Brazilian court orders suspension of X(theguardian.com) |
Brazilian court orders suspension of X(theguardian.com) |
Tails [0] is surprisingly easy to use. Do your own research I guess, but it might help you out.
I bet it won't stop there. He won't be satisfied until he blocks Tor too, which X / Twitter could plausibly setup as an Onion service.
This is all because the National Assembly that promulgated the 1988 Brazilian Constitution chose to specifically ban anonymity. It's on paragraph IV, article 5 of Brazilian Constitution.
I got downvoted for posting the obvious topic here so once again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41316512
I certainly don't!
Of course most of those people also disagree with Putin's politics, but to them Musk is the "near enemy", which is more dangerous to them than the "far enemy".
If one sees any fundamental psychological drive in an average American's positive reaction to this news other than pure tribal/religious desire to annihilate their political opponents, one has not yet put on those nice sunglasses from They Live. Don't get me wrong, of course there is the occasional actually principled rational person, but overall the vast majority of reactions to this fall along tribal lines, even here at the orange site, which maybe once was full of geeky libertarian types but has clearly for a long time now been overrun by a different sort of person.
Good luck, Brazil.
- Elon Musk on decision to follow Modi's requests for censorship
https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/twitt...
On the other hand, in Brazil Alexandre de Moraes sits on two different courts at the same time and claims that one court gave him the power to unilaterally censor/ban/arrest people in secret from the other court. It is obviously a farce, even to the slightest investigation. Twitter/X is correct to challenge it since it isn’t legal within Brazil.
/s
I wonder if Brazil is finally going after corruption that I believe exists there.
>“implement technological barriers to prevent the use of the X app by users of the iOS and Android systems” and to block the use of VPN applications.
I wonder how they can selectivity enforce the VPN part of the ban ?
The fact that someone does a bad thing doesn't justify a government becoming arbitrarily tyrannical against them and everyone associated with them (in a way that has nothing to do with the bad thing the guy did to begin with).
And the bad thing is not even in the same category as what the government is doing, since Musk censoring Twitter is non-coercitive, while Brazil censoring Twitter is coercitive.
Equating both is analogous to equating an insult to a punch.
Fining random VPN user is just going far above and beyond that.
Also Modi is an elected popular leader. India's censorship laws have been passed through the normal means. If Musk pushed back most Indian institutions would rally against him.
de Moraes is a chief justice making decrees that it's not clear he has the power to make. He's doing it in an unhinged fashion. Getting out of the country until things cool down is probably the smart move.
ps. every major company has applied double standards wrt censorship requests in the past, the subject has a long history
As a distant observer, it seems wild to me that anyone thinks this is about free speech.
Edit: Thanks for this user https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41404325 for posting the court order and bringing this new information:
Apple and Google must remove all VPN apps from their stores!
Apple and Google must DELETE all VPN apps already installed on users' phones!!!
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-suspended-de-moraes...
Not gonna happen. But it should, if this is the order!
But the ban and the fine of US$8,900 for users who use a VPN to access X-Twitter still apply!
I had to check with local news, because I couldn't believe it. It checks out, he did impose the fine. (It's R$50k if somebody is as uninformed as I was.)
That said, I do think that judges in Brazil can have a larger investigative role due to the different legal system that does not happen in other countries with more separation of powers to prevent exactly this sort of thing.
And shame on Canada and UK!
The order does say Apple and Google must take down the VPN apps, but the way it's been written makes me think it was intended to order VPN apps to make Twitter/X unavailable, but someone misunderstood it or poorly expressed it.
Of course you can't expect judges to understand technical terms very well, but this guy has been dealing with tech long enough I feel like they should know this VPN text is bullshit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240830201851/https://www.conju... (Page 49 and 50, document is in Portuguese)
Brazil is heading down a very dark path.
Fining even users is a bit surprising.
Ironic he abandoned the US citing its freedom laws only to wind up in this situation.
Soon TikTok will be blocked in the USA. I expect this to serve as an example and an avalanche to follow across the globe.
Blocking a platform for alleged crimes committed the by operator or participants is a punishment for all the users. It’s ridiculous but unfortunately, it appears that the world is ready to accept this as a solution.
Anyway, if the US has suspicion of PLA working with TikTok and IMHO the should be suspicious, they can regulate how data is collected or how algorithms work and require mechanism that allows that be verified.
"A Brazilian judge tells Elon that he has to block certain users of X. Elon says no. The judge says that he will then put X's legal representative in Brazil in jail. Elon closes the offices in Brazil. The judge says that he has to have a legal representative in Brazil, that is what the law says. Elon says "if I name another representative you will put him in jail". Then the judge orders X to be blocked in Brazil. And he threatens to fine those who try to use X in Brazil through VPNs. In other words, users who easily use X in Brazil to see memes become potential criminals when they did nothing illegal.
