've gathered, Brasil informed Elon Musk's Twitter that in order to comply with Brasil's law regarding disinformation, libel, and propaganda, they had to appoint a legal representative to be…

You are ignoring the lead-up to this situation, where the judge is overwriting the law because he and his peers decided they are above it because they are the Supreme justices

Where did you get these "facts"? From Elon's tweets?

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

#510

Post by FollowingTheDao »

bobbruno wrote: post #497
open4glabs wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, I'm Brazilian and this is "censorship at all"!

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 professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government.

I am wary of the tightening fence around what is protected speech. I am a historian, and the censors never end up being the good guys.

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