Is there any plan to offload hosting costs to users repos or do the relays have to bear the cost of images / videos ? It just seems very incongruous to me for a decentralized app to suffer from hugs of death like this link is right now. I actually tried to pull this up on the wayback machine but they seem to have only crawled as far as the butterfly logo ? Is this intentional ? I know that bluesky likes to give users control of where their post ends up, maybe they have asked internet archive not to crawl ? [0]
I liked how urbit did it, just paste s3 bucket credentials into the app settings. A - its pretty cheap even for a terabyte of storage, B - it removes liability from the application not having to host user content, C - it increases decentralization, with many hosts in many jurisdictions able to host content.
EDIT: I went to sign up for a new account and right away I'm given the choice to host content on my own server, neat, I think I'll give this a try [1]
The bad crawl for internet archive is because it's a giant SPA. It's a react native codebase which, while irritating for web users, allows us to target all the platforms without building multiple apps. Kind of a life-saver.
Relays actually don't process media; that's up to the applications. We intentionally keep the repo-hosting costs low (and they'll get lower soon) so that self-hosting your data and keypairs remains affordable. Think of the application model as equivalent to a search engine, with the repo-hosts (PDSes) being web servers. That's almost exactly how it works.
The only way decentralization would make a hug of death irrelevant is if the individual nodes weren't processing the full network, in which case you're not getting the global social experience, so.
One of our team (bryan newbold) used to work at the IA and we have a good relationship with them because we used to attend their decentralized web summits/camps. Really wonderful people. We do plan to chat with them about it.
my thinking wrt hugs of death is that if one host is saturated, the content would be available at another host, such that it's not simply unavailable due to high traffic, but leaving that aside, I'm still unsure which party is delivering content to end users.
If I host gifs at bsky.jazzyjackson.xyz, and my posts are indexed by some number of relays, and finally viewed by bsky or an alternate front end app, is that app mirroring my gifs to shoulder the burden, preventing traffic from hitting my $5 VPS?
I always thought {bit,web}torrent would be a good fit for this problem of mirroring content among multiple hosts, but maybe there's a reason no one has gone down that road.
Servers are holding up so far. Somewhere been 800k-1mm signups (need to check backend). Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting.
edit: we did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, firehose crashed a couple times, image servers are giving bad load latencies randomly) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
I left Xitter about 6 weeks ago and went all in on Bluesky. Took time to give feedback to the algo, but it's doing much better these days. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much, you'll get the same news & events on Bluesky. A lot of people who were scared of losing their following are reporting more, better engagement with lower follower counts.
What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation.
- DID for identity
- PDS for data mobility
- algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes
- Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra
I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.
That's my favourite thing about it, really. It's very interesting at the technical level, but regular users simply do not need to care about any of that. They're adopting it anyway because it works.
Most other "interesting protocol" projects are used exclusively by interesting-protocol enthusiasts.
Well the normal folks will care when one of the nerds creates something personally useful to them. Then that becomes the killer feature that makes the platform sticky.
Will this happen? No clue but it is cool to see someone innovating in this space. Let’s see what people come up with.
Many non-nerds care about having their own TLD and corresponding email address, yet still use Gmail/GSuite, whether via their webapps or IMAP/CalDav/CardDav.
And arguably the most important thing keeping Google accountable for the quality of their products is the threat of users being able to move out on relatively short notice (i.e. without losing all of your historical inbox content and most importantly people being able to reach you via the identifier they know).
Bluesky seems closest to replicating that to the Twitter-like use case. (Mastodon is severely lacking on both portability of identifiers and portability of data across servers; there really needs to be a lightweight middle ground between self-hosting and complete reliance on somebody else's infrastructure).
Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.
The bluesky team worked previously on IPFS and Dat/Hypercore and Secure Scuttlebutt. Whyrusleeping - one of the core authors of IPFS - has been an active technical advisor from the start. ATProto is basically those p2p & content addressed techs moved into the server stack. None of us are bullish on client side p2p for large scale publishing or social applications, and we spent 10 years each doing that.
nostr's protocol is also fairly unstructured compared to atproto. ive researched bluesky, farcaster, and nostr, and their cultural origins have definitely impacted how they have approached their designs.
There is no predicting what approaches will win, but those 3 are the current viable options I think.
FYI I am part of the crypto crowd myself, but I am a SWE looking at these systems, not a CT gambler, lol.
Oh, so what about the origins of Bluesky by the same founder(s) as Twitter ?
That alone gave me pause, as Twitter ended up as one of the most despicable platforms we have to suffer today (and yes, those issues are inherent in its nature, and long predate Musk buying it). But I guess that they might have learned from their mistakes this time ??
One can authenticate message integrity on the client side and the server side, it doesn't have to be a trade-off. The same is true for encryption and decryption.
Feel free to pick up where we left off, but just know that you're in for a lot of pain on key sync, device pairing, unreliable data availability, poor connection establishment latency, high end-user device resource usage, and very small data indexes which make it nearly impossible to produce even moderately-sized social networks.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. It's not just hard, but the user experience with it is just terrible. The masses will not use it. If the masses will not use something that requires network effects to be successful, there's no point. These problems may be solvable, but I think I'd trust the opinions of people who have worked on it for years and decided to do something else.
I don't think so, you can now run your own PDS with a limited number of users. There was a comment on another recent Bluesky HN story where someone reported that they offer instructions for doing his at sign up, iirc
I want a social network like X/BlueSky but it uses a community notes style algorithm to decide what content to show me instead of raw engagement. Should get rid of the trolls as Paul Graham wants to happen.
What happens when Community Notes gets "gamed" like what supposedly happens sometimes on ...Community Notes?
One example can be that there is a mass attempt at pushing some viewpoint, it may not stick long term but it sticks for the duration of time the content is viewed by the most amount of people. Kind of like how upvote bots mess with Reddit.
The algorithm would analyze the post's/user's likes. If a post/user is liked by people who often disagree, then boost the engagement of that post/user. If a post/user is liked by an echo chamber, then deboost it.
What you describe is a flamewar maintenance algorithm. I mean, it COULD work if all people were sound and reasonable, but that's obviously not the case. And being a flamewar battleground is probably not the goal of most platform owners either. Also, for many topics that are not politics you don't need disagreement for a productive discussion.
> I mean, it COULD work if all people were sound and reasonable, but that's obviously not the case.
But community notes works well. That's evidence that reasonableness emerges when you boost content that a diversity of people appreciate, regardless of whether people are sound and reasonable.
> What you describe is a flamewar maintenance algorithm.
Are you saying my idea will increase flamewars? I believe it should decrease flamewars, and that's why I want to see it implemented. Again I point to community notes. If a diversity of people like content, it's probably level-headed, and that's why community notes works so well.
Ok, now I get it, I got it wrong. Still questionable, but for other reason: niche content (like, retrocomputing or pet spider care or just about anything that's less agreeable than funny kittens) would never come thru.
Echo chambers aren't intrinsically bad, only when it's about politics and social issues - i. e. stuff that will affect everyone in the end.
Looking forward to login being oauth based, but from what I've vaguely remember skimming these weeks, that's an @proto limitation that is being worked on?!
Reddit can still be a great place to discuss hobbies and foment helpful and insightful discussion in my experience. While the platform has its flaws, I don't see it being wrong to try and replicate.
I also don't see anything wrong with trying to do that. I am talking about communication, not development. Mussolini probably used fountain pens, but I wouldn't advertise a pen as just the way Mussolini liked it!.
I’ve started using it again recently and find it’s improved massively. I can find all the people I want to follow and my feed is much nicer. I see no reason to go back to Twitter.
Several folks in Brazil had much to choose from out of Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky as alternatives to Twitter / X.
Now that X got banned in Brazil and to potentially lose over 100M+ users we are starting to see which platforms they are choosing to sign up to.
So far, Bluesky is seeing a surge in user registrations after the invite system was lifted a year ago. I would expect Threads to also see a surge in registrations as well.
Mastodon however appears not to be even considered as a migration path at all yet, but either way it is still early days for all options.
Mastodon was dead from the start, it isn’t in the running.
Threads has too big of an image problem to overcome. No one wants Instagram for Twitter.
Bluesky is the only platform currently that has a chance, but it’s an under funded, tiny team who can’t ship on time. Bluesky will see a surge in registrations but no change in DAU as they still haven’t supported video, so no one will stay on the site.
I'm looking at one of the Mastodon Users Count bots and it seems like there's a 43% increase in sign-ups per weeks since last week. Of course, I have no idea why and that might be normal noise.
Mastadon is the green ribbon worn by 13 people out of 57 people attending a conference out of 230 million people in that country who were there to condemn, in strong terms, the privatisation of the national health service.
Thread doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t have an Instagram account. So I am not going to create one for Threads. Nope. I know friends and colleagues who detest even the idea of this connection even though they have accounts.
Meta/Fb didn’t create X/Tw competition/alternative. They created an Instagram add-on.
Does bsky stand a chance? Probably? Does ATProto stand a chance? Nope, it doesn’t. Sad, but it doesn’t. It has the same Mastadon problems - not technical but practical.
They take very different approaches even if they have similar goals.
Neither is better I think unless you want to get fanboy tribal. It is to be seen what apps will scale and gain adoption for each, though bluesky having a few mil in funding and normal users definitely puts it in the lead.
Speaking as someone funded in the crypto industry... nostr, IMHO, is dominated by BTC maxis and creating a monoculture around it, which will prevent adoption, b/c a social network isn't going to just be talk about NgU and HODL'ing all day.
One of the linked articles said it boiled down to X being ordered to censor political opponents of those in power. They chose not to. I’m glad.
Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.
When Musk is picking-and-choosing where freedom of expression matters (e.g., Turkey, India, publishing his plane's location information, banning users writing "cisgender", etc.), I don't think it's "pro-censorship" to not be on his side here because this doesn't feel motivated by true principle and puts his motives and associated narrative into highly suspect territory for me.
Is some selective censorship from Musk better than nothing? Since his selective censorship appears to be primarily aimed at supporting right-wing causes, I have a hard time feeling like the answer is "yes".
This doesn't make sense to me. I'm just doing to poke at one aspect.
Imagine you are a Brazilian. The government will censor these speakers whatever they appear. If you favor this ruling you are agreeing with the statement "Yes, I trust the Brazilian government to be the one to determine what is misinformation and against democracy and to make action to prevent me from seeing it"
Twitter/Musk can not substantially change your access to information as there are many other sources. The government can.
I'm not saying I'm "in favor" of what Brazil is doing - despite having read some news articles, I'm not confident I fully understand the entire situation. But what I am saying is that I'm having a hard time getting up in arms about this or feeling like X is fighting a righteous fight.
Here's my own thought experiment: if X overtly and publicly said they would fight all censorship-related actions by left-wing governments, but acquiesce willingly to all right-wing governments, should I be happier about that than if they treated all governments equally? I can understand why the answer for some is "yes, because for those individuals in those countries they deserve freedom of expression even if it's only given as a tool to power structures trying to erode their rights." But while I get it, that's not how I feel, because then the actions aren't motivated by principal, but by an effort to shape global politics.
It boiled down to X not taking down accounts associated with individuals with outstanding warrants who were inciting violence. Brazilian law requires X to do so.
The problem with Elon is that he's decided to pick and choose which countries he will comply with local legislation on, and which ones he won't. So India, Turkey, he did. Brazil, he didn't.
Maybe the Supreme Court in Brazil is "wrong" and "corrupt" where legislators in India and Turkey are not, but knowing a fair bit about all three countries, I doubt very much that to be the case. So then it's a business decision -- or more like a "whatever pisses Elon off" decision, which in the end is just as "corrupt" as your typical corrupt dictator who acts on whatever pisses them off.
It’s a question of what is legal in each country. The censorship orders in Australia and India and Turkey complied with local laws so X stuck to their policy of following them. I detest censoring and authoritarianism in general, but X has publicly stated their policy is to comply with laws in each area.
One thing I’ll mention: after Musk acquired X in 2022, they were engaged in a lawsuit against the government of India in 2023 to fight censorship orders, that they ultimately lost (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66083645). Not that it matters because India ended up passing various regulations (legally) that give their agencies various powers to censor.
Note that in Brazil, no new legislation or constitutional amendment was passed that would give this one Supreme Court justice this power to censor, ban, or arrest. Also note that the orders aren’t from the Supreme Court but one person sitting on it, Alexandre de Moraes.
Moraes was granted that authority by the Supreme Court, so it is legal. Whether it's right or wrong is a different question, but Moraes' actions are not "illegal".
Moraes does seem to be acting like an unaccountable little dictator in his fiefdom, which is dangerous. But then again Elon acts like an unaccountable little dictator in his fiefdom, which is also dangerous, so I don't really mind that X is getting banned. I'd feel completely differently if it were Mastodon or even some other commercial network over which a single person doesn't have an iron grip.
> Moraes was granted that authority by the Supreme Court, so it is legal.
This is not exactly true, so let me explain it. Moraes is himself a justice on the Supreme Court. He was not granted authority by it. His own claim actually acknowledges that no new laws (either legislation or constitutional amendments) were passed to give him this power. Instead his claimed power rests on something more confusing and again, illegal. Brazil has two top level courts - an electoral court and a Supreme Court, for simplification and use of common international language. These two are separate courts and are supposed to have separation of powers. When de Moraes was president of the electoral court, he proposed in October 2022 to the electoral court that he be granted the unilateral power (as a single person) to remove online content as part of his role in the other court, the federal court (where he was inaugurated in 2017) - this is all easy to verify and there are many sources (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_de_Moraes).
Obviously, it is a total violation of the separation of powers for him to sit on one court and grant himself powers that he can use through the other court. Because no new legislation is involved, it also violates the fundamental role of the judicial system, since the creation of laws is part of the legislative power in Brazil.
> But then again Elon acts like an unaccountable little dictator in his fiefdom, which is also dangerous, so I don't really mind that X is getting banned
I don’t condone Elon’s erratic behavior. However, I think generally he has been more on the side of free speech and civil liberty than the previous leadership of Twitter. For example, after Musk’s acquisition, Twitter tried hard to stop censorship in India through a lawsuit against the government that they battled in 2023. They did not succeed, in part because India passed laws that legalized censorship unfortunately. But at least Twitter/X tried. As far as I can tell, they have been consistent with their public policy of following local laws when it comes to content moderation and censorship. But in Brazil’s case, the orders appear to be illegal (example: https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479/phot...).
Whatever his demeanor is though, he is a private individual, and his actions matter less than actions of the state. Alexandre de Moraes is a Supreme Court justice. Whether Elon antagonizes him or not, he should remain neutral, stick to the law as written, and lean in favor of civil liberties as a default anytime there is something controversial or ambiguous.
Supreme Court has since confirmed Moraes decision re X, so that settles it.
Also, whether some action breaks your idea of separation of powers doesn’t make it illegal (that’s for the judiciary to determine). You may think it’s I democratic but that’s a separate matter (I think a lot of things in the US are undemocratic, especially considering we elected a anti-democracy corrupt businessman as president and may elected him again)
Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've unfortunately been doing that badly and repeatedly in this thread, and we have to ban accounts that abuse the site this way.
I have no idea whether you're right or wrong on the topic—actually I don't even know what side you're on, or even what the sides are—but your posts have repeatedly crossed the line into being abusive and that's not cool.
I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully if you choose to, so please do that instead.
Your comment isn’t kind, and is calling me names. I am not sure why you cannot just calmly speak to the issue instead of saying that I am buying into “bot-fed rhetoric” or spreading misinformation. The guidelines explicitly say to assume good faith.
> Moraes has the power to decide on this matter and the court will review his decision collectively in due time.
The problem is Moraes was not granted this power through constitutional amendment or law. Feel free to point at something specific otherwise. But here is the breakdown of why these orders are unconstitutional and illegal:
If that is not good enough, look at Article 5 Title IX of the Brazil constitution from https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Brazil_2017, which guarantees the following right to all Brazilians and foreigners residing in the country:
> expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free, independent of any censorship or license
Posting on Twitter is clearly “communication activity” and therefore must be free of censorship. There are numerous other parts of the constitution that are also violated by the notion of a single justice issuing orders in secret. You can read through the page with the constitutional text if you wish.
> Arguing that this is a political move doesn't even make sense. How does banning X help Lula?
De Moraes was banning content and accounts that belong to the political opposition against Lula. Banning X, a service that provides equal access to social media to all parties, is equivalent to only allowing services that continue censorship of the opposition party. That is directly favorable to Lula.
You're skipping the part where the people they were asking to ban were calling for a coup against the democratically elected government, which is not legal in Brazil. Your argument is a strawman.
"censor political opponents" is the most intellectually dishonest take, and in it lies the whole root of the discussion. Said opponents' accounts were asked to be shut down, not because they are opponents, but because they were being used to commit crimes against the electoral justice. The Supreme Court is a lifetime seat meant to not be caught in bi-yearly electoral politics, so it can oversee it, this current judge was the appointed by draw the judge of the whole "fake news inquiry", like every thing at the supreme court, he was also the elected president of the Supreme Court at the time of the previous elections (he was elected president by his colleagues in the supreme court). If the president at the time, or the drawn judge, was to be pro-coup, then we wouldn't have this whole debacle and elon musk would probably be CEO of Brazil at this moment.
Since elon musk became owner of Twitter, brazillian court has struggled significantly more to obtain data from criminal accounts (a famous example being hate speech accounts that were not shut down, nor "doxxed" to the court, since according to twitter the hate speech didn't break TOS), to a point where it became impossible, so the court had to act, this situation has been boiling for a few years with Elon trying to strongarm his will in the country, he raised the bets, STF's called his bluff.