It's crazy. It's an abuse of authority. Because let's suppose that Carlinho Da Souza calls for burning all the kids alive, the one who commits a crime (let's suppose) is Carlinho, and Justice should be focused on him, not on the company that provides its platform without knowing beforehand that Carlinho is an idiot, and even knowing it later from his posts. And you shouldn't demand that the company prevent Carlinho from exposing his stupidity, that would be like telling the cell phone company not to let me talk on the phone because I threatened to break someone's face. And then, since the company says no, it won't prevent me from talking on the phone, then it blocks the cell phone signal throughout the country, for everyone.
Freedom of expression is being able to say what you want and take responsibility for the consequences. But the consequences are for the alleged offender, not for people who have nothing to do with it.
To make another cheap analogy, if someone stabs a neighbor, you can't ban knives and force butchers to cut meat with their teeth."
Starlink will now be free in Brazil since remote hospitals, schools use it: Musk
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41397506
Starlink's financial assets frozen in Brazil
Unfortunately the courts have made their own laws. De Moraes claims the court he previously served on gave him the power to issue secret unilateral censorship orders from the court he now serves on. It’s all convenient but obviously doesn’t pass the sniff test for legality. If the Brazilian governments wants new powers to censor the speech of political opponents, it must do so through constitutional change.
This is what Twitter/X is defending, and it is the right thing to defend. You cannot have democracy without free speech. And if businesses cannot conduct operations without threat of unreasonable fines and arrest of their legal representatives, then Brazil won’t be a good destination for business either. It is also very telling that Lula, who has a long history of corruption and scandals, came out to endorse Alexandre de Moraes’s actions. Meanwhile, other justices must either stay silent or support them to avoid retribution. It’s a scary time in Brazil.
The judge tried to silence the political opposition on Twitter via shadowbans and removal, Elon didn't comply, so they decided to go after Twitter employees in Brazil, to which Elon shut everything down to prevent the employees from being jailed, then since Twitter has no bank accounts in Brazil, they went after Starlink's accounts, and now they've banned the platform, add to that that they're fining people exorbitant amounts of money for circumventing the ban.
I'm oversimplifying it, but the matter of a fact is that this judge and the political party in power are acting like fascists, they've even tried getting several popular VPN applications banned by asking Google and Apple to remove them.
EDIT: For those in the comments pointing towards India (Modi) and Turkey (Erdogan). I personally didn't like when Elon bent over for them, he likes to call himself a free speech absolutist, but he's a hypocrite, and those aren't the only two cases of him going against is so called morals, but that doesn't change the fact that this is wrong, and two wrongs don't make a right.
The political party in power is socialist and defines itself as socialist. The president openly defines himself as a "socialist". [1]
So, they aren't acting as fascists, they are acting as socialists. Which, granted, is mostly the same in many aspects.
[1] https://jacobin.com.br/2023/10/lula-e-a-construcao-do-social...
Pull up a list of all known BR notable people on twitter. See if they tweeted anything since the ban was in effect. Fine them and rake in the $$$.
The govt probably WANTS it to be circumvented.
These rulings are clearly arbitrary and have no basis on anything. They should be thought more like a Monarch's orders. Yes the monarch can any day order using Linux you will have to pay a big fine if he somehow gets angry on Linux.
Because of authoritarian traumas post-WWII, most democracies evolved to a highly controlled executive, mostly by the judiciary – which is supposed to be monitored by the legislative.
But if you pack the court (the left is dominates Brazil in the last 40 years) and pay enough to the House (the executive controls the federal budget), you pretty much won the game (you are able to make your own rules).
It's amazing how someone from outside like Elon Musk is way, way more powerful than all elected representatives in Brazil, simply because he is somewhat independent from the political apparatus (the most voted congressman in the last election had been arbitrarily banned from social media, so votes really don't count).
The only way out is a combination of international pressure + local manifestations.
On practice, well, they are clearly above the other powers, and only the supreme court plenarium can do anything about the individual judges.
He is technically bound by the law, but he also has the power to interpret the law as he sees fit (many such cases in Portugal for instance).
This system puts too much power in the hands of a single person and as such is ripe for abuse for personal causes… or worst, for personal gains. There’s nothing democratic about this.
It should be a jury of fellow peers to decide if someone is guilty of actually breaking a law.
https://www.cgi.br/pagina/marco-civil-law-of-the-internet-in...
Or pull out of Brazil on the ground and operate as a rogue isp whose money can be blocked, in the short term at least but not their service.
I hope it's the 2nd, be a lesson to all world leaders, and not just ultra authoritarian ones, that the Internet doesn't respect geographic boarder and you cannot control it like that.
There's a tonne of regulations already applying to the internet. Yes you can control it like that and many countries do. Twitter already had flags for filtering content based on local laws.
It's a cool overall idea, but no. It doesn't work like that in practice. Not for a person not very informed about traffic masking anyway.
So, assuming this judge won’t go as far as forcing people with starlink antennas to remove their existing installations, they will be the only ones able to use outside access. And that is an extremely low percentage of the population.
- Brazil
- Venezuela
- North Korea
- China
- Iran
- Myanmar
- Pakistan
- Russia
- Turkmenistan
Does he have a valid/legal/moral point under Brazilian law with attempts to ban those accounts on X? Or is he just a toady for da Silva?
(1) a supreme court judge ordered X to remove some political profiles saying they are spreading misinformation
(2) coincidentally (or not) most (if not all) profiles are from the opposition
(3) Elon said that that was censorship and closed the office in Brazil
(4) The judge applied hefty fines but those couldn't be fullfied since X doesnt have a bank account in Brazil anymore
(5) The judge orders a judicial blockage of Starlink's brazilian branch accounts to pay for X fines
(4) Finnally, Brazilian law demands a legal representative (a person who will be liable) and Elon say (very loudly) we would not comply
(5) X is now banned by all means
Since then, Starlink has just said that everyone can have free service for now since they can't get paid anyway. They're in use in a lot of remote areas, like Amazonia, and the Brazilian military came out with a statement the other day saying that they rely on Starlink and if Moraes wants to shut that down, it will screw them over.
It is sad to see nation states taking the route of censorship, it seems like some super form of helicopter parenting.
Then returns to Brazil?
Proton VPN
Express VPN
NordVPN
Surfshark,
TOTALVPN
Atlas VPN
Bitdefender VPN
I thought maybe PIA just doesn't operate in Brazil, but they actually have a specific page dedicated to it:
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/vpn-server/brazil-vpn
Maybe that VPN is already illegal somehow in Brazil?
Arbitrary traffic can be tunneled over SSH to a low-cost VPS. Web browser extensions can tunnel traffic over SOCKS proxy. Tor/Tails can route traffic globally, without VPN.
Other network arms races: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41396206
From what I'm reading, it also orders Apple and Google to DELETE VPN apps already installed on users' phones!
(I think this has been done in the past, in Brazil)
How are they planning to handle remote employees whose employers use VPNs?
https://web.archive.org/web/20240830223541/https://www1.folh...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240830223743/https://www.cnnbr...
The specific section about removing VPNs from apps stores is quite unclear, I'll give you that, but factoring in how that section is structured, it's safe to say it's meant to be an order to remove VPNs from app stores.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240830235848/https://www.cnnbr...
But predictable. Contempt of and banning speech because it’s disruptive to the regime (cynically “our democracy”) and harassing political opposition is commonplace for socialist and leftist governments.
I uploaded the ruling to the Internet Archive along with a copy of the document I pushed through Google Translate (which may not be perfect).
https://archive.org/details/Brazil-Court-Suspends-X
> IN VIEW OF ALL THE ABOVE, given the necessary legal requirements, fumus boni iuris – consisting of the repeated, conscious and voluntary failure to comply with court orders and failure to pay the daily fines applied, in addition to the attempt to not submit to the Brazilian legal system and Judiciary, to establish an environment of total impunity and “lawless land” on social networks as well as
> Brazilians, including during the 2024 municipal elections, the periculum in mora – consisting of the maintenance and expansion of the instrumentalization of X BRAZIL, through the action of extremist groups and digital militias on social networks, with massive dissemination of Nazi, racist, fascist, hate speeches, anti-democratic speeches, including in the period leading up to the 2024 municipal elections,
> I DETERMINE:
> (1) IMMEDIATE, COMPLETE AND INTEGRAL SUSPENSION OF THE OPERATION OF “X BRASIL INTERNET LTDA” in the national territory, until all court orders issued in these proceedings are complied with, fines are duly paid and a legal or natural person representing the company in the national territory is appointed in court. In the case of a legal entity, its administrative representative must also be appointed. The President of the National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL), CARLOS MANUEL BAIGORRI must be notified, including by electronic means, to IMMEDIATELY take all necessary measures to implement the measure, with this COURT being notified within a maximum of 24 (twentyfour) hours.