>Said opponents' accounts were asked to be shut down, not because they are opponents, but because they were being used to commit crimes against the electoral justice.
What are the "crimes" they're being accused of? Getting the opposition locked for "crimes" is basically authoritarianism 101. See: Venezuela[1]
Crimes like calling the current president a condemned criminal. Which he once was. I watched them arrest him, and I watched multiple judges condemn him. Then these judges erased his crimes due to some technicality and made him innocent again, and we're all supposed to just magically unring the bells and wash our memories of these facts, or be censored.
Crimes like calling the current president a friend of dictators. Which he is. This guy rolled out the red carpet for the Venezuelan dictator months after he was elected. He also defended his recent "reelection".
Crimes like calling the current president a communist/socialist. Which he is. He literally calls himself one. I even have videos.
I was commenting strictly on what’s in the articles’ links. If he did that, it would be just as deplorable as the censorship they were claiming to oppose.
> If he did that, it would be just as deplorable [...]
No need for hypotheticals. He did do that (this is an easily-verifiable fact [1][2][3]).
> [...] the censorship they were claiming to oppose.
The thing is that this is clearly an empty claim, when Musk has no problems either complying with similar censoring orders from right-wing governments (Modi, Erdogan) or with arbitrarily censoring people for using medically-approved terms (like "cis" or "cisgender") that he simply does not like [4][5].
All of this censorship by Twitter is (legally) 100% within their right to do, as a private entity, but then whatever claims he (or Twitter) has of being a "defender of free speech" ring a bit hollow.
Given these things, the more plausible explanation for Musk's actions is not that he wants to defend free speech (or that he is fundamentally against censorship), but simply that the request comes from a (left-wing) government that is not ideologically aligned with his views.
Regardless of Musk's motivations, would you rather he had complied with this latest request? In other words, would you rather there's more censorship in the world?
The world is not black and white... there are shades of grey. Sometimes censorship is lawful and/or justified, sometimes it is not.
I don't know if, in this case, it is justified or not, but it seems to be lawful (the same way that the censorship requests in India and Turkey were), as far as I can tell (I assume a judge of the Supreme Court knows a bit more about Brazilian law than you and me).
Given that Musk/Twitter seemingly has no problem complying with lawful censorship demands (or engaging in arbitrary censorship even without lawful censorship demands), it seems clear to me that Musk has no problem with "more censorship in the world". That was my only point.
My personal opinion on whether there is higher or lower need for censorship in the world is rather irrelevant (since I have no power or platforms to censor), but I certainly see no problem in actively censoring terrorists, bots, spammers and scammers (for example).
It's not irrelevant to me, which why I'm asking. I'm asking if you would have preferred Musk to be consistent and ban those accounts instead. And if so, why? Do you agree with censorship if and only if it's legal (whatever that means in a particular jurisdiction)? Or is there some other reason?
As I mentioned, I agree with censorship when it is legitimate (ethically or morally justified), and I agree with the need for rule-of-law. It is not me that is arguing that censorship is ok when it is legal (and not ok otherwise), but Twitter/Musk.
In this particular case, I do not have enough information to state with certainty whether I think this particular case is legitimate or not, but it does seem to be lawful (which is the criterion that is seemingly important for Twitter/Musk).
I have no particular preference with regards to whether Musk chooses to be consistent or not: that's his decision and he/Twitter is the one that has to endure the consequences of his actions (not me). Since I am not a Twitter user, it does not affect me either way, and I don't see how it will significantly affect Brazilian's capacity to freely communicate (note: there are plenty of other private communication platforms that do comply with Brazilian law... Telegram, Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc.).
On the other hand, I do think it is hypocritical to claim to be a "defender of free speech", and then both engage in non-state-mandated censorship AND comply with state-mandated censorship (as long as it suits him or Twitter). It's a laughable claim. That was my only point.
There was no coup. There was a protest. The protesters wanted the military to enact a coup. And the military did not attempt a coup. You simply cannot claim that elderly people with bibles and flags amounts to a coup or even an attempt at one.
This was discussed at length only two days ago. If you disagree with this, just refer to this comment thread:
Protests that actually turned into a coup ? That doesn't seem to have happened in Brazil. (Yet.)
Discussion about would-be coups seems to be fraught... probably best to avoid the term ?? I'm remembering those funny (for an outsider) images of the January 6th USA Capitol invaders seemingly being lost at what they were supposed to be doing once in the building... (though this took a darker turn when we learned, much later, that Trump did not show up because his own security service prevented him to !)
I don't think it is. I think the assertion is that people who have been accused of supporting something that has been seen as a coup by supporters of the administration should have their speech banned, anyone who helps them speak should be arrested, and anyone who listens to them speak should be fined $10,000 per violation.
Hopefully the growth of Bluesky doesn't get crazy. It's handy for Twitter to keep the eternal September types in a sort of quarantine. Grandparents on Facebook, culture wars and spam/scams/porn on Twitter.
It's best if there's no single monolithic "winner" in the exodus from Twitter because that community would descend into the same patterns of stupidity that are unavoidable past a certain community size.
The next phase of social media should be about community affinity and quality, not size.
this a point which im glad to see someone else bring up.
i’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line the same group of sil val investors started trying to convince us that everyone should want to be in the same place at the same time or it’s somehow a “failure”.
i keep repeating it, but that kind of ridiculous idea wouldn’t ever be fun in the real world and it’s just as ridiculous to suggest it would somehow be different just because it’s “online”.
every city has multiple styles of restaurants, bars, clubs, stores, etc… for obvious reasons. sometimes we want a quiet night out, sometimes we want a loud concert. some people don’t enjoy the same things i enjoy and i don’t enjoy their shit tastes either ;) and that’s totally ok.
i’m very very skeptical of anyone who suggests _everyone_ should have fun being in the same venue at the same time. it’s weird af. the mere suggestion is incredibly shady at worst and plain ridiculous understanding of people at best. it’s one of the quickest ways to make me stop taking someone seriously.
AT Protocol aggregators (“relays”) can choose their own content moderation policies. It’s possible that if there are multiple relays, and one of them doesn’t block violent / hate speech, the government would ban that relay and corresponding domain, and others could continue to thrive.
ATProto actually separates moderation from PDS or App View. Users can choose which labellers they prefer and can even combine them, separate from where they host their data or the UI they choose to use.
So what levers does that give governments seeking to get compliance out of an internet service - if multiple apps are hosting anti-party propaganda the government has to block the domains of each app ?
Or, perhaps the domains of the content itself is blocked so apps continue to work but fail to load content within certain borders ?
Bluesky's whole moderation and decentralization setups were only devised, or at least implemented, after it blew up in Japan and bunch of Japanese artists immediately started hammering the platform with novel content they consider to be lawful and more kosher than normal but were officially felt platform threatening to their team.
So, not to undermine efforts from Bluesky team - I applaud their SoTA attempt at microblogging architecture and platform so far - but Bluesky definitely has not solved the messy question of legality, ethics, and speech, at theoretical levels. Only hypothetical and/or operational.
I can only imagine what this refers to but after googling for a few minutes for "bluesky japan controversy" I'm just going to let this exchange color my impression of what's going on at bluesky:
> Deleted Post
>> Katie Tightpussy:
BLACKTHORNE: We are a moderation service for Bluesky with the goal of improving social media for progressive queer folks and leftists who wholeheartedly enjoy Japanese anime, manga, games, hentai, fan art, and doujin.
MARIKO: The Anjin incorrectly believes that he is an expert on Japanese culture.
>>> Sign in Required
>>> Sign in Required
>>> Yep, the "controversial fiction" thing is such a sad (yet hilarous) cop-out. They KNOW it's wrong so they employ this linguistic obfuscation to try and make people think they aren't pedos.
yeaaaahhh, it can't get more appropriate than to frame this problem with an image of an angry short ethnic woman in front of a tall white male guardian, right... and it's totally fine that no one in said ethnicity interacts with that post over there, right...? At that point you might as well include topics like mercury content in Asian seaweeds and arsenic in rice... duh.
The reason why you aren't finding anything specific to Bluesky is because it's not a Bluesky specific problem. Every social media that goes big in Japan will have this Japanese pedo flood problem, if you prefer it expressed in that kind of vocabularies. Social media that do not experience this stays irrelevant in Japan, for better or worse(frankly said likely better for profitability).
It happens as a spontaneous flood of 50:50 mix tangentially labeled pedo:nonpedo mixed content stream consuming non-negligible bandwidth, increasing in volume exponentially until Japanese fraction reaches steady state of >50% by content, ~30% by user count, and >50% of top popular accounts. The mixture and fraction metrics show indefinite steady up trend.
Gargron, the Mastodon author and benevolent dictator of the Fediverse, famously gave up and went on to basically race filter Japanese from the European half of the system, which by the way I have no choice but to fully respect given his circumstances, options available, and value to be recovered. Twitter famously deleted trust and safety team, and according to Elon Musk himself with his tongue in cheek, Twitter usage in Japan is "growing", amid its worsening Indo-Arabic spam problem and tanking global popularity. Even literal pornography websites like PornHub had this exact problem, in whose case they were forced to nuke the website to get rid of so-called JAVs using unverified CP as an excuse(lots of JAVs feature easily CP frameable females). And Bluesky created the whole moderation framework and default enforced implementation in response to it.
Anyway, what I'm saying is just, only, Bluesky's whole moderation framework is a post hoc solution to this problem, so while strong resistance against oppressive evil radical totalitarian governments sure is considered as one of ultimate goals, it's definitely not the goal in their initial problem definition.
Your broader observations match what I generally know, but the moderation system wasn’t created as a reaction to Japan or any other specific set of circumstances we were facing. It was a system we had been developing since before launch and was designed to resolve the tensions of different perspectives in what’s acceptable
The answer is that the government won't have many levels to pull to censor content on the internet.
I think that people are are celebrating the ban of X, and moving to decentralized platforms, forgot that the whole point of decentralization is to make censorship difficult.
When you move to bluesky, you just support an even more free version of twitter.
apps don't host data, PDS (personal data servers) do
apps implement views on that data, and may or may not follow the rules, of gov't or users. For example, even though you can block a user, detach a quote post, or hide comments, apps have to implement this behavior, and nothing stops a person from finding that relation.
ATProto is federated, not centralized, and not something gov'ts and regulations have thought thoroughly about. Also, with DID, I believe DNS blocking will be hard because I can change the name and still get to the same content
> not something gov'ts and regulations have thought thoroughly about
Not trying to be combative but I find this mode of thinking is likely to backfire, governments don't have to think they can just act - has bsky thought seriously about what their response will be to the same laws that X is suffering from?
Users have choice over moderation, it's not necessarily something Bluesky can limit, by design.
It's also worth seeing how it plays out with others, while you are still not on the radar. Part of the reason Xitter is getting harsher treatment is because Musk antagonized. That's not the best way to negotiate, especially since he said he'd abide by local rules, like how he said he'd be better for free speech.
Bluesky could implement it in their moderation service, but that does not mean users in Brazil would be impacted by it.
Users could swap moderation service or swap interfaces
The one thing that could happen is the PDS deleting the record for everyone, everywhere
One thing to separate is Bluesky from ATProto. Bluesky is the default implementation of the 4 core pieces, but one could use alternatives for all of them as well and still have their content show up in the bsky app. Imagine if Twitter was open source and federated
If the govt bans a specific app, the people will just use another for accessing the same information.
It's not really tools for circumvention. The Bluesky app is more like Chrome for the ATProto network, the best implementation of a viewer, open source and leading edge. The moderation is less federated, more about user choice, as each labeller is centralized, but there are many of them.
They previously banned Telegram, and might come for these other services next. But selective enforcement is also part of how injustices are performed in authoritarian regimes. Note that most websites and businesses on the Internet don’t need to have a local representative in Brazil, for example, though the Supreme Court justice here demanded Twitter have one (just so he could jail the person like an act of theater). The aggressiveness against Twitter/X could just be a strategy to compel other companies to quietly censor in behalf of the current administration, even if it would be illegal for them to comply.
The previous administrator was removed and another wasn't appointed, running foul from the societal laws.
Telegram doesn’t have a local entity and complies with Brazilian law, which is the only thing that is required. There is absolutely no need for local representation of foreign entities in Brazilian law.
Twitter having a local office is simply a commercial decision - easier to conduct business, better relationships with customers, local tax vs duty over importation of services etc.
x.com is also not easy to ban. vpn are always to use but you will be fined by the government if they can identify you. same goes for any other platform that are not "easy to ban".
I'm on Mastodon and Bluesky but rarely visit -- not sure I need that kind of network after all. I don't feel any loss of value after closing my Twitter/X account, and am glad to have the time back.
I've basically narrowed my use down to two networks that I visit regularly:
IG (private account) for photos of friends/family and some interesting strangers. I keep my follow list quite short, and unfollow liberally if I feel I'm not getting anything out of the content anymore. But lately the sponsored and ad content feels like 5-to-1 vs my actual follow content. If my family didn't use it to see pics of my kids then I'd close it.
HN: the only reason HN works is that it's not centered around "following" people (like every other network), which then becomes a race to get more "followers" which becomes some sort of currency. I saw this happening with Quora in its early days where after a promising start and really interesting content/replies by actual experts, it turned into a little attention-seeking groupie club--that's when I closed my account.
That wasn't the claim. The claim was that people aren't leaving voluntarily, which simply isn't true. Lots of people have voluntarily left Twitter since Musk took over (About 23% DAU, a ~50 million drop) and that's before Brazil banned it
That people are also leaving because of twitter being banned in their country isn't relevant to the original claim
Your response is a non sequitur; adding on to GP’s comment, countless people have left voluntarily and are easily findable on mastodon and bluesky, refuting GGP’s comment.
Honestly, it's because Tumblr is too good for Twitter users.
In my brief experience with Twitter, it felt suffocating. Every recommended tweet didn't see me as a person to share thoughts with but as some sort of prey, like they only wanted me for my attention, formulating tweets with open-ended questions and clickbait to bait me into engaging with them.
On Tumblr, it's just people's blogs. I follow a guy who takes photos of birds. No sweating. No engagement metrics. Just cool birds. Check it out https://www.tumblr.com/doingitfortheexposure
It's relaxing.
I don't think Twitter users would get used to the peace of mind that Tumblr can offer them.
In fact when I checked Bluesky, some new Brazilian users were talking about how there was no "trending topics" section in Bluesky. A part of Twitter's interface that I personally tried very hard to avoid looking at.
I think banning any network that allows citizens to air their views, whatever they may be, is very dangerous. Free speech that is free of control is essential.
I also think that anyone, especially someone prone to childish tantrums like Musk, having unquestionable control of a major network on which citizens can air their views, is also very dangerous. Free speech that is free of control is essential.
Twitter isn’t a network where anyone can air their views. Elon regularly takes punitive action to mark links that criticize him as containing malware, has accounts banned that post evidence of his misdeeds, etc.
We have a network where you can post what you want to say. It’s called the World Wide Web.
Bluesky is nice, don't get me wrong, but it's also boring. Most users don't update their feeds. The Brazilians will get bored too and leave once X.com resolves the ban.
X.com is where the action is at. It's where the news makers and shakers are.
I like Bluesky, its devs, and its tech. I even built a third-party web client for it in Solid.js. But I find Bluesky to be too toxic. There's too much unwanted nudity, even if all my filters are turned on.
That's really the core of the social media problem though. Social platforms are asked to, and signing themselves up to, walk the fine line between free speech and content moderation.
Ultimately they are private platforms and as far as I'm concerned they can censor as much or as little as they want, but its a fundamental problem of any algorithmically managed feed of user generated content. There's no easy fix there and you'll always piss of a large chunk of the population.
I wonder if anyone's doing intersections and differences on feeds yet - would be awesome if there were people aggregating all the only fans accounts so I could just subtract that from my algorithmic feed.
No he is just rubbing them the wrong way. States, governments are control freaks. They make sure only their "disinformation" must be spread (public schooling, paid academia, controlled media). Rest will be muffled.bl Before musk Twitter was aligning with them, now not much.
I strongly believe the potential valuation and financial performance was not the primary motivation for Musk to buy Twitter, it’s simply a toy for a man worth $200+ billion.
Oh, true. But the problem is that Musk, rich has he is, can't run Twitter indefinitely without revenue (more than he's getting today, and it's likely declining). He needs it to perform financially if it's to continue to be a going concern.
He's going the other route - lower costs. He got rid of the overwhelming majority of staff, moved (or is moving?) the HQ out of San Francisco and California - meaning lower costs + lower tax, and so on. So while revenue has decreased, so have costs. In later 2023 he stated that it was expected for Twitter to be profitable early in 2024. Given there was no follow up announcement I doubt this goal was achieved, but it does suggest that it's probably quite close to being in the black. And that's quite good for a company which was only made profit 2 years in its entire existence.
And you believe him? The guy who took out loans to finance the purchase of the company, which drain the company of $1.5 billion a year? I’ve got some oceanside property to sell you.
I agree, but if he valued the soft power, wouldn't you expect to him to take the survival of the platform more seriously? Or maybe it's all for the lulz and I am just a dumb peasant. Certainly, to hell with the valuation if you're going to run it as your own personal forum, but if you scare all the users and revenue away, you are left with a very expensive CRUD system you alone are posting into (and paying billions of dollars for the privilege).
Maybe Twitter will become more popular and influential now that it's banned. It could be the place to find out what the government doesn't want you to know.
Back in 2020, an acquaintance of mine started ranting to me about covid when I wished her a happy Chinese new year. She was at pains to point out that she got her information from unofficial sources.