> (2) THE SUMMONS, to be complied with within 5 (five) days, and must immediately notify the court of the companies (2.1) APPLE and GOOGLE in Brazil to insert technological obstacles capable of making it impossible for users of the IOS (APPLE) and ANDROID (GOOGLE) systems to use the “X” application and remove the “X” application from the APPLE STORE and GOOGLE PLAY STORE stores and, similarly, in relation to applications that enable the use of VPN ('virtual private network'), such as, for example: Proton VPN, Express VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, TOTALVPN, Atlas VPN, Bitdefender VPN; (2.2) Which manage backbone access services in Brazil, so that they insert technological obstacles in them capable of making it impossible for users of the “X” application to use;
> (2.3) Internet service providers, represented by their Presidents, for example ALGAR TELECOM, OI, SKY, LIVE TIM, VIVO, CLARO, NET VIRTUA, GVT, etc..., so that they insert technological obstacles capable of making the use of the application “X” unfeasible; and (2.4) That manage personal mobile service and switched fixed telephone service, so that they insert technological obstacles capable of making the use of the application “X” unfeasible
> (3) THE APPLICATION OF A DAILY FINE of R$50,000.00 (fifty thousand reais) to individuals and legal entities that engage in conduct involving the use of technological subterfuges to continue communications carried out by “X”, such as the use of VPN ('virtual private network'), without prejudice to other civil and criminal sanctions, in accordance with the law.
And to be complete on the context, I expect it to have teeth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382
Why they could: The ruling socialist party is allowing the judge to go on a rampage because the ruling class has too many skeletons in their closet to mount an effective defense against the opposition. They hope they can just play dead during this mess - but if history is any guide, the judge will come after them later.
Not really. Using VPN is illegal in China. The police can put you in jail for using VPNs. Of course, there are very few cases like this even though many people use underground VPNs. This is typical behavior of an authoritarian state: the government reserves the rights to punish you when the situation is right.
Should have kept the focus on Elon Musk breaking the law.
He chose this.
If that is true it strongly biases me towards believing X is in the right.
Those are astonishingly authoritarian actions.
https://twitter.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1829296715989414281
Twitter isn't a platform to promote democracy, it promotes what Musk wants.
Twitter has turned into hot garbage. For years my feed was pretty clean as it's almost exclusively tech. Gave it up recently as it was clogged with right-wing conspiracy, odd videos and random made up AI young women randomly following me occasionally.
Before Musk, others were doing the same, but on the other side of the political spectrum from where Musk is now. Nothing new.
The guy literally gets community-noted every once in a while. It's free speech.
How can you freely choose who to vote without free exchange of information?
Twitter/X closed shop because, after stating that they would not comply with these requests, the judge threatened to jail every Twitter/X employee in brazil in retaliation. So to avoid putting these employees/people in danger they chose to immediately close all offices.
Something similar happened in Argentina with twitter as well I believe, and in that case they relocated most of the employees and their families via political asylum in Brazil at the time, if i'm not mistaken.
This article covers the beginning of the fight
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-twitter-moraes-bef0...
And this one is an update on how both sides are acting kind of ridiculous
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/29/elons-standoff-with-braz...
"Judicial temperament" is how I've heard lawyers describe the ideal.
So shutdown it is for Musk
On that topic, can you speak to the judge's orders to freeze the bank accounts of X's legal representative, even after she had resigned? What's the deal there?
Its just that the executive and legislative are now so weakened due to corruption scandals (and open investigations) that no one seemingly dares to move against 1 wild judge.
I wonder how this ends though. 1 judge seemingly has more power now than a set of democratically elected senators
It got worse in 2019. Some magazine ran a damning article on them. In retaliation, they granted themselves virtually limitless power to investigate, prosecute, judge and punish "fake news" of all kinds, with themselves as the victims. They determine what's fake of course. Their powers just kept expanding until they essentially usurped everything. It got to the point this judge started proposing changes to laws directly to our representatives. The changes were rejected but he just rammed the "fake news" nonsense down our throats anyway via his "resolutions". It's under the umbrella of this "fake news" inquisition that the judge-king banned X in Brazil.
And not a single politician will move against them. Precisely because they're all so hopelessly corrupt. All the judges need to do to put them in the ground is unearth one of countless corruption scandals.
This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the judiciary. Unelected judge-kings with lifetime mandates whose pens directly make the people with guns do their bidding. It's kind of ridiculous to even discuss "laws" at this point. These guys could write whatever they want on a piece of paper and it becomes law.
Even more context:
( short of opening your phone and browsing instslled apps )
The problem is that this is not true, the two companies are not part of the same economic group. They are two completely different organizations and even if they were, this type of decision is only made when there is fraud of the type: you owe the government and it is known that you are the owner of a company despite there being no legal connection (i.e., it is in the name of third parties).
It is an absurd decision that shows the world how unsafe it is to invest in Brazil.
I've heard some defend it as "well, that's just how the law is in Brazil" but the same defense could be given for any dictatorship and it's rather telling that even those who advance this as a defense do not even attempt to give an account for why a single person playing judge, jury & executioner is a good way for this to be done.