"The lawsuit from his X platform against the non-profit advertising initiative GARM has led to its dissolution. A major ad industry group is shutting down, days after Elon Musk-owned X filed a lawsuit that claimed the group illegally conspired to boycott advertising on his platform." -- Google
Yes, he sued not only the cartel organization, but its members. That seems only reasonable, as he sued them for violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Do you think the Sherman Act is an unreasonable limitation on the free market?
I only specifically responded to the claim that the advertisers were not a party to the lawsuit.
I make no claim as to the nature of claim, the appropriateness of the Sherman act, or if the claims will fail as a matter of law or fact (or neither). I am not a lawyer and am especially clueless on the topic of antitrust law.
I did however, incidentally, see this recently which may be of interest on the topic:
And unless Musk has some extraordinary evidence it will be difficult to provide those advertisers colluded together to better themselves at the expense of other market participants. Especially when they aren't even in the same markets.
Also if you think this situation is akin to a cartel god knows what you think of IMDB or the Michelin guide.
Given Musk's personality, I would not be the tiniest bit surprised if he's suing without any actual evidence, just because he's angry and because he can.
I mean, remember, this is the guy who tried to get out of buying Twitter, and then refused to pay out contractually-obligated packages to many of the former management team he fired. (I'm not the biggest fan in the world of golden parachutes, but this was pretty egregious.)
Sorry, but I'm saddened by about how far people are willing to go to dislike Musk.
As far as I am concerned, his contributions to the US, society, and the future via Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, etc., dwarf his various foibles.
P.S. if the pay packages were contractually obligated, then the courts would have forced him to pay them. Courts are generally pretty biased in favor of employees when they sue their employer.
P.P.S if his case has no merit, the advertisers are hardly unable to defend themselves, they are huge corporations. You don't need to feel sorry for them.
Yeah, I love living in a society where money is diverted from public infrastructure like railroads into fake vacuum-tube con jobs and tunnels that hold more cars. I love living next to unreliable cars that drive into traffic and catch on fire. I’m happy when rocket launches destroy local ecosystems with concrete waste and toxic pollution. Elon has really done so much for humanity.
“It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things,” he added, referring to the multiple companies where he is CEO.
Hahahaha! He’s absolutely not standing for free speech and anyone still thinking that needs to spend a few minutes actually poking around Twitter (and maybe a few minutes deconstructing what “freedom of speech” actually means). It’s a playground to promote speech he likes. And he’s a right-wing rich guy bigot whose primary mode of “argument” is either trolling or attempting to financially destroy people he disagrees with.
This is all very unfortunate. It's sad to see liberalism dying in Brazil in real time. The very little reported thing is that this judge also installed a fine of something like $8000 per month (more than double the top percentile salary) for anyone using a VPN and also demanded that Apple and Google remove X and any VPNs from their app stores.
There are no possible alternatives to US based services unless you enjoy extreme restrictions on speech. Europe has become a big no-go zone for speech over the past decade, they're outright hostile and authoritarian about it (with only a few exceptions among European nations). And the direction re liberalism and human rights in Europe is overwhelmingly hostile toward speech. And for South America, Africa and Asia you can entirely forget about it, there are no reliable speech protected locations in any of those.
Social media is trending towards regional balkanisation. Governments are clueing into the fact giving everyone including foreign states free reign to broadcast to, and manipulate, their constituants is a bad idea. Just look at what happened in the UK recently with the riots. Twitter's days are numbered there.
They were to large extent provoked by misinformation about the attacker on kids party. The misinformation stayed on twitter for long time and was spread out by many people including Musk.
A crazed 17yo son of African immigrants murdered 3 kids. Then, the far-right seized on it to make assumptions about the attacker, speculate he was a Muslim, and even provide a fake name. In fact, some of these Twitter accounts (Tristan Tate, etc.) shared the picture of a young Black preacher as the attacker. I saw it and I know when the post disappeared from EndWokeness' and Tristan Tate's page while I was reading through the comments. The young man in question had to make video clarifying he wasn't the attacker.
LMAo. I just gave you an objective breakdown of what happened and suddenly, I'm prone to conspiracy theories? I gave you the info of two people Elon Musk has platformed explicitly (EndWokeness, Tate brothers) and how they inflamed the riots across the UK, and somehow, what you deduced is that I'm a conspiracy theory type?
You are alleging some kind of conspiracy where a few twitter accounts are able to spread misinformation that somehow a hundred thousand people see and act upon in coordination.
The british protests/riot mass movement cannot be attributed to misinformation any more than the Arab spring can be attributed to the police mistreating the Tunisian merchant.
> Social media is trending towards regional balkanisation.
By choosing to frame things like that, it almost sounds like multinational monopolies on social media controlled by murderous fascist regimes and used to push industrial loads of machine-generated propaganda is something that's somehow preferable.
Your new digital town square brought to you in part by the House of Saud, where there's free speech for everyone but some accounts are more equal than others and cisgender is a slur.
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:
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.
The majority of pro-Ukraine content used by journalists are on Twitter. Has always been the case since the very beginning of the war. Take a look at any article on TWZ, like the most recent one:
Yes but once people mess up and choose the wrong thing it’s very hard to go back. There are plenty of examples of countries where bad actors have taken over all institutions and what then? There are not takesies backsies
And you think censorship will solve this? You’ll just get a different sort of monster. One that probably appeals to your worldview in the short term because you fit the typical person you think will be controlling it forever and you think the scope will somehow to be constrained to a small group of things you don’t like.
Well intentioned, but extremely naive. Something our society will sadly have to relearn every century or so.
Text from the 1st amendment: "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
You see that part that says "The press"? Thats what a media company is.
Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech, and threatens it with legal action, that is by definition something that effects free speech and is censorship.
Definitionally, I cannot think of something that could be more accurately be described as censorship.
> Yes, if the government punishes "The press" for its speech
That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals. Being the press don't give a company free pass to commit crimes and Xitter is paying for that.
PS: "1st amendment" is an American term that doesn't mean anything outside of american jurisdiction (and maybe not even inside, see Tiktok).
> That wasn't the case, the case was "the press" covering criminals.
If the government makes it illegal to publish certain things, that would mean that it is both a crime and censorship. So yes, that would be the case and my previous statement applies.
The government making it illegal for the press to publish certain things is definitionally what censorship is. There is literally no more clear example of what censorship is than that.
Do you consider anti-government Chinese people, such as Falun Gong members or general pro-democracy activists to be bad actors and that censoring their speech is important to protect institutions from them? I'm trying to point out that you can't simply decide who's good and who's bad. Censorship entrenches whoever happens to be in power regardless of their merits. Maybe you think democracy is the important part and autocratic governments are wrong to do censorship while democratic ones are wrong to allow free speech?
That's a very black and white view of ways of restricting speech. Aside from the US most democracies have some sort of limits to free speech and not all of them have turned into autocracies.
To counter your argument, absolute freedom of speech allows whoever controls the media to create narratives and manipulate public opinion without consequences
What's wrong with manipulating public opinion? People aren't complete idiots and are still responsible for their own beliefs and how they vote. They'll only believe lies that they want to believe. The Soviet Union used to control all the media and its people famously didn't believe what it told them.
The US is a ~250 year old continuous democracy. Almost no European states can say the same. After WW1 a lot of democratic European states popped up. Two decades later half of them were autocratic.
I think it's half that our governments don't want to give away control, lest the peasants become uppity. And the other half is that that's just how the dice landed when the laws were first created.
> I see no reason why someone should be allowed to spread obvious lies
The right to lie is fundamental to the principle of freedom of speech. Also the lies you think are “obvious” are almost certainly not obvious to everyone - they rarely are. And if someone cannot share a different view then you can’t arrive at the truth.
I wasn’t calling it absolute. I used the word fundamental. My meaning was that giving people this freedom means giving them the freedom to lie as well. I agree that we can debate specific exceptions, which I feel SCOTUS precedence has explored in very nuanced ways. But that’s not where I was going. I was making the point that even if you think something is a ‘truth’, what you perceive as a ‘lie’ must be allowed since only through that debate can people find their way to the truth. A truth that is just unchallenged feels more like propaganda.
> giving people this freedom means giving them the freedom to lie as well. I agree that we can debate specific exceptions
We can. But we don't and never have. Anyone arguing for the freedom to lie without consequence is off the deep end. There has never been a society that doesn't punish lying and fraud. (What constitutes a lie is a deeper question.)
> even if you think something is a ‘truth’, what you perceive as a ‘lie’ must be allowed
Why? Also, where? Ever?
If I go and commit a bunch of fraud, I'd expect--at best--riotious laughter from anyone with more than two brain cells if I offered, as my defence, that I cannot be punished for defrauding everyone because I'm part of the truth-finding process.
> truth that is just unchallenged feels more like propaganda
Propaganda is regularly challenged. A truth that cannot be challenged is an article of faith. This entire debate reeks of arguments from faith on both sides.
Fraud isn't just lying, it also has to be for some sort of personal gain, typically financial. You're taking their money too. If you tell people that if they invest in your pyramid scheme they'll get rich but you have no actual pyramid scheme and don't take anyone's money, then it's not fraud and shouldn't be banned in my opinion. But it is a lie.
Well OK but he still sold the house. If you're not doing anything, just talking, it's not fraud. People often offer to sell a bridge to somebody as a way of saying they're gullible. That's not fraud because they're not actually selling the bridge.
> he still sold the house. If you're not doing anything, just talking, it's not fraud
Let's edit the premise. No sale occurs. The agent spins some yarn, but you catch on and report them to a regulator. Do you expect them to go unpunished simply because it was all talk? Should they?
> Do you expect them to go unpunished simply because it was all talk? Should they?
If there was no house to be sold, and the agent wasn't even an agent, and they had no way of accepting that money, then of course they should not be punished.
As an example, lets say it was a youtuber who did this, and they recorded the video as a funny prank to post on the internet.
This would not be illegal and they would not be punished.
Real estate agents have stricter ethics requirements from their professional body than the general law for everyone else. They might be punished for doing that. I don't know if they should or not.
I learned that tweets by nobodies on topics such as Hunter Biden's laptop or Russiagate or Israel's behavior in Gaza have more credibility than the entire mainstream media. I fully understand the danger of lies (more than you ever will) and that is precisely why I support free speech for ordinary people.
In Arizona a giant home builder complained about a home inspector called CyFy posting tiktoks showing their shoddy construction. What you consider bland and unobjectionable they get very upset about.
It’s obvious by now that this law will only get selectively enforced. Several members of the ruling socialist party continue to use X to push electoral propaganda aimed at the upcoming election (which would be funny if not tragic). [1]
Any law that’s only selectively enforced, is ripe for abuse by any kind of government. More so by a government that’s descending into autocracy.
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 difficult to find someone who approves of his actions.
>but he threatened a fine of 200k and imprisonment to the person Musk appointed as representative if his stricture orders were not complied with
Moraes essentially wanted a hostage. Executives of companies shouldn't be arrested for things they have no power over, such as content moderation. My guess is that Moraes wanted to force Musk's company to not have a legal representative in the country, because the moment you know if you accept a job there's a high chance that job will result in you being arrested, those business men and women won't want that job. So Moraes clearly forced a situation that drove X out of the country.
If anything – it would still have been incredibly draconian and abusive from Moraes part – but it would have been “less bad” if the had skip the whole "arresting the legal representative" thing and had went straight to "block Twitter/X for not complying with his orders" part. But I guess Moraes really wanted to go for the "they didn't have a representative in Brazil, so we ban it" narrative.
Which by the way, this requirement, even if it's in the law, it surely not demanded from the vast majority of online companies that offer their service in Brazil. Otherwise they would have blocked Blue Sky as well, because (I assume) it doesn't have legal representatives in the country. So at best this law is being selectively enforced.
At the end of the day law will always be selectively enforced online since you literally cannot afford to pursue every single organization not compliant with the law. In fact, what happened with Twitter was something exceptional. Probably, many other organizations are breaking the same rule, but at the same time they're not as important as Twitter and it's not even worth prosecuting such cases
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 parent company.
Musk could choose to furnish the Brazil office of Twitter/X with the necessary resources to do content moderation to conform with local law. He chooses not to, with predictable consequences in terms of legal liability for any local representative.
Define “often”. Did you know that Elon isn’t chairman of the board of Tesla?
Also no, chairman isn’t only accountable to themselves. Where did you read that? Investor having seats on board is so they can have a voice in the direction of the business.
Activists investors often try to have a minority stake and a board member so they can force changes at the company -[0]. A recent example is Elliott’s effort at Southwest Airlines -[1]
Often as in much more than 50% of the time for fortune 500 companies. If the CEO and the Chairman of the Board is the same person then there is sort of a conflict of interest. The Board is there to oversee the work of the CEO. The board is headed by the Chairman of the Board. Thus, if the CEO and the Chairman is the same person, then the CEO is accountable to himself.
Not sure why you include investors all of a sudden, as I didn't mention about that. I have no issue with shareholders having a seat on the board.
This is true, but following this logic you can’t hold anyone responsible for any negative externalities of their business since nobody can solely be in control. That’s not the world I want to encourage.
You can "be from Brazil" and still not understand the matter. Legal decisions are not a matter of "I agree" or "I disagree". They are a matter of law and facts.
How exactly was the judge's decision here not in accordance with the law?
I'm not "a part of the government base" and I happen to think this decision was lawful. Don't assume everyone who disagrees with you is doing so for political reasons. It would be too shallow to do so.
I'm not sure what that proves, though. Even if the judge you mention was not totally out of control, and was actually applying the law properly and correctly (with the same outcome), I could very easily see a large number of people being all "no, not my Twitters, what am I going to do with my afternoons now?" without giving any critical thought to whether or not the law is being followed and if that's a problem.
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
And it would further be a different result if the question was:
"Is it ok for foreign companies offering services to Brazilian citizens to ignore Brazilian law? Even if that company is Twitter and it means you lose access to Twitter?"
The average person does not really care about what's right or wrong or fair - just what's in their interest.
The average person cannot or does not think - "But what if a bunch of other companies were doing this thing? What if we had to treat them all fairly?"
That's why it's good when you have a legal system that at least attempts to be fair - instead of just populist and doing whatever people want.
I know a fair number of people and most of them do visibly struggle with what is right or wrong at times. Cooperation is very much a mainstay of human behavior. Or of course some people believe that what is good is also in their own interest, long term and considering the effect posing what you believe is wrong has on your own self. They do things believing them to be good and also in their interests. But they certainly
don't ignore what is good.
His approval was 37% in March, before most of the worst controversies became known, including an humiliating whatsapp leak. Wouldn't be surprised if it were in the 20s or 10s now.
Just to be clear, the sample size of 1200 is enough for a margin of error of 3% with a 95% CI. It is a huge sample for the claim being made for a population the size of Brazil.
Irrelevant. Disagreeing on moral terms is not the same as deciding it has not followed the law and must face repercussions, which is what was decided here.
This is a Justice from the brazilian Supreme Court, they are the highest position in the court system, and allowed to make individual rulings and apply sanctions like this.
These decisions hold until ratified or rejected by the court as a whole (which they all eventually will, but it's not fast) or successfully appealed. Appeals can be made only to another Justice or to the court as a whole - no expedited process, because there's no higher authority.
Besides, who'd make the appeal? X has no representation in Brazil (that's why it's been suspended), and there seems to be consensus on that specific point, of legal representation being a requirement by law, so the general attorney or other officials will not question the main decision.
The side decisions are a different matter, that about VPN apps and app stores had been withdrawn. The fine for accessing X is more controversial: hardly enforceable (for just browsing, at least), ongoing hot debate in the country about it being within the Justice's power.
In fact, the Court will probably expedite a whole court judgement on that, and apparently there's no consensus across the Justices on that.
Disclaimer: indifferent at best to musk, probably more dislike than anything else, but not with vitriol.
So I read that this is all because musk refused to appoint a Brazilian citizen as an X representative, as dictated by Brazilian law. I have not verified this part.
Musk refused because the last person to fill that role had all their bank accounts frozen by the judge.
The judge also cut off payments from Brazilian citizens to starlink, something about relating star link to x. so musk said “well then starlink is free for Brazilian citizens because I don’t want to cut people off from their internet connection.” Or something like that.
Edit: blackeyedblitzar child comment of this has better information.
That's the legal justification for blocking X now, not the root cause. Musk did more than refuse to appoint a representative in Brazil (which could be a subsidiary or any legal resident, not necessarily a native Brazilian). X had representation, and when the natural people leading that representation firm were sued (which is legal in Brazil), he shut down the representation, putting X in a non-compliance state to Brazilian law.
The whole thing started because X refused to take down posts judged as defamatory against some politicians in Brazil, as well as some profiles accused of consistently posting fake news and borderline illegal content. One can disagree with the ruling and appeal, but ignoring a Supreme Court Justice order is not a legal option, which led to the escalation.
True that no one would want to step in as a legal representative of X in Brazil right now, but that doesn't change the legal requirement - it exists so that the State has the power to enforce law over companies effectively operating in the country. The US is doing something similar (in process, motivations are quite different) by threatening to ban TikTok, for instance.
The Starlink ruling is mostly being considered an overreach by the Justice. It may take some time, but it will likely be withdrawn. Him deciding to keep the service for free, as long as it complies with the law, bears no matter and should be read most likely as a publicity stunt.
> well then starlink is free for Brazilian citizens because I don’t want to cut people off from their internet connection
It's only for existing customers and because they can't charge them anymore, but don't want to drop the customers just yet. It's a business continuity plan, not some altruistic gesture.
There's a cost to acquiring new customers and friction when switching providers. Overall it's going to be cheaper for starlink to eat the cost for now if they expect to resume operations than to convince the same number of customers to switch again.
It's the same reason you get offers of discounts or free periods when you try to cancel services from large companies. They care about your worth over years, not just right now.