Banning an entire communications technology, with abusively high fines for citizens who defy the ban, is on a whole other level.
Virtual Private Networking is the communications technology I was talking about.
Banning VPN's is what's shocking here.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-defends-ena...
So meanwhile the judge is trying to enforce a law that Elon is actively, and spitefully, breaking.
Musk is shareholder of Starlink, but there are many others. This is kind of thing is only used in cause of fraud like a person who puts other company in name of a third party to avoid fines.
It also shows foreign investors that investing in Brazil is unsafe.
So, yeah, it is practically illegal to use VPN in China.
https://constituicao.stf.jus.br/dispositivo/cf-88-parte-1-ti...
Rather the supreme court declared in 1803 that they had that right, because it makes sense if you sort of squint at the constitution.
The ruling is incredibly dumb for sure (at least the removing apps from devices part), but if the sovereign state demands it, they'll either have to exit the market/nation entirely or comply.
It's still the sovereign state however, businesses that want to be active on their territory have to comply with local legislation, wherever that legislation is an extreme overreach or not.
This is not a case of one arm of the government doing whatever it wants like with PRISM.
This is a public ruling. they're criminal if they don't comply, by definition.
And the Internet & computing can't have such extreme veto power over how we think & connect. Europe for example has granted itself a right to be forgotten, where even if you do awful awful things you can ask to have yourself removed from the Internet. And so far that's been respected... In European search results. But as much as they insist, we don't censor the rest of the world of those results, just because one group of people says so.
Whether vpns are available isn't exactly the same. But its still horseshit. It's still casting a gigantic net because you are a petulant shitty power-mad rule-maker. It doesn't seem representative of the nation either; it seems like some hyper-political over-reacrion horseshit.
There's just so many people who will be trying to control how we think, how we connect, control what the internet is. And I feel like there's a long running crisis of what we do and what we don't do to match nations. We maybe aren't at full Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. But we've had a number of services get to the brink fo bas again and again, only for someone to blink. And it seemed inevitable that this system of never testingimots was going to break, and when it did, rather than break reasonably & part ways, Brazil has just gone scorched earth, has drastically drastically upped the brinkmanship & blast zone, in extremely harmful ways. This is just my judgement call, but fuck yeah I think this shit deserves a colossal colossal colossal middle finger, and if Brazil wants to escalate, well, have fun doing something other than the internet that everyone else uses. You'll have to build that path yourself, and I don't think we should support & enable that schism.
Also, the "right to be forgotten" suggests more rights of the data subject than the text of the article provides for. The title is often understood by data subjects to be an absolute right to have personal data deleted - however if the controller has a legal basis for the processing of personal data, the exercise of Article 17 GDPR has usually no effect.
The Guardian is a reputable, independent source. X is neither of those.
"The Brazilian supreme court has ordered that X be suspended in the country after the social media platform failed to meet a deadline to appoint a legal representative in the country."
"The dispute began in April, when Moraes ordered the suspension of dozens of accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation – a request Musk denounced as censorship." X, formerly known as Twitter, has been without a legal representative in Brazil since 17 August, when Musk announced that his company was shutting down its operations in the country “effective immediately” due to what it called “censorship orders” from Moraes. The service has remained available to users in the country.""
"Moraes’ April order to X to block some accounts stemmed from an investigation into “digital militias” who backed former president Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat. After Musk refused to comply, the judge included him in his investigation."
"On Wednesday, Moraes gave the company 24 hours to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil – a requirement for foreign companies operating in the country – “under penalty of immediate suspension of the social network’s activities”."
The prior legal representative of X had all her personal bank accounts frozen.
That's simply false. The proper legal processes are being followed. It's just a narrative pushed by those who refuse to accept that their actions are/were illegal and have consequences.
> In Brazil, a judge cannot open an inquiry.
False allegation, the inquiry was asked by the Federal Police and the judge accepted it. If it starts with a wrong premise we can already know what's coming next.
In Brasil's case he decided to abruptly pull out if the country.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-defends-ena...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...
If you want to connect the thread, look into what kind of leaders Bolsonaro, Modi, and Erdogan are.
Seems pretty easy to enforce to me regardless of the technical ways people circumvent it.
I know, I know. There is probably some exemption for law enforcement. Or if that was overlooked, there will be soon.
But it was still an amusing thought.
China has nailed it.
Brazil has dialed this up to 11 by declaring the Internet as being under their jurisdiction. That means they can act as judge, prosecutor, and jury and issue court orders regarding anything that happens on the Internet. There is zero recourse because they are the supreme court.
> How does the court have what also seems like legislative power?
It doesn't. It just does it anyway.