> It's a business continuity plan, not some altruistic gesture.
Why is there someone always making this comment every time a company or someone rich does something good for a bunch of people?
There's no such thing as altruism, with humans it's all self-interest, and that's good actually. Might as well point out that the water is wet. So why make this comment?
Altruism exists. Maybe you haven't seen it yet, but it really does.
I made the comment, because parent suggested that starlink did something for the citizens in general. That's not correct. The good they did was incidental to preserving customers until they can start charging again.
And specifically I mentioned that, because the good part gets played up as some kind of freedom stance by many people online... but it's not. Even the announcement didn't describe it as such.
Sure, but it's still a business decision. On the other side of things, Musk could have complied with the court order, appointed a representative, and accepted that the rep would have their bank accounts frozen and have a pretty bad time of it all. Because Musk might believe being in Brazil is better for his business than not being in Brazil, regardless of any moral/ethical stances he might prefer to take.
Musk could cut off Brazilian Starlink subscribers in the hopes that the backlash would change things in Brazil. But instead he probably thinks keeping those customers on (and happy) for free is the better choice for his business.
I agree with you that altruism exists, but I'm not sure I'm willing to give Musk the benefit of the doubt for many of the decisions he makes.
Not exactly. X had a local representative who was threatened by this judge issuing illegal censorship orders. It’s not that they refused to appoint a representative but that they had to get rid of all their employees and legal representation in Brazil because the judge was going after them as individuals, making it impossible for X to challenge what they viewed as unconstitutional orders to censor speech.
The root of the issue is that Alexandre de Moraes, a single justice on the Supreme Court, has been issuing secret orders to censor content, ban accounts, and jail people over political speech. This is unconstitutional in Brazil per article 5 of the 1988 constitution, so X refused the orders. Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”). If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries.
Also the “Musk refused” part isn’t accurate. Ultimately these decisions are made by Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X.
Nope Im Brazilian. And all of this started way before. These orders were not imbalanced -- the blocking of X accounts -- (Ok VPN now is). Musk after several court decisions decided to not comply, even after all involved received due process. It's not, in the slightest, censorship at all. What really happened was violation of ellection rules on daily basis, specially on X but many other social also were fined. META, Tik Tok also had to remove content by court decision and they did comply it. Alexandre de Moraes at election's time was the judge of our TSE -- a branch of supreme court which deals specifically with the electoral process. Many of these accounts participated in January 8, including promoting violence against institutions, some calling for a coup d'état. The continuous disregard of Brazilian laws meant that Musk, which in addition do not paid the fines, also removed his legal representatives from the country, which is not permitted by our legislation.
What people don't get is that mild "censorship" is desirable even under common Libertarian ideologies.
The general rule is that you have the freedom to do and say whatever you want as long as you don't harm others.
Unrestricted free speech simply does not exist and any free society will have mild censorship, otherwise a lot of terrorists, criminals and fraudsters could defend themselves under free speech.
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 some illegal posts), then they went to removal of recurring offender profiles.X ignored those Supreme Court Justice orders - their only legal course of action being to comply and file an appeal to the Supreme Court as a whole. That led to further escalation against their legal representation in Brazil and their executives (which is according to Brazilian law), which led to Musk shutting down the local representation rather than following the local law. Which put X in a non-compliance state and led to the order for its blocking.
If you understand the initial order to take down posts of defamation and illegal speech as censorship, you comply and appeal. Ignoring a court order is not a legal option.
> 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.
Civil disobedience means breaking a law in order to argue in court that the law is bad, thereby deliberately putting yourself at risk of serious consequences.
This is not civil disobedience, because Elon Musk is not in Brazil, nor a citizen of Brazil, and is not personally at any risk.
You can have freedom of speech, but there’s no country were it’s absolute. You’re always responsible for consequences of what you say.
Article 19
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
> Stop being dishonest about the situation. You know full well [...]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
A court ordering for social media accounts to be blocked is censorship, no question about that.
If there are "election rules" that regulate what can be posted online, that's censorship. Even if people are inciting violence or formenting revolution, banning them is censorship.
Most governments participate in censorship, and most people are OK with some level of censorship. But Brazil's constitution guarantees freedom of speech without censorship, so their courts have no business issuing orders to censor social media.
> A court ordering for social media accounts to be blocked is censorship, no question about that
This is a bad litmus test. Courts order fraudsters to stop doing fraud all the time. It's censorship. But it's acceptable censorship, even in America where we have a uniquely-potent First Amendment.
> Brazil's constitution guarantees freedom of speech without censorship
That can't work in reality though. So at best it can only be a theoretical ideal, merely a guideline for practical legislation. Same way French constitution has equal rights for all citizen baked into its constitution for more than a century.
You are down voted by people who don't understand what the word censorship means. The problem is that the censors don't call it "censorship" anymore, for vanity reasons. Leading us into this dumb modern discourse. The same thing with the word "propaganda", that is misinterpreted to always mean something bad.
Each day the popular vocabulary shrinks more and more, until we're back at cave man levels. Tower of Babylon.
> This is unconstitutional in Brazil per article 5 of the 1988 constitution, so X refused the orders.
This is unconstitutional according to their interpretation of the (very extensive and vague) article 5 of the 1998 constitution, maybe. At the same time, if you disagree with a judicial order, you probably should appeal the order, rather than refuse/ignore it. Ignoring judicial orders has consequences.
> Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”).
It says a lot of things (that can be interpreted in many ways). Note that it also says "é livre a manifestação do pensamento, *sendo vedado o anonimato*". Did Twitter/X refuse to give information about accounts, after having been asked by the Supreme Court? If yes, then it can also be said that they are breaking article 5 of the 1988 constitution.
In general, constitutional laws (in Brazil and elsewhere) tend to be rather vague. The devil is in the details. Just because it says somewhere that "é livre a expressão da atividade intelectual, artística, científica e de comunicação, independentemente de censura ou licença", doesn't mean that you are free to express your art of screaming "fire" in a crowded theater, for instance.
> If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries.
In general, a person (or other legal entity) are not free to pick and choose what laws or judicial orders they want to follow, depending on their own interpretation of the law. Or, I mean... they can... but there are usually consequences to ignoring judicial orders.
Yes and appeal to whom? Himself, who’s clearly shown himself to be a partisan? Why even need an executive when your judiciary can basically unilaterally function as executive be a legislator in one? Obviously they’re is not the US, but that’s not an excuse to a ridiculous system.
If you cannot appeal (and you probably can't, since this was a judicial order by the Supreme Court), then you have to comply (or face the consequences of ignoring judicial orders).
If the argument is that it is illegal to "censor", due to the Brazilian constitution, then Twitter is already engaging in illegal behaviour whenever it bans accounts (or auto-removes tweets) for using terms Musk dislikes (like "cis" or "cisgender").
I really don't buy the "free speech" argument here, since Twitter has never been an "absolute free speech" space to begin with. Note that Musk had no problem censoring and banning accounts when asked by the Turkish or Indian governments.
> If you cannot appeal (and you probably can't, since this was a judicial order by the Supreme Court), then you have to comply (or face the consequences of ignoring judicial orders).
It was a secret order from one justice of the Supreme Court, not an official order or decision from the whole of the Supreme Court. It came with an order to maintain secrecy to avoid public scrutiny, which tells you all you need to know about its legality and ethics. Anyways, X’s appeals were not heard by the same supreme court, and that’s probably in part because the other justices are also intimidated by the aggression and power grab by the authoritarians in the regime - namely de Moraes and Lula himself.
If a government commits atrocities at the highest level in secret, should no one refuse or speak up? Of course not - it’s by airing these out in public that it can even be challenged, if there is corruption or authoritarianism. You don’t have to just blindly comply and accept dictatorships.
> Note that Musk had no problem censoring and banning accounts when asked by the Turkish or Indian governments.
This feels like a distraction not an argument - it’s not relevant what happened in other countries. Also X did challenge censorship in India at least, in a lawsuit after Musk acquired Twitter. They lost the lawsuit in that case, but the main thing is that censorship was legal in other jurisdictions where X complied. It’s illegal in Brazilian law, which is why they aren’t caving to the demands of that one single rogue supreme court justice.
> This feels like a distraction not an argument - it’s not relevant what happened in other countries.
It's relevant, because it shows that Twitter/Musk has no problem engaging in state-mandated censorship, as long as it the mandate comes under the form of a judicial order.
The fact that Twitter/Musk also has no problem engaging in non-state-mandated censorship (e.g., banning of arbitrary words that displease Musk), further reinforces the notion that the refusal has nothing to do with "not wanting to cave to [censorship] demands".
> Also X did challenge censorship in India at least, in a lawsuit after Musk acquired Twitter. They lost the lawsuit in that case, but the main thing is that censorship was legal in other jurisdictions where X complied.
According to article 19 of the Constitution of India (https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1218090/), "all citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression".
> It’s illegal in Brazilian law, which is why they aren’t caving to the demands of that one single rogue supreme court justice.
According to what? Constitutional law (the same way censorship is also illegal under Indian Constitutional law)?
If the supreme court justice is "rogue", there are specific mechanisms in the Brazilian political system to boot him out of the TSF.
> You don’t have to just blindly comply and accept dictatorships.
Unless the dictatorship changes the constitution (or some other laws) to make censorship legal, right? Otherwise, it's ok, according to your logic, since Musk/Twitter is ok with censorship, as long as (they consider) it is legal.
> If the argument is that it is illegal to "censor", due to the Brazilian constitution, then Twitter is already engaging in illegal behaviour whenever it bans accounts
In the US first amendment protections only apply to the government. Is that different in Brazil?
Exactly. It is perfectly legal for a private entity (such as Twitter) to engage in censorship, as they regularly do so. So, the argument that "we can't do that, because that would be illegal" doesn't really fly.
Furthermore, there is already a precedent here: both Telegram and Meta have been previously (temporarily) banned from Brazil until they decided to comply with judicial orders (after which, they were unbanned again). Why does Twitter think they are special in this regard?
If the judicial order is (correctly) justified by an inconstitutional law, then it's that specific law that has to be challenged, not the judicial order.
> Exactly. It is perfectly legal for a private entity (such as Twitter) to engage in censorship, as they regularly do so. So, the argument that "we can't do that, because that would be illegal" doesn't really fly.
These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed). Obviously I'm not fully aware how exactly this works in Brazil but I doubt if it's fundamentally different.
> both Telegram and Meta have been previously (temporarily) banned from Brazil
That's still unreasonable.
Also you're still dodging the VPN ban order...
Anyway.. I understand that authoritarianism has a certain appeal to some people and actually might lead to some positive outcomes in some rare cases.
> These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed).
Sure, but we are not discussing the first amendment, or US law in general. As you must be aware, protection of freedom of expression rights are different in different jurisdictions.
> Obviously I'm not fully aware how exactly this works in Brazil but I doubt if it's fundamentally different.
I would not be so sure. For example, it is not legal to display a swastika in Germany (even though Germany is usually considered a democratic rule-of-law country), even though it might be legal to do so in the US.
> That's still unreasonable.
Just stating this (without any further argumentation) doesn't make it so. My only point is that, apparently, there is legal precedence for such kinds of things (i.e., banning a certain social network when it refuses to appoint a legal representative in Brazil).
> Also you're still dodging the VPN ban order...
I'm not dodging anything... that is a different issue, that we can further discuss, if you want to have a discussion in good faith. Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made could be seen as moving goalposts, though.
> Anyway.. I understand that authoritarianism has a certain appeal to some people [...].
Ad hominem argumentation is not the best approach to argumentation, if you want to be taken seriously and have a discussion in good faith.
I'm not sure what do you mean by that. How is this specific decision, or some of the other examples/laws you've mentioned not authoritarian at least to some extent? It doesn't mean that they are not necessarily or unjustifiable in every single case.
> Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made
I kept repeating this point in every comment I made. Yet you ignored it from the very beginning. Also it's not a different subject, it's intrinsically related to the decision made to ban Twitter since that's how the judge decided to enforce it.
> without addressing the point I made could be seen as moving goalposts
The point that different countries have different laws? Well that's a fact, not sure how can I address it. However I'm curious where do you draw the line? e.g. the USSR had laws, Russia has laws, Venezuela has laws so does China, Hungary and every other country. They all have vary different attitudes to freedom of speech and a bunch of other matters, do you believe that they are all equally valid, reasonable and legitimate?
I mean that "trying to argue based on (your perception of) the person you are talking to, rather than what is being discussed, is a bad argumentation strategy".
> How is this specific decision, or some of the other examples/laws you've mentioned not authoritarian at least to some extent?
Even if it is (which you surely haven't demonstrated), in what way does that imply that I (or anyone else) feel "appeal towards authoritarianism"? Stick to discussing the subject, instead of discussing the people you are talking to, if you want to be taken seriously.
> It doesn't mean that they are not necessarily or unjustifiable in every single case.
If they are legally, morally and ethically justifiable (at least sometimes), then it's not really "authoritarianism": it's just "rule-of-law".
> I kept repeating this point in every comment I made. Yet you ignored it from the very beginning.
No. The only time you mentioned it (in a response to me) was when I called you out. If you disagree, please post the supposed previous comment you made (in response to me) where you bring up the VPN ban issue.
> Also it's not a different subject, it's intrinsically related to the decision made to ban Twitter since that's how the judge decided to enforce it.
From what I understand, the only thing that was banned was the use of circumvention technologies for the purpose of accessing Twitter (which seems legitimate if his previous ruling is to be effectively enforced). From what I understand, the blanket ban of VPN technologies (which does not seem legitimate to me) has been reversed.
> The point that different countries have different laws? Well that's a fact, not sure how can I address it.
The way to address it is to accept that US laws (and US standards of free speech) do not apply to this case, since it is outside of US jurisdiction. Furthermore, to accept that, if a company wants to operate in a certain country, it kind of has to abide by its laws and regulations (regardless of whether they are legitimate or not).
> However I'm curious where do you draw the line? e.g. the USSR had laws, Russia has laws, Venezuela has laws so does China, Hungary and every other country. They all have vary different attitudes to freedom of speech and a bunch of other matters, do you believe that they are all equally valid, reasonable and legitimate?
Obviously not, but the fact remains: if you want to operate in USSR, Russia, Venezuela, China, Hungary, or wherever, you need to comply with local regulations and laws. Or, of course, you can choose not to, but then it is quite likely that local authorities will do whatever they can to prevent your company from operating in their country.
Musk/Twitter has no problem complying with Turkish and Indian court requests and laws, even when it involves censorship. Yet, it can't seem to do the same when it comes to Brazilian court requests and laws. Strange...
I’ve mentioned the HN guidelines to you before, as this type of aggression is not ideal for this space. I understand you are very invested in this story - many people are, myself included. But this type of comment is not appropriate for Hacker News.
> The court will judge the matter collectively in due time in accordance with Brazilian due process, but judges have the power to decide matters immediately when needed before waiting for the court.
I am not familiar with what you’re claiming here about the matter being judged collectively in due time with Brazilian due process - care to share a source?
I do think though that you aren’t quite responding to the point the GP comment made: First, X has nowhere to appeal to because the Supreme Court has refused to hear their appeals so far, which is something X has stated publicly. And of course, the person issuing these secret censorship orders is a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court, so there is also the conflict of interest. There may be no way to eliminate conflict of interest at this highest level court since other justices may feel intimidated by Alexandre de Moraes’s power, or they may simply be on his side as professional friends.
> Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal.
Second, the GP comment made the point that the judiciary was functioning as the executive and legislative branches. They are correct about that, since no new legislation was passed to give Alexandre de Moraes this power. He effectively gave himself this power from the electoral court he was president of, by proposing to the court that he be granted these unilateral powers. That happened in 2022, and was flagged by journalists and legal experts as a threat to democracy at the time.
> I am not familiar with what you’re claiming here about the matter being judged collectively in due time with Brazilian due process - care to share a source?
These aren't "secret censorship orders". They are a matter of public record.
Also they are perfectly legal. Brazil has a modern "Internet Law" which in its Section III, Article 19 states:
"Art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, the provider of internet applications can only be subject to civil liability for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after an specific court order, it does not take any steps to, within the framework of their service and within the time stated in the order, make unavailable the content that was identified as being unlawful, unless otherwise provided by law."
> You can if there is a venue for that. If the government is behaving in arbitrary and authoritarian way trusting it to do the right thing is a bit silly...
I assume that the judge in question used a specific criminal or civil law to justify his judicial order. If Twitter believes this law to be unconstitutional, the correct venue for their legal recourse is the Constitutional Court, not the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, until the Constitutional Court decides to hear their challenge and (possibly) revoke the law in question (possibly with retroactive effects), they still have to comply with judicial orders.
From what I understand, the Senate (if they believe the judge in question to be acting outside the law) has the necessary powers to boot the judge from the Supreme Court, if necessary. Twitter doesn't, sorry.
> Nobody is arguing about that, though.
People are arguing based on the supposed protection that the Brazilian constitution reserves for freedom of expression. This protection is not absolute, though (as pointed out by my example).
And constitutional law is not something that is directly applied: it mostly serves as guiding principles for the production of specific civil and criminal laws by the legislative power.
"This judicial order is inconstitutional" is simply a bad argument (from a legal point-of-view); a much more reasonable argument is "this judicial order is justified/based on an unconstitutional law" (but that is not the argument that is being made, as far as I can tell). If the judge is justifying his orders based on an inconstitutional law, then you should challenge the law itself, not the judicial order (if you can't really challenge the judicial order, which seems to be the case).
> Maybe appointing people who behave like schoolchildren to the supreme court is not the best idea then?
For someone who claims to be concerned about Brazilian law, Musk sure seems willing to ignore Brazilian laws, whenever it suits him.