(Technically, it can dictate to courts how to interpret laws. On practice, it dictates things like "a person can only be arrested after a judge hosts a trial and orders it" as "a person can only be arrested after all judges host a trial". The power to interpret laws is extremely ambiguous.)
Anyway a thorough explanation of the applicable law, point by point
I'm sorry, but... what?
The Executive is the one closest to this qualification, but Lula, Haddad, Zé Múcio, Tebet and the others in power are nowhere even close to being socialists! Lula perhaps, until about a couple decades ago was a little bit closer but now he's not even on the left very much.
The Congress and the Senate, on the other hand, are mostly in the hands of neopentecostal evangelicals, the pro-gun nutjobs, the agrobusiness tycoons and other capitalists and fascists.
This is Kafkaesque!
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a widespread fallacy. Attitudes like that gave us alliance with Stalin once, and subsequent 40 years of a Cold War.
Not all moderation is bad, and different places have different tolerances for it. I keep seeing people say "silencing the opposition" but not actually providing what that means in practice.
Could be authoritarian, could be not.
Given musk's history as a right wing agitator, I want to see data before coming to any conclusions here.
Why should the government be the one to make that decision? If anyone has a conflict of interest, it's them, no?
Government moderates speech all the time, and yes, there's obviously grey areas and opportunities for abuse with those systems. I want to see the examples. Not someone grinding an axe with "the opposition"... show me what was not allowed.
Absolutely not. That might be the absolute world's last content that should be touched.
What about opposition candidates spreading truthful information. You'd really moderate the truth away before you'd moderate blatant misinformation?
The legal representative of a foreign company in Brazil is expected to be legally responsible for the actions of the company in Brazil. This seems to make sense as Brazil probably thinks having individuals be personally liable for company actions to improves alignment with local laws and gives Brazil more leverage over otherwise exceptionally powerful global organizations.
However my understanding of "Legal Representative" is the North American understanding. A lawyer who is representing the company and not liable for the companies actions (those would be the directors).
I think these articles would do well to add this clarification as threatening to in-prison, and freezing the accounts of a lawyer representing a client in court is wild.
Doing the same thing to a person with direct legal liability is a little more sane.
I suspect The Guardian and X's accounts are both correct and it comes down to the expectation of the Legal Representative in the Brazilian system.
Somehow, we came to normalize that US Tech companies, are above local laws. They pay virtually no taxes in countries they operate in.
The brazilian court does seem pretty arbitrary, and not behaving at all as we would expect (we, as in the 'West'). Just don't do business there and it's fine.
https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
If you think Elon is doing this to defend "freedom of speech" I have a beautiful bridge to sell you.
It's the reason for the entire news post we're all commenting on.
January 8th in Brazil - "troubled Southern American country", "broken democracy", "banana republic"
January 6th in the US - just a blip in the world's most perfect democracy. etc.
Free speech absolutists should be just as irritated by today's X as yesterday's Twitter. Subbing out one set of permitted speech for a different set is not a free speech win.
1 - EXECUTIVE:
Lula is in the literal workers' party.
Fernando Haddad, Minister of Finance, did his own Master's dissertation defending socio-economics of the USSR, before the USSR collapsed and was an embarrassment for cocktail communists everywhere. The guy who calls economic shots is literally a communist fanboy.
Carlos Lupi, also Minister, is literally one of the vice presidents of the Socialist International . The word socialist is literally in the name, and he is VP of it worldwide!
2 - CONGRESS:
The opposition is in clear minority in in both chambers[1]. The opposition has almost a 2:1 deficit vs the Government inside the Chamber of Deputies
3 - MACRO:
The president's own party is in an alliance with the communist party[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Congress_of_Brazil [2]
They're a bit different to people being allowed to have an opinion and say it without a tech giant (then) or judge (now) stopping them.
As for banning images - sure. Tricky. Don't particularly like nazi symbols, but I personally wouldn't ban them. They aren't magically evil symbols that trigger awful behaviour.
How come he is deleting the VPN apps on my phone??? That I need to remote to my overseas job???
How come I I'm now banned from reading what Zelensky, Kasparov, Yann LeCun, and thousands of others world leaders have to say?
How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
Most legal judgements are blunt swords.
Fairness is seldom considered.
I'm not agreeing with the outcomes here. Just pointing out laws get enforced, if they don't they aren't laws.
Brazilian constitution says:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
What he's doing is censorship, plain and simple. And it's unconstitutional.
This is the single most important thing about tech censorship I wish more HN'ers would figure out on their own. It may be narrated as a fight between corporations and judges, but in addition to all of that, it's ordinary individuals' rights on the line. "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
The right of an individual human to read what some individual account on a media platform wrote is a core civil right, and should be inviolate. It stands alone and apart from whatever other wrongs the platform is involved in.