Also, maybe it's not just the judge that is acting like a schoolchild, in this context. What do you think is going to happen if you talk back and threaten a judge with being arrested, even in a US court of law? Usually not fun things.
> Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”). If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries.
Said "freedom of expression" in Brazil is constrained by the following paragraphs, that for example explicitly:
IV - requires anything considered "free speech" to be explicitly non-anonymous.
V - anything considered "free speech" must pay compensation to harmed third parties.
X - "free speech" can't violate the personal privacy and honor of third parties.
XVII - "free speech" doesn't apply to you if you're trying to assemble a paramilitary force.
It is not "free speech" in the "I speak what I want" sense at all. Violation of those rules isn't considered "censorship" because you didn't have the rights (to be anonymous, to harm others, and to assemble juntas) to start with.
Harming others does not justify censorship. Brazilians get to answer and to be made whole via legal means. Article 5, term V. They don't get to preempt or prevent the speech.
You cited term X which says people's intimacy, private life, honor and image are inviolable. Looks like you didn't finish reading it though. Right after those words is written the following:
> the right to be indemnified for the material or moral damage secondary to their violation is guaranteed
It basically says you're entitled to a payday if someone damages your privacy or reputation.
Nowhere does it say that censorship is warranted. The constitution goes out of its way to explicitly mention that censorship is prohibited multiple times and in multiple places.
> The expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific and communication activity is free, independently of censorship or license
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological or artistic nature is prohibited
I think it's worth noting that "this legal order is unconstitutional therefore I won't abide by it" is still illegal to do in any constitutional democracy that I know of, even if you're ultimately right, including in the USA. You can abide by the order and then seek reparations, but you can't claim something is unconstitutional like that.
Obligatory IANAL and speaking from an American perspective.
You certainly can, but it usually takes the form of defying the order and appealing to a higher court for a stay pending trial and then hopefully and eventually a reversal of the order when hopefully it is indeed found to be unconstitutional or otherwise illegal.
> making it impossible for X to challenge what they viewed as unconstitutional orders to censor speech
Unconstitutional in which country? And if you disagree with that in Brazil you can make your case to the Supreme Court.
Musk was playing chicken with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who called his bluff. He obviously lost, because the latter has immediate legal power and X doesn't.
Please stop. The moment you mentioned started mixing the Executive with the Judiciary ("has support of sitting president") it became clear you are not providing pure facts, but an opinion.
The way I see this: the Supreme Court asked X to remove content and accounts that main purpose were to promote hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions; X didn't comply; fines were issued; fines were never paid by X; the justice started using all available legal tools to fulfill the previous mandates (content removal and/or pecuniary penalties).
> Please stop. The moment you mentioned started mixing the Executive with the Judiciary ("has support of sitting president") it became clear you are not providing pure facts, but an opinion.
If you are going to post here, you need to engage in good faith. A five second search could have brought you to numerous articles quoting Lula where he supports Alexandre de Moraes’s actions and criticizes Musk. So yes, the executive and the judiciary are mixed because one is lending support publicly to the other. Those are the FACTS.
> The way I see this: the Supreme Court asked X to remove content and accounts that main purpose were to promote hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions
It doesn’t matter if accounts promote “hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions” (which just sounds like hyperbole for criticizing political processes) - that isn’t sufficient grounds for state enforced censorship in any free and democratic society. If you want to admit that Brazil has turned authoritarian, that’s one thing. But these convoluted narratives are wildly inaccurate and unconvincing.
You do not understand Brazilian rule of law at all. WE have a specific bill that regulate specifically the internet and social media. We have a penal code that assure that freedom of speech it's not absolute. You do not have the right to be racis (for instance if you wear a nazi flag or post nazi content you go to jail). In 2021 the supreme court established a dept exactly to study and create legal mechanisms to understand and protect disinformation (specially on electoral period): https://portal.stf.jus.br/desinformacao/ And also a vast jurisprudence on the subject on many instances of Brazilian Legal System: https://www.tjdft.jus.br/consultas/jurisprudencia/jurisprude...
A bill cannot override constitutionally granted civil liberties. The penal code is secondary to the constitution. Regardless, no law was passed to give de Moraes the powers he now claims. He even literally said that his power comes from the electoral court that he was president of, not from a constitutional amendment or legislation. Do you think the judiciary should be able to grant itself powers arbitrarily? Does it make logical sense for De Moraes to serve on one court that grants himself powers in a different court?
the 1st Art of our Constitution is exactly this:
"Art. 1º A República Federativa do Brasil, formada pela união indissolúvel dos Estados e Municípios e do Distrito Federal, constitui-se em Estado Democrático de Direito e tem como fundamentos:
I - a soberania;
II - a cidadania;
******III - a dignidade da pessoa humana;**** (The dignity of human being being assured)
Then it comes the Art 5:
Art. 5º Todos são iguais perante a lei, sem distinção de qualquer natureza, garantindo-se aos brasileiros e aos estrangeiros residentes no País a inviolabilidade do direito à vida, ''''''à liberdade'''''' (freedom, not only speech), à igualdade, à segurança e à propriedade, nos termos seguintes:
[...]
IV - é livre a manifestação do pensamento, sendo vedado o anonimato.
V - é assegurado o direito de resposta, proporcional ao agravo, além da indenização por dano material, moral ou à imagem; [...]
In none of art 5 parts it says the freedom of thought and of expression is Absolute, on contrary, i let here for you guys translate yourselves the paragraph V... It's not censorship when you comit a crime, you lose your freedom when you comit a crime (depend on the aggravation of course, its penalty dosimetry)
For others reading the parent comment to this one - they left out the most relevant part of the Brazilian constitution for this situation, presumably on purpose to make the secret censorship orders look legal. Within Article 5, is Title 9 which reads:
> “IX. expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free, independent of any censorship or license”
And note that the introductory text that precedes this reads:
> “Everyone is equal before the law, with no distinction whatsoever, guaranteeing to Brazilians and foreigners residing in the Country the inviolability of the rights to life, liberty, equality, security and property, on the following terms:”
In other words, “communication activity” (which posting on Twitter obviously constitutes) is protected without censorship.
In France specifically, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (which is an integral part of the Constitution), defines freedom as doing anything which does not harm others, and that the Law determines the limits of a freedom.
Which means Freedom (including of Speech) in its very conception is more bounded that the US notion of Free Speech (which, even though also limited, is less restrictive).
However, Free Speech based on the First Amendment only applies to the individual's relations with the State. A private employer in the US can fire an employee for saying something that doesn't reflect the values of the company, even if that speech was lawful. In France (and I assume most Freedom of Speech countries), the constitutional protection applies even with private entities and an employee cannot be fired for a lawful speech. .
>In France specifically, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (which is an integral part of the Constitution), defines freedom as doing anything which does not harm others, and that the Law determines the limits of a freedom.
But the whole point of freedom of speech is for situations where it does "harm others". If nobody has a problem with your speech, then you don't need laws to protect it. The protection is only useful if speech comes into conflict with someone.
Freedom of speech doesn't stop where somebody else's rights begin, it starts there. There is no need for freedom of speech before that.
And the entire point of constitutional rights is that they should make the society better. There is no inherent value in abstract principles.
Broadly speaking, freedom of speech can mean two roughly orthogonal things:
1. Lack of government censorship.
2. Freedom of speech as an outcome: a society where people can speak their minds without excessive consequences.
Sense 2 is inherently vague and can't be regulated, as people won't agree on when the consequences are excessive. But it's usually what people want when they care about the freedom of speech.
The two senses are sometimes opposed. If you say something other people find unpleasant and a million people decide to ruin your life, it's clearly against freedom of speech in sense 2. But if you have laws against such mob justice, they can easily violate freedom of speech in sense 1.
Freedom of speech in sense 2 is more about culture than government regulations. If you have a highly polarized society, you can't have freedom of speech in that sense.
The "harm" is in relation to other people's constitutional freedoms and rights. Freedom of speech isn't inherently superior to, say, freedom of assembly, freedom of belief, the right to safety in one's person and one's properties, the right to vote, and so on...
It's a question of value: either you think Freedom of Speech is the highest form of freedom and right that one can hold, and all the other freedoms must come second, or that all freedom and rights are equal, and the role of the Constitution and the law is to find a balance between those.
> defines freedom as doing anything which does not harm others
Who decides if someone is harmed? Did I really harm someone if I called them a homophobic slur? Can I say that someone harmed me if the mispronounce my name?
> The US constitution categorically upholds the value of Free Speech whereas the European Court of Human Rights Article 10 explicitly lists the reasons that free expression can be constrained.
There is no difference. From all my searching, these terms are used interchangeably. As far as Brazil is concerned, freedom of expression is freedom of speech. Specifically Article 5 describes four activities of expression that are “free and independent of any censorship”: intellectual activity, artistic activity, scientific activity, and communication activity.
Isn't it about the people who invaded government buildings on January 8 2923 because they claimed Jair Bolsonaro won the election much like the January 6 attack in the USA after Trump lost?
The same people who wanted to overthrow the government and wanted a coup d'état by the military?
I doubt that the US government would differently in such cases.
And Twitter censored accounts on behalf of Turkey and India for political reasons but in Brasil they act differently, maybe Musk is in favor of Bolsonaro.
And that Linda makes the decisions is questionable at best
As far as I'm aware, the American government has never ordered a social media platform to ban certain accounts. Even mild government suggestions about social media content are quite controversial in the US.
Yes, in the U.S. the obedient capitalists act as proxy censors for the government, in exchange for campaign donations, preferential tax treatment, and weak regulatory enforcement.
I'm not sure what you intend for me to infer from this context-free link. It doesn't seem to include any examples of the government ordering Twitter to ban certain accounts, although it does have a few of the suggestions regarding content I mentioned.
They never ordered anyone to censor anything. They shared recommendations that as far as we know were based on good faith determinations. Twitter was never obligated to do anything.
That's a stretch. They could have decided twitter was non compliant and started treating them a little less gently but would they order content be removed or issue fines or some other direct punishment? Probably not.
If you look at the revelations from Zuckerberg‘s letter this week, you will see that they were not good faith recommendations. They were highly aggressive demands made in forceful ways. Remember, the administration that issued these demands is also in control of the agencies that regulate the same company. For example, the FTC, who could determine that the company is acting anti-competitively or whatever else. They are in a position of power above this company, and therefore, even if they had made the suggestion in a friendly way, it would still be from a position of power that could compel them.
> The root of the issue is that Alexandre de Moraes, a single justice on the Supreme Court, has been issuing secret orders to censor content, ban accounts, and jail people over political speech. This is unconstitutional in Brazil per article 5 of the 1988 constitution, so X refused the orders.
Oh... so now Twatter/Musk is "god-like" and above the law? Judge Dredd?
Why Elon doesn't bring "peace and liberty" to China? Or other nice countries?
If the order is illegal you show that in court. U.S. district courts constantly issue illegal orders. There is a massive difference between appealing for an emergency stay and just blowing off the court. (Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur. He has given zero shits about the rule of law across his career, domestically or abroad.)
At the end of the day, both sides in this case are posturing. The judge gets to act like he's standing up to us American imperialists. Musk gets affirmation from his anti-work censorship crowd. The fact that X f/k/a Twitter has zero employees in Brazil should tell you how much that market really matters to him.
> Ultimately these decisions are made by Linda Yaccarino
This is nonsense. I have a lot of respect for senior people on the X team as well as many of their shareholders. Yaccarino is an obvious puppet.
I mean, let’s be real. X isn’t profitable so does retaining a bunch of users from a country with relatively low disposable income really matter?
I fully support Brazil banning X because a country can do whatever they want, but let’s not pretend X owes Brazil anything.
Brazil is irrelevant to X and countries that act like dictators deserve to be ignored by foreign companies. It’s hilarious to see Brazil play their cards and show they have no power over their citizens by threatening to fine them for using a VPN to access X.
This isn’t bias against LATAM, I also want to see Australia lose business due to their crazy spy laws.
> X isn’t profitable so does retaining a bunch of users from a country with relatively low disposable income really matter?
Oh, I totally agree with you. But they're not worth negative money. This was a cheap stunt for both sides to pull off. But it's still a stunt. X's TAM has been cut. Brazil's reputation harmed. But both men have personal interests that make those costs worth it, and there isn't anyone in their respective domains who can check them.
If the judge's orders clearly contradict the constitution, it's pretty logical to suggest that these would lead him to a jail.
There are various ways to resolve a conflict; to comply to your opponent's demands just because he happens to hold a high enough office is but one of these ways. Complying to unlawful orders so as to preserve profits is often seen as corruption. Sometimes the best way to resolve a conflict correctly is to take a stand.
A military coup d'état is unconstitutional in nearly every country, to prevent that and protect the intended way of change of government isn't a magical right but simply a duty of the government.
And Musk didn't fight as hard in India or Turkey for accounts of people that did far less.
The actual act of a coup is unconstitutional in probably every country. But talking about a coup is not unconstitutional in many countries. For example in the US, seditious speech is protected.
Anyways, Alexandre de Moraes - the Supreme Court justice in this situation - is acting unconstitutionally in multiple ways. Issuing orders to censor, ban, or arrest in secret is depriving the victims of due process and the public of accountability. He also said himself that he is not getting his powers from law but from what the other court he sits on gave him as a new power, which is just a made up legal invention on his part. How can a court make up legal powers, when that is meant to come from the constitution and legislation?
> And Musk didn't fight as hard in India or Turkey for accounts of people that did far less.
You are one among many attempting the whataboutism of bringing up Turkey and India, even though it has no bearing on what is happening in Brazil. I don’t agree with censorship in any of these cases. However, Twitter/X has publicly stated that their policy is to comply with local laws in each country. The difference is in the legality of orders per that country’s own laws. In Brazil, there is a right to freedom of expression without censorship, per article 5 of the constitution. Also another difference is that the censorship orders here were done in secret - like with gag orders that make it invisible to the public - and this is both highly unethical but also makes this judge unaccountable and difficult to challenge.
>But talking about a coup is not unconstitutional in many countries. For example in the US, seditious speech is protected.
Unless you were already part in an attempt than it's more likely you aren't just express your opinion but coordinate your next attempt over social media.
Free speech has limit. Just look at Charles Manson, he didn't kill anybody but he talked others into.
You wouldn't call Russian orders through Telegram free speech, would you?
The same entity behaves differently on the same issue but from different requester.
By your logic every complain about racism is whataboutism.
"Why got the black man jailed for drug possession but white man got probation?
Copying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting
Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).
The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.
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 tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.
And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.
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 limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.
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.
It happens in multiparty systems as well. All it takes is a significant portion of the population feeling like their voices are not heard, and then one of the parties taking up their banner as one part of the overall campaign (which doesn't even have to be in their new constituents' interests).
This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn't have to be. We've seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.
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 just a bad comparison.
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.
What did winning mean, though? Is it Republican-style minority rule where they can work the system push through policies which a majority of Americans oppose, or a coalition government where half of his coalition is pledged to rein in his more extreme positions?
The UK system has a much less powerful Executive though.
To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn't as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system - i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they're fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it's by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen - rather then by direct vote.
The French system, with its two rounds system has a built-in protection against extremism and to encourage compromise.
The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.
[admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two]
No country that I know of adopted US election system. Its beyond obscure, unfair and set to be rigged for anybody looking from outside, with no normal way out. Its just not resilient enough to everchanging society. I know the historical reasons, but only fools get stuck in the past ways at all costs 'because, you know, in the past, XYZ so we are where we are so suck it up' when its clearly not beneficial to general population.
One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.
But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.
> 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.
My wife is a nationally recognized expert in elections in the US. The combination of FPTP and politically controlled district geometry (gerrymandering) explicitly creates a brittle system that engenders extremism. It's well understood to be both the cause and a reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism we have now was left in place in the early 19th c. explicitly to allow a small minority to be able to control their individual states. The main change since then has been cross-state unification of the party system. To give an example: here, in Texas, the most volatile Federal district was won by a representative who received only 10% of the votes in his district. Some districts were won by reps with as few as 1% of the total votes (that's total turnout). (This is due to the primary mechanism and gerrymandering.) If you can win by harnessing just 10% of the electorate, you're shopping around for the ironclad voters, and they tend to have weird views (left or right).
I quite like charter cities, at least in theory, and I'm a little annoyed that everyone sees them as an attempt at world domination. They could let us A/B test legal frameworks, and I think that's neat.
Hopefully someone who isn't a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don't get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.
> So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn't actually present.
The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy's main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.
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[0] I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here
[1] There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren't as vocal as the others so we don't hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren't heard over the yelling of others.
You got to be kidding me... Prospera / Honduras is nothing. It doesn't register. Libertarians, sadly I'd add, shall never ever have an ounce of success: all the powers that be in this world are out there to crush liberties, everywhere, worldwide.
Meanwhile The New York Times is titling an article: "The constitution is scared, but is it dangerous?"
There's nothing more belonging to the rich than the mainstream media, including the NYT. They were the people selling you the FTX scam and explaining you SBF was the second coming of Christ.
Now that Harris wants to "force congress to ban guns in her 100 days, or take executive orders if congress doesn't do it", of course that the NYT is publishing about the constitution being potentially dangerous.
And the problem is... Prospera in Honduras?
As long as you keep reading The NYT, you're fighting the wrong enemy.
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...
Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
> He is exporting the 1st amendment to us nations who don't get to experience such freedoms.
This is particularly absurd. “The first amendment” isn’t a paragon of freedom unique to the US. And it only applies to government censorship. You can’t “export it” to other countries by means of a social network.
>Stop listening to what he says and pay attention to what he does. You’re being swindled.
I am paying attention to what he does. I use Twitter for hours every day.
The point is less about "free speech", because of course you're right, this is Musk's version of free speech.
But the real issue to the left is that he's allowing speech that, in recent history, has been considered "dissenting" or restricted. The fact that in the past week we have had Zuck come out and say Facebook was pressured to censor COVID19 materials and that we have mainstream politicians and bureaucrats calling to THROW MUSK IN JAIL is insane. Utterly insane.
The people behind this are getting found out, and there will be political consequences.
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.
> His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.
So he's merely an equal and opposite reaction to what the other tribe have been doing for ages?
He didn't fundamentally change Twitter. He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
(I suppose he's also using it as his own personal megaphone, whereas the previous owners would merely ensure that chosen voices were amplified/suppressed rather than using their own voices directly)
Not sure how we start to approach some sort of disarmament process when it comes to these propaganda weapons, though.
> He bought a powerful propaganda tool/weapon and aimed it in the opposite direction.
I'd say not. I don't think twitter itself wasn't aimed directly in any direction before Musk, other than “away from where firing may cause twitter problems”. They operated from a position of cowardice rather than political bias.
Sometimes this was towards the right because there was a fairly centrist or centre-left¹ bias online, but it often very much wasn't. For a clear case of them not aiming at the right, look at them leaving Trump and many like him alone at a time when they were flagrantly going against twitter policies, but slapping them for that would have caused too much grief back at them. It may be a complete coincidence², but Musk first started getting really serious about taking over around the time twitter started cracking down on that group (having joked about it prior to that IIRC, though it did take over a full year for his first actual takeover bid to happen).
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[1] These definitions are difficult. Often what America seems to see as centre-left or even actually moderate left, is things that many over this side of the big pond would see as more centrist.
Those unfair tactics, assuming I accept they existed⁰, were not twitter's by my understanding, but reactions to the whims (or perceived possible whims) of advertisers, or the bulk of users that advertisers were there to claim the eyeballs of.
I'll caveat this by saying I've never had a twitter account or any desire for one¹ meaning my views are those of an outsider and occasionally a passive reader – but from what I can see twitter acted from a position of cowardice² rather than any political machinations.
----
[0] One man's fair slapping of an arsehole, is another man's unfair restriction of speech.
[1] At first it was a daft novelty, then a novelty that had perhaps outstayed its welcome, then just a place far too full of people who thought twitter was a good idea, then the famous got hold of it and it became a tribal shit-show & soon after a political shit-show – all before Musk jumped in with both feet and a lot of other people's money.
[2] Hence not kicking Trump (and a few others close to him or relevant rhetoric) despite flagrant breaches of their stated policies, until such time as he was a lesser threat due to not getting a second term, and before that kicking people not because of any internal moral code but because of what advertisers might think.
Not sure X posture against censure is to be taken seriously though. From Al Jazeera:
> In India, he agreed with an order imposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take down accounts and posts related to a farmers’ protest that swept through the country in February, their demands including guaranteed prices for their produce and debt waivers.
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, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).
The Soviet Union supported anti war, peace protests and free speech in leftist groups, but most of it was organic.
Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.
Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.
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 understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.
Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.
> 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.
> Some things need to be censored - that's how it's always been.
No. There are very few things that 'need to be censored' by the government (or corporations with almost government-level power), and it's hard to think of any beyond CSAM or legitimate threats to national security.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that children should be protected from. But we're failing miserably at that. They're watching extreme porn and gore while the censors are focusing on silencing adults with the wrong political views.
Because they are old and have families now. Metoo and toxic behaviours did the rest. And, it is just not that important.
For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.
> Free speech is a dog whistle. We can't have actual "free speech" in the pure sense of the term
If you are in the U.S I am sorry you have this take on free speech, because it is distorted.
Free speech is defined by law and the law is clear. Freedom of speech means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government.
That is untrue and a very frustrating error (because it's so common). Freedom of speech is an ideal that one should be able to speak their mind without retaliation. The First Amendment is the law which guarantees freedom of speech with respect to the government. The two are not the same, and private actors can (and often do) violate freedom of speech.
You are definitely correct there. Twitter was a shit-show in this regard long before Musk came along and made it worse. They did far too little to enforce their own policies (let alone common decency) on things like bullying and hate content for far too long, for fear of losing users and therefore advertising money or being punished because some of those openly breaking those rules were in high power at the time, and this led to an “open season” feeling for all sides.
[for the avoidance of doubt: I've never had a twitter account, after the initial novelty stage it has always been far too full of the sort of people that think twitter is a good idea]
> 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. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)
I really effing hate the idea that competition is created not because people with entrepreneurial spirit think they can do what SpaceX does cheaper and better, but because the guy running the show is politically undesirable and untrustworthy.
But that's not the issue: the issue is that Musk alienated almost the entire core demographic who wanted to buy Tesla's, wanted to support electric cars and were more or less completely primed to freely promote the entire brand.
He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.
There's competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it's valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed - correctly - a market opening. No one I know recommends "buy a Tesla" anymore for your first electric car - they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.
People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there's a growing market for "anything but a Tesla...". And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.
Tbh, not sure what percentage of Tesla buyers are ideologically motivated, but having tried a couple electric cars, I still believe the Model 3 is the best EV outside the premium segment, period.
As for Musk, he's a weird one for sure. He made me realize that I don't know the politics of most CEOs (or even know who they are). Which is just as well, I don't want to ponder in the supermarket whether my bodywash is ideologically consistent with my shampoo.
I missed out on his climate change denialism - if true that seem strange from the head of one of the most successful EV companies and arguably the company that finally got the EV revolution started since all the others were dragging their feet. He further sells solar roofs and off grid power.
Just a single man representing single family in Switzerland but you are right - I'll never buy anything from Tesla, couldn't care less if they are best or not (no they are not in 2024, novelty wore off some time ago with tons of competition, at least in Europe).
He showed his true colors, there is no correction possible, people just don't rewrite their core personality. Support for puttin' and overall war in Ukraine, support for dictators, very bad stance on many societal topics, treats his employees like slaves, proper piece of shit as a parent, utterly childish reactions of an immature boy rather than Man - we haven't seen the worst yet.
Brilliance in some aspects means nothing if its dragged down into mud by rest of personality. I know some still worship him for the positives and ignore or even appreciate the rest, I can't and won't.
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, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.
From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.
Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).
> I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
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.
> I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
The issue is that many people who feel this way (seemingly Musk included) swing to the other extreme and embrace policy positions that only serve to further support and entrench systemic racism.
I'm not always comfortable with the methods and rhetoric of some social justice advocates, but I'm not going to present that as evidence that the movement they support is dangerous and we should strive for social injustice instead.
> he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
Sure. I don't think he's a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that's in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.
Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we're seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk's deteriorating influence.
I do agree that he is hyper fixated on specific things like gender
but – I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship. I don’t think that censorship has any place in a democracy, and I do think it is a problem we need to address.
The executive branch asked Twitter to ban a NY Post story on the grounds that it was misinformation when it wasn’t. It was “malinformation”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malinformation
I really don’t like Elon, but I fear the previous Twitter censors more. Media is supposed to keep the government in check and not the other way around.
“ I do think that there are elements of the “woke mind virus” that are okay with censorship”
Then let’s not focus on some made up boogeyman and ignore the fact that in 2020, the executive at the time was happily reaching out to Twitter and other platforms asking them to remove posts. The guy Musk is supporting was happily asking Twitter to remove posts.
But let’s be clear, they were asking Twitter to enforce its rules. And you can argue that the government asking like that is illegal, but I’ve yet to see a guilty verdict in court so, until that happens, Twitter enforcing its rules isn’t censorship. No one has been denied their first amendment rights.
More importantly, by Musks own yardstick, Twitter is no longer the bastion of Free Speech it was when he took control. So regardless of what you think, Twitter is worse off now.
Musk’s Twitter actively censors and promotes content based on the personal whims of the billionaire owner. Is that really better for democracy?
The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.
Props to Bluesky for trying something else, at least.
Musk censors mentions of his own daughter on X — the same person who he claimed was dead on a recent interview, but who is very much alive and posting on Threads.
That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.
> What is this topic that's only in vogue in tech circles? Wokeism?
Wokeism as it pertains to social media's discussion of the woke mind virus. Everyone has an opinion on it. But it's not of practical relevance to most people, certainly not most voters. Sort of like modern art.
> Considering a ton of podcasts talk about it and they're not in the tech bubble I'd say it's a pretty important topic especially in the US
Yes, like modern art. It’s talked about a lot, especially by a particular core who gain money and influence from it. But it’s an obsession of a few and irrelevant to most Americans. It certainly doesn’t build one a national platform.
I don't know man, I'm not even from the US and I meet a lot of people being concerned about wokeism being imported into our country, do you have any proof of your allegations?
The reason I don't move to the USA is because of woke people, scary numbers of mental health and crime.
The reason I moved country is because woke politics is making life worse. Crime is through the roof, kids can't go out in the cities by themselves because it's too dangerous.
They started doing mandatory "gender identity" education in school, teaching crap to my kids.
I'm still in Europe and observing a progressive decline so I'm ready to move to Asia, the Caribbean, South America (Argentina maybe?) or maybe switch to the enemy and go to Russia or China, depending on how the situation evolves.
Dictatorship for dictatorship, I just want a low tax, safe place and governments to bother me as little as possible.
Some countries in Eastern Europe actively opposes gender stuff (it is banned in education). I do not know why "gender" is being asked in the first place, it should be "sex", and that is biological. Why do we ask for gender on websites, for example? What is the purpose of it, really?
> Why do we ask for gender on websites, for example? What is the purpose of it, really?
I can only think of two reasons:
1) Localised messages to and from the user. Not every language supports gender-neutral singular "you/they".
2) Demographic tracking e.g. for advertising: I've been given unskippable ads on YouTube for sanitary pads, and have forgotten which ad network presented me with one for dick pills.
85% sure: the claim here was that there are some languages where "you" itself comes in masculine and feminine forms. I'm told this applies to Hebrew and Arabic — אתה and את — but my ability to confirm this is limited to googling wiktionary.
85% is mainly how much I trust the sources: my experience has been kind of factoid is often true, but sometimes turns out to be "this source sounds like it means X, but actually it means Y" or worse "we made it up and you'll never check".
That said, I ought to have written "I can only think of two *good* reasons", because the third reason is "whenever anyone makes a database of people, we automatically add gender without even thinking about it".
I remember when the Toyota Prius was a potent symbol of everything that was wrong with smug liberals. Lazy comedians still use the Prius as a punchline. Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage? Why don't right-wing conspiracy theorists consider Musk to be part of the "WHO/WEF globalist elite", despite the fact that he's a tech billionaire who is literally trying to plug people's brains into The Matrix and colonise space?
By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about "the woke mind virus", or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.
> Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage?
When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan
Not how partisan affiliation works--think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren't seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).
> Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.
This surprises me (I believe you though!). I've read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I'd blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.
If you want an honest answer to Prius vs Tesla, it's because Prius was seen as a slower and lamer version of existing cars for people who didn't care about cars. While Tesla's could get from 0-60 faster than hypercars of the time.
Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.
Yep. And he could have effortlessly achieved tolerability in most right wing circles that reflexively dislike "smug liberals" simply by not saying "smug liberal" stuff whilst encouraging right wingers to talk up what a great capitalist innovator he was, running red state targeted ad campaigns and making a pickup truck that people that normally drive gas-guzzlers would actually want to drive. His aspirations for colonies on Mars were already at least as appealing to much of the right as they ever were to the left.
Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.
> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan.
There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.
SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.
I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.
It's in full swing here in Sweden too. Me and a close colleague bought new cars a couple of months apart. My left-leaning teammates who are usually pretty climate aware only offered congratulations to my colleagues new gasgussler, but had some criticisms for me who bought a Tesla.
I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?
Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.
Yup - the hole turned me off so much I've switched my first EV buy to Hyundai ioniq 5 (N if my wife authorises it LOL) ... not saying they're any better but it's a branding thing ... I couldn't stand to be associated with anything to do with that hole.
In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. This was at a time when effective drugs were already approved and saving lives.
Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…
This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.
It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
> With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.
The thing that is so maddening is that we're already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren't really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define "something else").
I said as much in my comment, pointing out that these scientists with differing takes were not the bad guys: “These scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies.”
The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.
Well with climate change we have no scientists saying otherwise because we see they get attacked and lose funding by the quackery of the public and governments. As evident by the idiots on HN.
Funding is a red herring. Powerful interests would love to fund serious climate science that could assure the status quo is fine. If only they could find serious climate scientists willing to claim that.
Fifty years ago, there was no shortage of funding for medical scientists who tried to prove that tobacco didn't cause cancer. (You can guess where that funding came from.)
> he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society
If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.
Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.
He was able to find or buy people and companies smart and capable enough to deliver this for him, and he was often, but not always smart enough to listen to them (ie tesla autopilot fiasco - example of an ego playing with him). He was so successful with spacex because nobody really dared/bothered to enter that space and existing companies had 0 pressure to deliver better but that's more of government fail. He personally didn't come up with any of those impressive feats like electric cars of vertical rocket landings, thats a ridiculous proposition when all he is is a competent manager.
Now he is slowly rolling back some of those hard won achievements, and competition catching up and/or overtaking in many others.
Occasional well-thought-out, ambitious, and positive talking points combined with a whole lot of keeping his mouth shut seemed to work pretty well for him.
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!
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.
"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.”
You keep saying “we”. Do you work for X, formerly Twitter? If not, who exactly are you? If you’re in any way related to the case or the companies or governments involved, there’s a major conflict of interest in this conversation and your defences. It’s good form to disclose those so that potential biases can be properly taken into consideration.
If you don’t have anything intelligent to say, yes, nothing is usually best.
> accept the diktats of authority
Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.
> Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.
China has a unilateral ban on all non-Chinese apps. Not just Twitter/X. They have the Great Firewall for a reason. Now for Musk to accept "diktats of authority", X should have been operating in China in the first place. It is not since 2009 at least. Whereas X was operating in Brazil until few days ago.
> If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights
When he did he got reprimanded by the Chinese CCP. He did not give a fuck [1].
> you might say that hurts the West
The West does more trade with China than with any other country. And yes it does hurt the West considering it is so dependent on China for everything including medicines! And a lot of that has to do with "wise men" in politics who decided it was cool to establish trade relations with a Dictatorship in the 1970s and ensured that the entire World's supply chain relied on said Dictatorship. If not for these "wise men", none of us would have been dependent on China in the first place.
Free speech is a human right. Either Musk believes Chinese should enjoy free speech or he doesn’t. The fact that he seems to be more vocal about his business interests (Brazil) than actual human rights tells me he puts his mouth where his money is, not the other way around.
He has always said he believes everyone (which includes the Chinese too) should enjoy Free Speech (calling himself an absolutist) while at the same time saying that he will abide by Laws of the country. If the Chinese people want Free Speech it is for the Chinese people to revolt against the CCP. It is not Elon's decision as he is not operating X there. In the case of Brazil, the Judge wants X to break Brazilian laws, which X is not going to comply with. Simple as that. Free Speech became an issue only when the Judge banned X. It became an issue because Brazil has Free Speech Laws (or at least had in effect and not just on paper like China). If Brazil wants to go the CCP route then nothing can stop that from happening. Neither Elon, you or me.
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!
Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.
Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn't really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.
And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes).
> Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.
That was a BS reason chosen by Twitter. Twitter Files exposed that already. You are late.
> Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn't really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.
Yeah you clearly haven't read the Twitter Files. It shows.
> And now it's 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue.
Because it clearly was and now even Zuckerberg has come out admitting that it was interference.
> (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes)
Sure. But if FBI is involved, it does not become a Twitter issue alone but it becomes Government censorship through a private company. That is election interference and a first amendment violation.
There is much more story that you’re either uninformed about or willfully ignoring. The correct move was to remove people from harms way for decisions they have no control over, hence their staff exit from the country.
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.
There are various accounts on Twitter which were being investigated etc. for criminal misconduct, Twitter was given a court order to block those accounts. I have no idea if that order was itself justified (IANAL and I don't speak Brazilian) but the orders were given by someone with authority to give them.
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).
I can't think of any country I'd consider having a strong rule of law that would start arresting employees for the actions of their companies that they themselves have no say in.
Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries. That's not something you'll find in the developed world these days.
> Effectively, the judge makes it impossible for X to defend itself in court because he'll just have anyone arrested who tries.
No, on two counts.
First, Twitter is free to seek out a lawyer to represent them in court. Most people hire lawyers for contract work rather than as a permanent employee, so this remains possible even with no assets within Brazil.
Second, there was nothing to be defended until they refused to comply with the lawfully given order within the required deadline.
That they chose to fire their staff member and close the office in order to prevent compliance with the lawfully given order, was an actual offence in its own right. To my limited understanding, it is also an offence in its own right to refuse a lawfully given court order. But in both cases, Twitter was not being punished until they actually broke the law.
Courts in the UK and the USA may issue an injunction, both to prohibit and/or to compel an action, and this may bind on people not directly before the court:
Compare and contrast Twitter in Brazil with Lavabit in the USA: Lavabit was ordered to provide certain information in secret (with an injunction to not talk about it); they protested, they first provided that information in an obtuse form that was considered contempt, they provided it in a form which was acceptable, then they closed their business in response and took further legal action in response to what they — and, to be clear, I — consider to have been a manner incompatible with the public view of American Democracy:
"""Levison said that he could be arrested for closing the site instead of releasing the information, and it was reported that the federal prosecutor's office had sent Levison's lawyer an email to that effect."""
and
"""Levison wrote that after being contacted by the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear in federal court, and was forced to appear without legal representation because it was served on such short notice; in addition, as a third party, he had no right to representation, and was not allowed to ask anyone who was not an attorney to help find him one. He also wrote that in addition to being denied a hearing about the warrant to obtain Lavabit's user information, he was held in contempt of court. The appellate court denied his appeal due to no objection, however, he wrote that because there had been no hearing, no objection could have been raised. His contempt of court charge was also upheld on the ground that it was not disputed; similarly, he was unable to dispute the charge because there had been no hearing to do it in."""