The modern zeitgeist isn't merely burning books; it's burning down magnificent libraries of books in order to spite approximately five of them.
Restricting access to X makes sense: the platform has removed themselves from the country, making it impossible to resolve legal and financial disputes in Brazil, so it makes sense they are not allowed to operate in the country anymore.
Then again, punishing users that access it through other means is baffling.
Google can definitely install/delete apps from your phone remotely using Play Store.
When he couldn't find representatives of X, he went after SpaceX and StarLink, even though no law allows him to do so. The judge is simply on a personal vendetta against Elon Musk solely on the basis of political alignment.
This isn't baffling, this is leftist totalitarianism at work.
A thorough explanation of the applicable law, point by point, that demonstrates that everything that is happening here is outrageous :
> How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
Because the other party did violate the law. Unfortunately, Twitter got taken over by an international ideologue who likes to pick fights, and you and your neighbor are suffering the consequences of that. He doesn't care about you in the least, and you should be wary about asking your government to pick up the slack for his egotism as it would just position him to further ignore or exploit you and your community.
(The broader VPN ban is admittedly another thing, though.)
Twitter was bought from ideologues by someone who opened it up to other ideologies. While this may have increased the absolute ideological load on the platform it actually decreased the effective ideological charge since opposite sides cancel out each other, pulling the balance towards the centre where it used to tilt heavily towards a single side.
Sometimes that's conjunction with a jury or as a panel of judges. Those scenarios involve voting or consensus. But not all judgements are made this way.
Decisions can be appealed or challenged by higher courts.
BBC has a decent article that estabilishes a critique of the same points you mentioned in your post: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/c4n3wklk255o some of your complaints are quite fair, some don't.
In particular: "The Brazilian constitution specifies that the Supreme Court can only judge those with “privileged jurisdiction" isn't true at all. The Brazilian Constitution states a whole bunch of attributions to the Supreme Court, which you can read (in Portuguese) at:
https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/constitui... (search for "DO SUPREMO TRIBUNAL FEDERAL")
The role you mention, about ruling over "privileged jurisdiction" is one of 20+ attributed roles, a small fraction of their attributions.
It’s important to curate a culture and agreed set of norms that you can live with when you’re not in control.
The more opposing ideas on a platform, the more ideas are spread, tested, strengthened, weakened, and grown.
An echo chamber is where ideas go to die.
I honestly, wholeheartedly wish that was true.
In reality, however, the ideology of whoever holds more economic power has orders of magnitude more weight than the one of the powerless masses.
But when oppositional speech is like, "Covid vaccines are made from dead children, so you must not vote for whomever", I start to be like, a whole lot less sympathetic to the idea that we should not moderate at all.
There are other ways besides the USDA, DoE, or FBI to get good food, health, education, and security.
Sometimes being a criminal by defying an unjust law is the best thing you can do.
You can't really do civil disobedience while everyone is looking at you, the way to do that is in secret.
Real life counter example, Leica Freedom Train, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leica_Freedom_Train
Overt disobedience versus subversive disobedience can have a risk. Yeah, don't do things that will eliminate your entity from the world. But often you should be willing to take some kind of an L (loss). The best time to fight injustice is as early as possible; push back if you can.
Banning vpns is a bridge to far for me. The state is placing itself too far above the people, demanding control which it is not entitled to, dictating how we might think & connect.
Letting a state grow ever more vicious in its enforcement, letting it cut itself off from the world & punish its citizens by denying them access to the internet & technologies that the rest of the world enjoys is their own real power, is the economic-military control they have, if they want to go to war with businesses. That's all they have for power. And it makes them look dumb, shows them to be bullies, and hurts their people.
We need some states to get uppity, so it becomes more clear that the Internet doesn't care & that states can do what they want, ban what they want, and the rest of the world will keep moving along. That's exactly what's happening here, and the state is, in my view, making an absurd fool of itself by going so absurdly far in desperation to try to apply the law. Fucking with the app stores just to drive home a grudge match with one service is fucking ludicrous & we should laugh out ass off at these fools.
Poor bastards.
Then, Starlink refused to block Twitter, and with that they kind of proved the Supreme Court's point that they operate under the same economic organization and are subject to the same leadership.
I guess they stepped into their own trap there.
Indeed, before the election and subsequent fallout, the right-wing elmu was friendly towards the right-wing Bolsonaro, who these orders support.
So it's the orders of one judge acting as judge, jury & executioner, which is not how we normally think of lawful process.
Now that is the Brazilian system but... there's a damn good reason other people don't do it that way. And a damn good reason that dystopian book was named "Brazil."
Also I'm not sure it's very common for courts to arrest lawyers (and basically use them as hostages) because of their clients actions in most countries.
Courts can literally compel you to comply with court orders in virtually every country, unless of course as you have pointed out, you have the means to avoid being compelled.
The “… when this is done by an arbitrary and corrupt government” sentiment has no real meaning here as you have pointed out that Musk can avoid being compelled either way.
Also I really don't understand your overall point.
This question is an equally relevant response to someone pointing out an uncontested fact about how courts work.
Are you suggesting that he is also a member of the Brazilian supreme court?
I never suggested that.
He is member of Korean institutions defined by Korean constitution, similarly how this judge is of a Brazilian Institution. Neither means there titles bear any similarity to what they are doing or what power they are exercising.
I do not understand the impulse to evoke a completely unrelated thing to try to make a conceptual argument against a fact that you do not even attempt to directly refute. Brazil does not have a monarch. If you believe that Brazil is a monarchy, I encourage you to expand on what you think a monarch is both in terms of power and historical context.
This is about a guy who faces no personal consequences whatsoever choosing to ignore court orders and a government penalizing his business for that choice. There is some speculation that maybe the judge is acting illegally but I haven’t seen anyone familiar with Brazilian constitutional law say that. There is also speculation that the judge is acting unethically, though the only “ethical” alternative offered is “let Elon Musk do whatever he wants”, which is less of an argument about ethics and more of a statement of what fandom a person subscribes to.
If the judge is acting illegally I sure hope the citizens of Brazil address that. If he’s simply pissing off a rich libertarian that’s popular on his own website then I hope he continues to do so.
I wouldn't necessarily use words like 'good' and 'evil' here but the fact that a judge can (arbitrarily) impose a fairly large fine on any individual using a specific foreign website says everything I need to know about that country and its judicial system. Genuinely curious how can someone defend something like that?
> “let Elon Musk do whatever he wants”, which is less of an argument about ethics and more of a statement of what fandom a person subscribes to.
I assure you I don't really care for Musk or most of the things he does and (especially) says. That's entirely besides the point.
even if it complies with Brazilian laws why would that matter at all? North Korea and Russia and all similar countries also have "laws"...
> If he’s simply pissing off a rich libertarian that’s popular
So a government censoring it's political opponents is fine as long as they are using a platform owned by a rich "libertarian" jerk? The implication being that no platform/social network can be trustworthy and ethical unless it cooperates with (semi)authoritarian governments?
This is where you are inserting “arbitrarily” as both a statement of fact and moral wrongness.
Every single court in every single country has the ability to issue court orders on businesses that operate in that country. It is true in the US, China, the UK, North Korea, France, Australia, Myanmar, Spain, etc.
Name a country! That country has judges that can do things that you do not like. Even things regarding your personal definition of acceptable limitations on freedoms, speech included. And it can seem arbitrary to you.
Your issue is not with Brazil’s court, your issue is with courts in general. Except for…
> I assure you I don't really care for Musk or most of the things he does and (especially) says. That's entirely besides the point.
This is a thread about Twitter being blocked. Is there an any other action taken by the Brazilian supreme court that you have an issue with? If not, this is not a concern about the Brazilian constitution, this is a petulant billionaire screaming “dictator!” loud enough from his soapbox that even people that aren’t in his regular retinue of credulous followers fall for it.
> So a government censoring it's political opponents is fine as long as they are using a platform owned by a rich "libertarian" jerk?
If the judge is following the law, and his only actual sin is pissing off some crybaby libertarian for having to comply with the law, then the judge has committed no sin at all.
Anyway all of that aside, all of this actually stems from Elon Musk refusing to comply with an investigation and court orders around an actual attempted coup in that country. Musk’s credulous supporters will either say “that’s not true because Elon posted that it’s about something else” or “actually the coup should have happened because Musk said the current government is bad and we should support undemocratic government overthrows because Elon says they are good”
His side of this is literally nonsense. It is defended by unserious people.
Not all laws are equal, just like not all countries and courts are. Some are more authoritarian and arbitrary than others and therefore inherently less legitimate.
> His side of this is literally nonsense > actual sin is pissing off some crybaby libertarian for having to comply with the law
Musk is a jerk, I get it and fully agree with that. How is this relevant, though?
Also you really have no issue with the attempted VPN ban and fines for individual who are using Twitter? Or a legal system that could allow something like that? Really?
“I see you said a mean thing, mayhaps you did not write anything else before or after that” is not a correct way to point out an ad hominem fallacy.
Which of the following statements would you agree with most?
A. This whole thing is not about the events of January 8th
B. The events of January 8th were good, actually. They should be repeated until the current government is forcibly overthrown and someone sympathetic to Bolsonaro is installed.
C. I do not care about the events of January 8th. My concept of freedom of speech covers incitement to violence, a right that does not exist in any country.