Musk and his people officially don’t have any control over political decisions taken in any country, be it Brazil, Germany, or even home in the US. And they shouldn’t but by virtue of a ton of money thrown towards politicians, and general US global influence, many times this happens.
So your explanation should be rewritten as “remove people from the way of legal consequences from breaking local laws they/Musk can’t control (buy) in their favor”.
It sounds like the same thing but it’s the difference between fleeing persecution and fleeing prosecution.
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.
Since Musk took ownership, the company has received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them.
Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
To be honest with the current polarisation levels in politics it's no longer possible to be neutral. The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves. People are worried, even though we're a Europe based company where this is not a contested topic (though we do have many offices in the US). See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..
DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.
You're welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I'd hesitate to claim that these companies were "strongarmed" into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.
The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that's been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. "We need to do this because it will look bad if we don't" is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.
Well companies are by their very nature immoral. They don't care about any kind of morals, just making money. You even have to strongarm them into following the law (see Boeing, Volkswagen etc).
Yes. Which is why lasting change will never come from persuading the leadership of companies that your personal set of morals need to be followed if they want to be successful—they'll follow you for as long as you are powerful and bail as soon as you aren't.
You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
(Cue comments that the right can't be reasoned with so there's no point in trying.)
> You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.
I can't speak for America as I've never been there, but here in Southern Europe it was pretty successful and at least LGBTIQ+ are really well accepted now <3 I know many clubs where people get banned if they make racial or gender slurs but in general it doesn't even happen.
I think part of the issue is that what is considered "left" in America (liberal/democratic party) is still very right-wing here in Europe, especially in economical terms, not as much in social ones. What the republican represent would be radical-right here.
Europe shifted culturally, but cultural changes in America take much more time because there's just so much diversity of people spread across such a large landmass. Real change was going to take a long time, and Progressive efforts here to push too far too fast created an equal and opposite reaction that directly led to the populist movement that has been exploited by Donald Trump.
I think that the fact that Europe leans further left than the US is actually part of the problem we have with moving at all— American progressives got impatient to join you and lost the discipline and patience that characterized previous generations' efforts towards change. The approach they've taken instead is entirely ineffective and, as bemoaned by the parent commenter, creates short-lived successes that quickly get rolled back.
>The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves.
Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
>See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.
Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
>At least I now know which to boycott..
Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
> Sorry pal, you're going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.
I'm not advocating for positive discrimination. Just no discrimination at all.
It's very important to have the proper procedures in place for when that does happen. That was part of the diversity programs. Programs against bullying, education for managers on gender identity and how to deal with the difficulties around them, how to pick up on bullying etc. It's this kind of thing that I do myself (not as a job but as a voluntary side assignment in my job). It's amazing what kind of sexism and racism you hear when you go on a company trip and have a few drinks with high-level managers. So clearly this work is still highly needed.
Don't forget these programs were started because things were going the wrong way, people who were different than the standard cishetero white male had less chance to a job and were making less money when they did get one. This is of course not acceptable.
I don't think quotas are the answer. But rather fines when a company goes too far askew. "We only hire white cristians here" just cannot be acceptable.
> Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.
That was only one small part of the diversity programs, and not one I necessarily agree with.
> Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.
I never said boycotts are wrong anyway. If right wingers want to boycott companies like Apple, go ahead.
It's absolutely contested in Europe. "Why is the NHS spending so much money on diversity officials when they don't have enough doctors" is a long standing complaint by many people and politicians in the UK, for example.
True there's some exceptions. The UK has indeed fallen to American-style polarisation. As have the Netherlands where an extreme-right regime now reigns.
But most of Europe is still sane, luckily.
Ps rather than blaming transsexualism it might be smarter to blame the Tories who have been skimming (and selling off to their own companies) the NHS until there was nothing left.
> We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades
Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world, we've had a lot of explicitly political tech movements over the years. Off the top of my head some of the more successful and major ones were:
- Cryptography.
- Free Software.
- Cryptocurrency.
The Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016, there have been a couple of political exoduses by various groups to alternative platforms. The non-Silicon-Valley companies have been worse and generally suspect to the point where nobody expected political apathy (is anyone going to claim that Chinese social media are not politically subordinate to the state?).
> Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world...Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016
That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn't concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)
Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn't outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.
If you figure out what that difference is, let me know. The tech scene has been decidedly liberal (old school liberal, nowadays people maybe call that libertarian) and as political as it can be since the start. There has been a trend where other political cultures are getting involved too since ... probably the Obama campaign was when politicians really started noticing that spreading messages through the internet was more effective than going through the corporate news. But that is just a change of affiliations (maybe more accurately a broadening), tech has always been affiliated with someone.
"Political" is anything related to inter-personal power in society, and can be anything from maintaining a homeowner's association bylaws to international spy-craft and assassinations, and is so broad as to be unavoidable in human behaviour.
"Political affiliation" is much narrower and comes with a specific named politician or political party — even if they're not going to get in, such as Lord Buckethead or the Green Party of America.
Speaking entirely personally as I don't handle those questions at bsky. I couldn't even begin to comment without seeing knowing what the court orders were and what the cases are. Every social company operating internationally runs into this issue, and it's daunting to say the least. So, again, this is not something I decide.
What I can say is that the protocol is a neutral global layer for data, which can then enable multiple applications with their own moderation policies and decisions. There's always going to be moderation decisions we make that people will disagree with. The point is that something can be done about that disagreement - you can have other applications on the same network that makes their own decisions. I think one of the best things that could happen is that Brazilian developers fork the Bluesky app and build locally-owned social platforms on the atmosphere.
>Brazilian developers fork the Bluesky app and build locally-owned social platforms on the atmosphere.
This makes it easy to send thugs to their house and 'encourage' them to comply with any political demand. Jurisdictional arbitrage, particularly sites hosted in America following the first amendment is the only thing keeping anti authoritarian speech alive in authoritarian regimes.
Something tells me at the least bsky will not begin a name calling primary school attack with a supreme court justice of a sovereign nation while using abusive names for the president of that country all the while using childish fake AI generated graphics.
PS. Somehow all of this feels very natural when done by Musk. It kind of makes sense. It feels like “yes yes, he’d do this”.
That's how it always works. "You see the problem with not dealing with XYZ is that the government/judicial/legislative doesn't have enough power to tackle XYZ."
You grant them power they asked. They don't deal with it, but ask for more power. At some point they stop asking and label you as the problem.
Yes. Brazilians were censored and moved to bluesky. Elon musk has problems with the law! Absolutely no overlap whatsoever. Also very interesting in its own way.
In my previous description, I avoided talking about atproto details for clarity, but this is all part of that (atproto.com). The "kv stores" are what we call data repos[1] and they use sqlite for storage, but can produce individual event streams. Those streams flow into the golang event stream, aka the "relay". View computation happens continuously.
1. data repos are actually signed merkle trees, which gives at-rest authentication of the data as it gets shipped across organizational boundaries
Ahhh you know what, I should call it stream processing or something, because we don't store the data entirely as events. We store the data as a mutable K/V which emits an event stream of changes, which can then be ingested into different views. We chose not to store changes as events specifically because we don't want unbounded growth in the system. Initial syncs work by fetching the current state of the K/V store (the "data repo").
Bluesky is built on atprotocol (atproto.com) and can be thought of as an open distributed system. The event stream is for replicating throughout the various services.
I wonder about the factors/considerations that led to hosting a given data/services on-prem or outside. Were there purely technical considerations or were there also about "self host what can't get leaked" (think GDPR, privacy concerns, things like that) ?
Twitter 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 twitter.
Afterall, if I want to know about the next road blockage or electricity outage, I know I need to go to twitter to check, where else would I go?
these are bullship tactics, but they seem to be working, and the internet is fracturing. It was nice while it lasted, but we will no loner have a 'world-wide' web, just national networks with passport controls on accessing external nets.
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?
In my country, they had to tell govt officers to remember to check their email because agreements would be signed, and foreign officials would email relevant officers to start work and get no reply and get confused.
Turned out officers run their entire dept on Whatsapp.
Everything is adhoc, emails are in the old 2MB email, 50 MB inbox era, websites have not been updated since they were created and only page that gets changed is the organogram, (got to advertise the new minister in charge).
So no websites are NOT a reliable source of info. For example, there does infact exist a website to check loadshedding and work shutdown schedules... but my area was split off from a previous feeder and now has a new feeder code, but the website was not updated so I don't updated for my meter.
But I can check the twitter account and see tomorrow's shutdowns, and if I am regular, I can be prepped for tomorrow's 5 hr shutdown.
same for other things like road closures, due to protests or security corridor or whatever. Maybe other things, twitter is the best source of info.
Officers maintain an active twitter profile (despite the ban!) because ministers also are there, and they want their work to be visible.
If your boss sees the tweets of your work and people praising you in the comments, that improves your chances of a promotion and better postings.
Most people in real life aren't using twitter actively at all, and they survive just fine? The only people I know who use it are tech workers in the conference scene, in my real world social circles there is nobody.
Personally I would check my providers website/status page in such circumstances.
I am in pakistan, and life here works differently. I explained in detail in another reply above, but basically websites are dead. Twitter is where it's at, for better or worse.
What's happening in Pakistan has no bearing on what's happening in Brazil. Just because "twitter is banned" in both countries doesn't mean it was banned for the same reasons or that the ban applies in the same way.
Absolutely, I understand Brazil and Pakistan are two different countries, I just wanted to share my own experiences to provide some interesting insight on how people react to bans.
In Brazil, people are apparently moving to BlueSky, but in my country, we didn't move platforms, we just to jump over the fence via VPNs.
> It's the final repercussion following repeated attempts by Musk/X to ignore demands from the Brazilian legal system which were made in accordance with Brazilian law as written by congresspeople duly elected by the Brazilian people.
The Brazilian constitution is clear, you can read it here, article 5 IX:
The actions taken by Alexandre de Moraes are certainly not in accordance with Brazilian law, since the constitution sits above everything else.
> The judge didn't say "put a local representative here or we close you down".
That is literally what happened - the disagreement with X originated with secret censorship orders. However, the order that ultimately blocked X for Brazilian users was based on the issue of having a local representative - or so they stated. X got rid of their local representative because of the threats issued by Alexandre de Moraes to fine and jail the representative and other staff, in addition to going after their personal financial assets.
Virtually all news articles say the final shutdown was due to the lack of a representative, and you can read it in an example article right here:
By the way, this tactic of pointing at some arbitrary rule, like needing a local representative, as a justification for some drastic action, is exactly the tactic that has been deployed in authoritarian settings in recent history - for example in the Soviet Union.
> Note X isn't being banned for allowing free speech.
That is literally what this entire issue is about. You can read the text of the order sent to X from Alexandre de Moraes here:
The order is to secretly shut down accounts belonging to various people - which is the dictionary definition of censorship. Refusing this order, which is unconstitutional and illegal under Brazilian law, is what this entire controversy is about.
> I'm defending the rule of law while you keep sinking into the QAnon bias projecting hurr durr my freedoms into other countries when you don't really know what you're yapping about
For the second time, read the HN guidelines and respect the type of interaction that makes Hacker News worth reading. Ad hominem attacks like this not only don’t help investigate the issue, but they also just have no place here:
Authoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted, having agents routinely shaking down social media companies or acting without any support of the law. What happened here is that bad actors have been taking advantages of the lack of accountability that social media had for the last 20 years. When laws were finally issued a few years ago, those "bad actions" could finally be labelled as crimes. Twitter was given ample time and opportunities to comply with such law, but after failing many times a court order was issued to block it.
What would be much more productive to discuss is if such law that gives accountability to social media is valid and weather the implementation is of good enough quality to catch abuses without impacting freedom of speech. I suspect it is, since we have similar laws mandating accountability to traditional media for 100s of years by now. Afaik any democratic country has such laws, in fact, the usa used to have strong laws around traditional media accountability until a few decades ago when they were weakened.
> Authoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted
I've got you covered then. Before the 2022 elections, this exact same judge did just that.
I witnessed him and his electoral court censor a documentary a priori. Before watching it, before it was even released, they declared it was "fake news" and did not allow it to be published.
To this day that fact shocks me. In my lifetime, I witnessed the exact same a priori censorship that was omnipresent in last century's military dictatorship, the same dictatorship my parents were subjected to and told me stories about.
There is little authoritarianism in the decision to block access to X. Brazilian law, properly drafted and passed by two independent legislative chambers, dictates several important things:
- foreign companies that operate in Brazil must have a representative there.
- all constitutional rights are to be equally protected, meaning that there are no absolute rights, such as freedom of speech.
- websites have to comply with Brazilian regulations and judicial orders, including removing content that has been deemed illegal by the judiciary.
- the blocking of a non-compliant website is explicitly listed as a penalty under the law.
Right now, Brazil’s Supreme Court is made up of judges appointed by various presidents, and there are tons of members of the opposition in Parliament. Anything that the Court does is subject to these checks and balances, and eventual abuses, such as “banning VPNs”, are quickly overturned in most cases.
At the moment, the only thing that Musk might rightfully challenge in court is the blocking of Starlink’s assets — as there is clear dissent about the legality of this measure. In terms of content moderation and blocking, the letter and spirit of the law are being properly followed.
Is it acceptable for foreign owned entities to not follow the rules of a country? I think, probably not - the choice is to follow the regulations or to not be there, like Meta in China.
Is the US also a dictatorship since nine (or rather, five) unelected people were able to abolish the right to abortion, the Chevron deference and what else at their whim?
A totalitarian leader flagrantly violating his own country's constitution is now "the rules of a country" probably because the guy you dislike is associated with the other side.
>Regardless of what you think of Musk, where's your outrage over this blatant authoritarianism?
"Billionaire's toy social media network gets banned after blowing off entire country's judicial system" doesn't exactly sounds like "blatant authoritarianism". When I listen carefully, it sounds closer to "rule of law".
Freedom of speech is a general conception of human rights, not any one particular law. Governments can choose to respect (or not!) those rights, but the idea applies to everyone.
Not for legal purposes, it isn't. Unless you're arguing the morality of the Brazilian Constitution and the limits it imposes on freedom of speech in some scenarios, such as outlawing racism.
The judge doesn't care about the morality of his decision. He shouldn't care. He is there to decide what's lawful and unlawful based on the facts and on the law.
When it comes to human rights, unfortunately, the notion got perverted by USSR and its allies.
The difference between the US and the rest of the world is that the US has the First Amendment, which it upholds. So, for example, in the US "hate speech" is not banned, and while inciting violence is banned, it must be literal incitement:
This is important, because freedom of speech was supposedly allowed behind the Iron Curtain as well, as long as it wasn't "going against the socialist order" or "promoting fascism" (with capitalism or social democracy being just light fascism). Various countries found ways to pay lip service to human rights, while being authoritarian.
> the US has the First Amendment, which it upholds [...] and while inciting violence is banned
So the US only upholds 1A when it decides it wants to. In other words, no, it doesn't really uphold it.
(And for the record, I'm mostly fine with that! I'm tired of this idea that absolute free speech is a thing, that people actually have it in large numbers, and that if they did, it would actually be a good thing.)
If you came up with that conclusion you know nothing about how US's justice system works.
I don't know what "absolute" means for you, but yes, free speech is good, the more free it is, the better. As to your popularity fallacy, consider that for most of our time on earth, constant war and slavery were normal, and our grand-grandparents knew both.
theres no absolute free speech in the US. There are most certainly plenty of things you cannot say and protestors are often violently silenced by police and riot squads. Then the media upholds its end of the bargain by heavily re-enforcing the State Dept. position while besmirching the message of the protestors and misrepresenting them in any and every way imaginable.
You can say a lot of awful shit, but you really can't openly oppose the State with any real threat of power. I mean, I wouldn't really call the US admitting to assassinating Malcom X, MLK, among others, the pinnacle of free speech... all theses people did was speak out against injustices that they observed... and that's just one incident. This happens everyday.
Protestors in the U.S. are frequently beaten, illegally detained and have toxic chemicals deployed against them in the streets (or are otherwise menaced and harassed by police) -- regardless of whether they are doing those things. This has been going on for decades, but should be especially obvious to you if you've been following the news in the past 4.5 years.
You can't criticize Israel or you will get punished by government in US. Where is your freedom of speech in this case?
"The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to revive a newspaper's challenge on free speech grounds to an Arkansas law requiring state government contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel, a policy the publication's lawyers called a threat to a constitutionally protected form of collective protest." [1]
The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition.
It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.
You can't attack another user like this on HN, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that abuse the site like that, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
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.
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 files.'
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.
Musk, like anyone else, has a right to endorse whoever he wants. Unless there's evidence that he's mass censoring or banning Democrats, I don't really see why there'd be any outrage. No one certainly seems to care when Silicon Valley big wigs donate to the other side.
Seems like even Masnick agrees, albeit begrudgingly, that this judge is an authoritarian. Where I cannot agree with Masnick is the implication that Musk and this man are somehow both equally wrong.
A government official, no less a judge, should be held to a far higher standard as his actions impact hundreds of millions of people. And as we can see by his unprecedented order banning VPNs, he clearly lacks the circumspection and self-reflection necessary to hold such an important office.
As a libertarian, how am I supposed to believe in the authenticity and neutrality of the network that Musk is operating when he openly supports a specific political ideology with his public actions? He shows no dedication to neutrality in his statements, so why should I believe he shows it with his decisions?
If the measure of a high standard is the number of people impacted, how many people would you say are affected by Musk, or the other private owners of social networks?
He is not imposing anything on anyone. He has the same right to express his opinions as anybody else has, and his platform clearly allows everyone else to do the same - in contrast with what the previous executives of Twitter did.
That sounds a lot like copium to justify an authoritarian action by the state because it benefits you personally.
It's interesting to point out that if your message was a tweet, it could have been classified as misinformation by the judge and have been the target of a secret court order to shadowban your account, request any and all your PII that Twitter might have, and prohibit Twitter from even letting you know.
All that without the possibility of your defense because he has been acting as the judge and the jury.
How do you know that the accounts X failed to block were committing crimes? My understanding is that the judge in this matter hasn't published any information about the block orders or why he issued them.
Brazil’s constitution guarantees freedom of expression without censorship. That’s the whole issue. Everything else is noise. If the secret censorship orders were legal, X would have complied. It also has nothing to do with Musk since X has a CEO making these decisions.
Also your comment is misinformation - you know, the kind of thing this judge in Brazil would send you to jail for. Specifically this part:
> X went so far as to close its office so as not to have to answer legal orders
They closed their office because Alexandre de Moraes, the judge issuing these unilateral censorship orders in secret without public transparency, also decided to threaten Twitter/X’s legal representative with fines and jail time. He also threatened to seize their personal financial assets (and already froze those accounts). So X had no choice but to close their Brazilian office to avoid having their employees or representation threatened and jailed.
Your making the claim that all of the secret censorship decrees issues by Alexandre de Moraes are related to the protests after the election in 2023, they are not.
Sure. Kind of late doing this after a year and a half, don't you think? Maybe Morales did it so it doesn't happen again, but it will anyway on another platform that isn't banned yet.
This doesn't make any sense. How does paying for some erratic billionaire's pet project equals to supporting free speech?
There are way better alternatives to support free speech. Don't waste your money on X.
Funny how Musk bought Twitter for saving it from censorship and pushed it into censorship. The fact that decentralised services are becoming a thing it's a good outcome though. Maybe that's what always been in his mind after all :) ?
Someone from Brazil said they have no rule of law right now, they have a dictatorship. So Musk would be complying with a despot, not the law enforced by Brazilian representatives.
It was a protest. There was no coup attempt. A coup attempt would be the military launching the operation to seize power and failing. An actual coup would be the military trying it and succeeding.
They didn't try to seize power for themselves. They wanted the military to seize power so it could rule them instead of the elected president. There's a difference. They thought the military would be better rulers. That's just their political position.
There's simply no way you can convincingly claim that a bunch of people, many of them elderly, equipped with bibles and brazilian flags, tried to seize power in the brazilian capital. This country is pathetic but it can't possibly be so weak that it could suffer a coup by people like that.
I’m reading some more and the election interference happened under Jack Dorsey‘s Twitter not Elon Musk’s X. The Twitter employees involved were fired in the purge after Musk bought and assumed control of the website.
I’m pretty sure that’s the CIA’s job. Isn’t it because Brazil doesn’t have free speech so they have absurd “hate speech” laws similar to the ones that are backfiring in Scotland right now?
Brazilian here. We don't have rule of law here anymore. It's a covert dictatorship run at the front end by one judge, Alexandre de Moraes, and a small group of collaborators. He interprets the law however he wants or just outright ignores it in favor of ad hoc absurd interpretations, and there is no one left to judge the "supreme" judge. He effectively figures as accuser, defendant and judge in his own cases, which he of course rules in his own favor, establishes new executive agencies with no legal basis, threatens any deputy or senator that dares criticise him with incarceration, bankruptcy, or social social media banning, with no due trial or legal basis, and in absolute legal secrecy, which should be illegal by itself, but so it goes.
Not even 10% of his insanity arrives untouched by editorialization in the Northern Hemisphere, you're being fed a polished, low bandwidth version of our affairs here, mostly because Brazil isn't a key enough global player for anyone to care, but also out of typical political bias. Glenn Greenwald has been attempting to bridge that gap, and has done as good of a job as possible so far.
The checks and balances in our jurisdiction are sufficiently tenuous that, with a relatively small group of people in key positions of power, you can gate-keep any viable democratic venues for impeaching him. A new profile on X called "Alexandre Files" is beginning to post his unlawful rulings.
His approval was 37% in March of this year, when most of the centrists were still openly with him, and most of the recent major scandals hadn't come into full play yet. Now that even the moderate part of the left is denouncing the blatant illegalities on his part, moreover after a leak of his whatsapp group, it wouldn't surprise me to be in the low 20s or even 10s now. Even major national left-wing publications are coming against him now, and I believe it's a matter of time before international media catches up.
He essentially used Bolsonaro supporter's rebellion as an excuse to impose a dictatorship of the judiciary in the name of "saving democracy". Those people indeed had to be judged for the crime of violating public property, but being unarmed, it's impossible to characterize a coup. This whole thing is a circus.
Thank you for the information. Everyone else on here is doing the aggressive, ignorant, high-minded American routine. I’ll keep reading but it looks like my suspicions are confirmed.
Well, the general issue that caused it is disinformation campaigns
People that point out Brazil's current state of affairs don't seem to realize that eventually, a ban of unmoderated social networks is inevitable from a legislative standpoint.
I wish that X/bluesky/Facebook/etc had something like a clear label next to its users, maybe a robot icon when the post was created via their API or in an automated manner.
That would help people to identify campaigns already a lot.
But on the other hand, these are the paying customers, right? It's always "just advertisement" until it is not anymore.
> Well, the general issue that caused it is disinformation campaigns
…
> a ban of unmoderated social networks is inevitable from a legislative standpoint.
I am surprised this even needs to be stated; either 15 or 18 years ago I made the mistake of creating a phpBB forum instance for my shareware, and it was a rounding error from 100% of signups being spammers.
The only difference between spam and disinformation is economic vs political power.
“First I’ve heard,” Musk wrote in response to a question from Canadian lawyer David Freiheit.
“It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things,” he added, referring to the multiple companies where he is CEO.
That the tide turned against Musk when he undid the old Twitter censorship regime which was targeted towards primarily American conservatives. Since then, a lot of folks, including here and on major subreddits like news and politics, have openly wished harm on the site and on Musk. Here Musk was pushing back on illegal [1] censorship, and many people on this thread are celebrating the authoritarian judge responsible.
Lots of pro-censorship people on HN. Remember what happened to Brendan Eich? [2]
It saddens me the Brasil banned X because of racism, anti-semitism and hate-speech. But X is still not banned in the west.
At some point we have to come to this realization in the west that absolutism is never the answer. Free speech is good upto certain extent, the way it was at Twitter before the rich and powerful took over. Moreover, it is content moderation and it doesn't have anything to do with free speech.
> The government in Brazil does not like X because users are critizing the government.
This baseless personal assertion does not pass the smell test. I'm going to explain to you why.
Elon Musk's Twitter is happily censoring opposition of totalitarian dictatorships such as Turkey's Erdogan regime, and the only remark that Elon Musk published regarding censoring Turk opposition parties is that Elon Musk's Twitter would risk being removed from Turkey. Elon Musk, when he caved to Erdogan's demands to censor his opposition, famously said
> “Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?”
So for Turkey's totalitarian dictatorship Elon Musk finds it acceptable to censor opposition by arguing bullshit like "either we show some content or no content", but for Brasil's democratic regime, which barely managed to fend off a fascist military coup, when they request Elon Musk's Twitter to appoint a legal representative to handle requests... That's suddenly unacceptable?
The statement you are replying to is "the government in Brazil does not like X because users are critizing the government." Why are you talking about what Musk did? What does one thing have to do with the other?
Up to the extent it doesn't infringe on other people's rights, according to the Brazilian constitution, including the right not to be discriminated against.
That's the norm in Elon Musk's Twitter. Since his takeover, content like white supremacy, antisemitism, and industrial state-level propaganda operations from fascist and totalitarian regimes is perfectly ok to publish on that platform. Criticism of Elon Musk or fascist regimes, however, is completely different.
Elon Musk's Twitter was also caught hardcoding censorship and throttling of both pro-Ukraine discussions and users who published pro-Ukraine content. Russian bots however have free reign.
More importantly, Elon Musk's Twitter is finding itself in trouble in Brasil not because of censorship, but because Elon Musk made it his point to go to great extents to avoid even appointing a legal representative to handle complains of illegal activity. This isn't even about censorship, but complying with basic legal requirements. It's like bitching that having to pay taxes is persecuting based on free speech just because you refuse to even file a form.
> 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 contacted by Brasil's judicial system to address reports of illegal activity. In response, Elon Musk basically ordered Twitter to dissolve all of its corporate presence in Brasil to retaliate against the demand, thinking that without a legal presence in the country that Twitter would magically become immune to Brasil's jurisdiction.
Except that Brasil's judicial system does have some tools and the means to prosecute uncooperative entities, particularly private individuals who hide behind corporate structures. Consequently, Brasil not only blocked Elon Musk's Twitter from Brasil due to Elon Musk's purposely uncooperative attitude but also has the legal means to go after the private individuals behind the decision to antagonize Brasil. Consequently, they enforced the consequences of Elon Musk's actions to Elon Musk's property in Brasil, such as Starlink.
Overall, this case is only orthogonally related to free speech. At it's core there's only one thing: Elon Musk making ill-advised decisions (reportedly against legal advise from his own legal representatives and in opposition to the actions of his legal representatives) and is now fabricating stories to distract people from the fact that all he is experiencing is the consequences of his own actions, which would be extremely easily avoided if he just listened to his own lawyers.
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
> You are ignoring the lead-up to this situation, (...)
I am not ignoring anything. The fact is that Brasil has laws to fight disinformation and libel, and those laws are being enforced.
Your personal opinion also glances over the fact that Brasil was recently subjected to a coup attempt to drive the country into a fascist dictatorship, heavily pushed by a massive disinformation campaign in social media services like Elon Musk's Twitter.
What you are trying to glance over is the fact that none of this issue is related to free speech. Elon Musk tried to avoid complying with a nation's laws with a ill-advised stunt of pulling Twitter's corporate presence from Brasil. As expected from any jurisdiction in the world, not cooperating with the judicial system bears consequences.
To drive the point home, I stress the fact that Elon Musk did far worse to support fascist and authoritarian dictatorships attacking free speech, such as his support for Erdogan's regime censoring opposition and non-supoortive posts during the last sham elections. For that, Elon Musk's reaction was claiming that either some messages were boosted or all of them were boosted, and he claimed it's better to have some (only supporting a dictator) than none. But for Brasil, the need to appoint a mere legal representative to process requests was now deemed too much? And enough to pull a dying company from a +200M market? It doesn't pass the smell test.
“It closed its office in Brazil earlier this month, saying its representative had been threatened with arrest if she did not comply with orders it described as "censorship" - as well as illegal under Brazilian law.
Justice Moraes had ordered that X accounts accused of spreading disinformation - many supporters of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro - must be blocked while they are under investigation.
He said the company's legal representatives would be held liable if any accounts were reactivated.”
They wanted him to appoint a representative so it could represent the company (and be held liable, in case the company does anything illegal) as mandates Brazilian law. As soon as Elon decided to not have a representative, Twitter's operation in Brazil became Illegal
Other companies, such as Telegram, also have faced the same and they simply appointed a representative. If you research you'll see that no representative has been jailed, so this whole "they would have jailed the representative" narrative is bs
Yeah, it’s a legally mandated fall guy. The Brazilian legal representative has no control over what X does. So he appoints one, Elon refuses to ban accounts, and that guy goes to jail for it. It’s madness.
It was not banned for racism, antisemitism and hate speech. It was banned for "fake news". As determined by our very own Ministry of Truth. Which is literally headed by the judge-king responsible for this circus. These guys are what happens when xkcd/386 acquires god-king powers.
If I were to follow the same logic as these judges, I would call for your comment to be deleted and for your account to be suspended. After all, you committed the crime of spreading "disinformation" and "misinformation". You were wrong on the internet.
Rejoice, for I do not agree with their logic. You can be wrong on the internet all you want, and I will not call for your censorship. For I believe that is a fundamentally immoral thing to do.
I mean people's speech. Whether their speech is "fake" or not is up to me to determine. I don't want any ministries of truth determining that for me. Especially not one manned by these partisan judges.
And "this" as in a protest? Like countless others before? Whatever. You're not gonna call it a coup, right? Even the Wikipedia article you cited doesn't call it one.
Aren't all protests? I don't remember many protests that didn't involve closing down roads, burning things down and whatnot. Protests that don't do things like that are usually so irrelevant they don't get Wikipedia articles written about them.
> The reason why it isn't called a coup is be cause they failed.
It's not called a coup because it wasn't one. A coup attempt would be the military seizing power by force. You know, the people with guns and tanks. A successful coup would be the military trying and succeeding.
There's simply no way you can claim a bunch of people, many of them elderly, equipped with bibles and flags, amounts to a coup attempt.
> And it's not the ministry of truth but multiple independent sources in and outside Brazil.
None of which have the power to censor anything. As it should be.
> At a certain point something is obviously fake.
If it's so obviously fake, then you don't need any censorship either. The fakeness will be self-evident.
>Aren't all protests? I don't remember many protests that didn't involve closing down roads, burning things down and whatnot. Protests that don't do things like that are usually so irrelevant they don't get Wikipedia articles written about them.
Most protests are peaceful and even the violent one rarely invade government buildings.
Whole different level.
>It's not called a coup because it wasn't one. A coup attempt would be the military seizing power by force. You know, the people with guns and tanks. A successful coup would be the military trying and succeeding.
It doesn't have to be the military. Most coups are by the military but it's not a necessity
>There's simply no way you can claim a bunch of people, many of them elderly, equipped with bibles and flags, amounts to a coup attempt.
No, but for a bunch of people who throw pickaxes and hammers at the police I can.
>None of which have the power to censor anything. As it should be.
That's the road to tyranny. Lies spread faster than the truth.
>If it's so obviously fake, then you don't need any censorship either. The fakeness will be self-evident.
Sadly some people fall for obvious fakes.
Just look at all the flat earthers.
> Most protests are peaceful and even the violent one rarely invade government buildings.
Nah. Occupying Brasília buildings is basically the standard brazilian protest at this point. Happened in 2016 as well, and they too insisted the country was suffering a coup, Probably more examples I can't remember off the top of my head.
> It doesn't have to be the military. Most coups are by the military but it's not a necessity.
In this case it absolutely needs to be the military. Because there's no way you can convince me that a bunch of people with bibles and flags tried to seize power in the brazilian capital.
> That's the road to tyranny. Lies spread faster than the truth.
Lies according to whom? You? This judge-king? Yeah, I'll decide for myself, thank you very much. I'm gonna look at the stuff and I'll reach my own conclusions. I don't need or want the judge's help.
> Sadly some people fall for obvious fakes. Just look at all the flat earthers.
Yeah, and? What are we supposed to do about it? "Help" them think correctly? Put the "right" thoughts into their heads? Send them to a forced reeducation camp? The mere thought of someone being that self-righteous is offensive to me. Even if they're right.
The existence of flat earthers is literally not an argument. I think it's illogical but if they want to believe it then it's their problem. It would be incredibly presumptuous of me to try to put the "correct" thoughts into their minds. If they can't be convinced by the study of physics, we're just gonna have to leave them alone and move on with our lives.
If someone can be duped by propaganda into becoming violent in favor of some cause, then democracy is justified in defending itself. Not a second before. And you don't get to "prevent" such things by censoring the speech that led to it either. Any government that steps over that line is a dictatorship.
> It was not banned for racism, antisemitism and hate speech. It was banned for "fake news".
Not even that. Brasil requires media companies to appoint legal representatives to handle complains of illegal activity, and instead of complying with the law Elon Musk opted to pull the company out of Brasil.
The funny thing about this shit show was that Twitter's legal representatives were actually complying with the law, but Elon Musk himself was contradicting and undercutting Twitter's representatives in Brasil. Until he simply pulled out of the company from the country, as if that was some kind of legal gotcha. Except that Brasil doesn't fuck around and it's legislation recognizes that there are always real flesh-and-bone people behind corporate structures, this the judge applying the legal consequences of Elon Musk's decisions to Elon Musk's property in Brasil such as Starlink.
> Brasil requires media companies to appoint legal representatives to handle complains of illegal activity
If that was the case all millions of sites that operate in Brazil, without having legal representatives in the country, would have to be blocked, which doesn't happen. The truth here is that this Supreme Court "judge", which is more like a de facto dictator at this point, wanted essentially a hostage. Someone who he could jailed to blackmail Musk – as Moraes threaten to do with the previous representative, which was the reason for why Musk shutdown X operation in the country . It's that simple. Them going after Starlink, a totally different legal entity with different investors only proves this mafia-like style and how much of banana republic the whole country became, with zero legal certainty.
You are talking about something you really don't understand, such was what is happening in the country. Nobody outside Brazil is taking the decisions of this judge serious. Not even Interpol, which denied countless Red Notice alerts that this "judge" tried to issue, such as when he tried (and failed) to go after exiled journalist Allan dos Santos living in the USA and Oswaldo Eustáquio living in Spain.
I liked how urbit did it, just paste s3 bucket credentials into the app settings. A - its pretty cheap even for a terabyte of storage, B - it removes liability from the application not having to host user content, C - it increases decentralization, with many hosts in many jurisdictions able to host content.
EDIT: I went to sign up for a new account and right away I'm given the choice to host content on my own server, neat, I think I'll give this a try [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240831230005/https://bsky.app/...
[1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation