I'm not sure I agree with Brazil wanting to compel platforms to ban accounts and I don't agree with fining people who try to access the service and if Elon is to be believed, I really don't agree with threatening Twitter's legal rep with prison. Elon is also a hypocrite having done the exact thing Brazil is asking for with India and Turkey in the past and he clearly has no problem inventing reasons to ban people who he doesn't like. ElonJet, accounts that campaign for Harris, journalist, etc. Everyone in this situation sucks.
I don't really get the idea behind fining people for using Twitter over VPN's either. That reeks of lawyers unable to understand the basics of how the Internet works.
Threatening their legal rep with prison is, however, perfectly reasonable. They have refused to comply with the law several times, were fined several times and have refused to pay such fines several times. With that, they have committed multiple felonies and it makes absolute sense they are faces with the consequences of that.
Yes, and establishes a BRL 50k daily fine for the users themselves if they circumvent the blockage by any means to get access to Twitter.
To me, that's punishing the users, who have no part in the legal ordeal, for the incompetence of whatever company or agency which was supposed to block the site.
The illegal act is using X. The means to enact that is to enforce it at the ISP level. A user finding way to continue to use X is on the user. You may not agree with X being banned, but punishing the users is what should happen when they violate the law.
What bullshit. Their rep in Brazil doesn't control anything about the platform or make decisions about disbursement of funds. Doing so is simply a variation of nation-state hostage taking.
Negative, representatives do not control their clients - they are the middleman that can explain process and likely result, but they are not the clients.
I'm sorry, but you must be confusing what a legal representative is, or we are getting lost in translation here.
The legal rep for Twitter in Brazil was not just some Lawyer defending Twitter in court. They were effectively the Owner and President of the Twitter subsidiary in Brazil, and as such are legally responsible for any and all dealings of the company in the country.
One of the principles Brazilian Law is based off is something called "Principle of Inertia" (which I can't find a proper translation since I keep stumbling into sixth grade Physics).
It reasons that the Juditiary Power will must not and does not have to act unless provoked to do so.
In practice, this means that while the law states that platforms operating in Brazil need a legal representative, that is not required or enforced until there's a reason to. In this case, it could be if anyone ever sues Bluesky, if they collect payments in local currency or transfer money in/out of the country, or if they provide a service that is regulated such as medical or financial advice.
So far, none of these have happened, or have not happened in a scale or frequency that has prompted action.
I expect that as people migrate over to Bluesky they will eventually be required to provide a representative or follow the fate of Twitter.
No, that comes down to shooting the messenger because you don't like what he said. This is usually done by 'the bad guys' and this seems to be the case in Brazil as well.
Well no, if someone is a habitual liar or always wrong, then you're free to assume they are lying or wrong. The ordinary opinion of random people is not a court of law where innocence is presumed.
Sure, I totally agree that you don't always have to give someone the benefit of the doubt.
In context though, it is very unclear that you weren't talking about Musk.
> Well no, if someone is a habitual liar or always wrong, then you're free to assume they are lying or wrong. The ordinary opinion of random people is not a court of law where innocence is presumed.
The GP comment you were replying to specifically mentions giving Elon the benefit of the doubt. Are you implying that you shouldn't give benefit of the doubt to a random person that you deem a habitual liar and therefore assume is always lying or wrong? Or are you implying that Elon is a habitual liar, should be assumed always lying/wrong, and not given the benefit of the doubt?
A lot of Brazilian users are posting "I am using a VPN to access X" on BlueSky so the judge will probably order BlueSky to turn over their IP addresses(like he did in orders to X) so they can be fined $9000 a day.
To be fair, that order would only matter if Bluesky is logging and storing user IPs. I don't know of any technical reason for needing to track that based on the AT Protocol, they could avoid the entire problem by not tracking that data (assuming they currently do).
The judge would probably force the legal rep to log ip addresses the next time those users access BlueSky under threat of jail time and frozen bank accounts like he did for Twitters rep.
Is it not a problem to you that a judge would go after legal counsel personally based on how the counsel represents the will of their client?
Personally I see that as a very serious problem. Its one thing if it can be proven that legal counsel knowingly breaks the law. Its entirely different if the lawyer simply disagrees with the judge. Judges shouldn't be able to threaten counsel with jail time of seizure of assets simply because the judge disagrees with the legal argument a client wishes to make.
Are IP addresses really helpful in moderation? Moderation usually pertains to the content itself, meaning you would want to block certain content from being posted regardless of the IP that sends a request. Maybe you extend moderation to include banning users, but at that point you have more specific data than IP addresses (like usernames or user IDs).
You can target a list of suspected spammer IPs, though that's often a losing game of cat and mouse where you end up missing some spammers and catching legitimate users in the crossfire.
I know that for Instagram/Threads, IP is very key to their moderation. Once they ban a user with that IP, any other account from that IP will also be banned (or something like it), it's fundamental to avoid ban evasion.
For Mastodon, all of this is manual, so it will be up to moderators on the server....
But Brazil justice is already in contact with then, as long as they offer a place for justice to send court orders and comply with then, as they have done so far, they wont have any problems..
Here’s a post from Eugen Rochko on August 31st (2 days ago):
“Aug 10, 10 sign-ups from #Brazil. Aug 28, 152 sign-ups from Brazil. Today, 4.2k sign-ups from Brazil. Portuguese (Brazil) has already entered the list of top 8 active languages for the last 30 days.”
Twitter is not a fundamental right, as access to users isn't a right to a company. If the company wants the product to be available, then it should respect local laws the same way it did in Turkey and India.
>Twitter is not a fundamental right, as access to users isn't a right to a company.
What about the rights of people who want to use twitter? Would you use the same characterization for Chinese censorship (ie. "The New York Times is not an fundamental right, as access to users isn't a right to [The New York Times Company]")?
> What about the rights of people who want to use twitter?
Interoperability should cover this. If the platform is barred from doing business in a given country, users should be able to download all their data and move it to another platform of their choice. People must not be made hostages of the platforms.
You don't have the right to patronize a restaurant that gets shut down for health code violations after it's shut down. There's no difference in principle here. Banning Twitter itself for failing to comply with the law isn't a free speech issue.
Now, part of the order makes it illegal to use VPN to access Twitter, which is an actual free speech issue, if you'd care to argue on those grounds.
Isn’t the use of a VPN analogous to using a back door (alley entrance) to visit the condemned restaurant? What difference would there be in your analogy?
This question isn’t relevant to this situation because Musk’s Twitter has already proven to not have any moral standing on this question.
Musk is willing to censor for Turkey but not for Brazil. It’s a massive double standard. His company has major shareholders who are part of the Saudi monarchy. Twitter under Musk isn’t a company that can make any honest claim to care about democratic free speech.
He’s already suspended left-wing and Musk-critical journalists and activists without a specific TOS violation or explanation while not doing the same for anyone that aligns with his ideology.
He doesn’t have kind of the moral high ground that other companies do on these matters, e.g., the kind that Google had when they exited China.
I also think that using china’s style of censorship as an analogy to other styles of censorship is also potentially a flawed exercise. I would argue that things like Germany’s censorship of Nazi ideology is a positive for human rights and democracy. Even the USA’s prohibition of the government’s speech on the topic of religion and political speech is technically a form of censorship - self-censorship, essentially.
I could imagine a hypothetical democratic government where speech is generally free but anti-democratic ideology is not tolerated, since that speech oversteps the boundaries of free speech and crosses into a territory of speech that harms others.
In other words, a society that overcomes the paradox of tolerance.
For example, Trump has spoken of elimination of term limits, becoming a dictator for a day, and has generally advocated for political violence. Because of his rhetoric there are a large percentage of people in the USA who would end democracy entirely if it meant that their dear leader Trump was president for life rather than a member of the opposition party. In the USA the first amendment protects him, but I would argue that it should not - that a democracy that intends to survive the constant onslaught of opportunistic authoritarians should criminalize anti-democratic activity and speech.
(I am not specifically commenting on Brazil’s orders to censor people on the Twitter platform because I am not equipped with that context. I don’t know specifically who those people are, what those people said, said and whether that court order was sensible. I merely speak in philosophical hypotheticals here - and at the end of the day whether my hypotheticals are “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant in the context of Elon’s asymmetrical application of “free speech”)
Access to the NYT in China or X in Brazil could destabilize their societies. One could argue that their current development status necessitates authoritarianism until a transitional event happens (which took the west many centuries).
That might be your goal. But that does not mean it needs to be everyone else’s goals.
For me, freedom of speech is part of what brings societies forward, and that includes deep changes which obviously means unstable societies at some point.
Humans would be stuck in Stone Age if we would have had only stable societies.
Before Musk bought Twitter there were plenty of people arguing on here that in the age of the internet Twitter and places like it are essential as forums of public discourse, and access to them should be as unlimited as possible.
Twitter refusing bans and continuing operations in a hostile country was some people's wet dream just a couple years ago. I guess it's a lesson to be careful what you wish for.
Complaints were about presidents blocking people so they wouldn’t see their postings. That’s a fair complaint. When there is no other venue to communicate or to get informed about things vital to them, it is perfectly fair to complain about that.
In this specific case, Twitter doesn’t provide an essential service and, if it did, that’d need to be regulated and forced to provide services in an equitable and fair way.
The claim is that the ban request doesn't actually comply with Brazilian law. I'm no lawyer and don't know how accurate that is, but if correct that Twitter would be complying with local laws by refusing the unlawful order.
The claim by Musk (who is also not a lawyer, nor Brazilian) is that a single renegade Brazilian Suprem Court Justice has made a non compliant unconstitutional ban request.
The report here asserts that every single other Brazilian Supreme Court Justice has backed that ban.
You may not be a lawyer, like Musk, but I'm led to believe that all the Justices of the Braziian Supreme Court are, and that they understand the Brazilian Legal system.
I, unlike Musk, don't have a team of lawyers though. Its common for people to attribute business decisions directly to Musk, but do we actually know he was the one and only person at Twitter involved in this decision?
Musk et al bent over backwards for India and Turkey and suddenly gained principles in Brazil?
A Supreme Court Justice who rules on constitional law is fairly definitive, now even more so .. in India and Turkey X-itter sided with the the ruling conservative right wing party in power, in Brazil X-itter sided with the losing conservative right wing party that spread election denial propaganda.
> Musk et al bent over backwards for India and Turkey and suddenly gained principles in Brazil?
The question isn't what morals the company decides to stand on other than the moral that they will only comply with government requests and court rulings that are legal under that jurisdiction's laws.
I don't know details of Turkish or Indian law, but I do generally understand their governments to be more oppressive than the US. It seems plausible that the requests made by those governments were legal there, as opposed to the Brazilian request that Twitter is claiming not to be legal there.
Supreme Court justices are in fact fallible. There have been a handful of decisions coming out of SCOTUS that many have been extremely unhappy with to the point of claiming the rulings were unlawful or unconstitutional. Is it impossible that the Brazilian judge made a request/demand and threat that isn't actually lawful?
Turkey and India is probably not the best examples humanity want to try to emulate when it comes to human rights. And this is coming from someone born and raised in India.
Between Elon deciding who to block (and he blocks quiet often) and democratically elected governments deciding, I prefer the one that's got at least some checks and balances.
I don't. Governments are very powerful and the necessary checks and balances may be either nonexistent or weak, or corrupt, or very slow.
Individual rights should be safeguarded against abuse as much as possible. Maybe it means that Musk should block less, but it certainly means that governments shouldn't muzzle people too easily.
In this case, an entire country of 200 million is threatened with massive fines for the horrible crime of using VPN to access a social network.
Yeah, Brasil really makes a good member of BRICS with this judgment.
That’s why regulation should apply to services like that, the same way a private company should not be able to block a highway that is critical to the functioning of a country.
Twitter since elon’s criminal “leadership” has become a bot-infested cesspool of racist bullshit, where he unilaterally censors whatever he dislikes in his sissy fits. In this form, this is a manipulation device, and good riddance.
There is a lot more than racist bullshit that is going on on Twitter/X, for example, a lot of interesting voices from Ukraine.
If I were a Brasilian, I would certainly deeply resent the idea that my government treats me like a digital serf who is only allowed to move within a certain "area".
I don't believe in merits of censorship, regardless of all the putative benefits it always claims. And yeah, I am aware that Musk isn't a good personal example either. But it is worse if an entity with a monopoly on violence (= government) engages in that.
Governments are elected by people, and are the best representatives of what the people want. You rather a foreign agent with questionable motives be the arbiter of truth, rather than the body that is elected more or less democratically?
I don't want governments to be arbiters of truth at all. Elected, unelected, I just don't want them to do this kind of job, much like I don't want a plumber to dictate the contents of my next lunch.
The idea that governments should stick their fingers into anything they want is literally the definition of a totalitarian society.
> Twitter since elon’s criminal “leadership” has become a bot-infested cesspool of racist bullshit, where he unilaterally censors whatever he dislikes in his sissy fits. In this form, this is a manipulation device, and good riddance
If that is true then why do Biden, Kamala, the DNC, and most European politicians continue to post heavily on it?
The two statements are not contradictory, and it still hasn’t lost all its users from the twitter times, when it was a decent social media.
You can easily verify my statement if you wish, look up all the instances where Elon decided to ban stuff he dislikes, the rate of flat out racist bullshit, etc.
Well, I think it would be very reasonable for a government to compel Twitter to allow access without an account to at least certain accounts that dispense information that is of real-time public interest. e.g. In the case of some recent wildfires here, updates about the emergency were primarily available on Twitter.
The sanest implementation would probably just be some nominal monthly charge that an account holder can pay to Twitter to have their account publicly accessible to all.
Accounts are free and easy to create, so it's your choice rather than a restriction on your rights.
You have a right to vote in your country, doesn't mean that you can demand they collect the vote in your bedroom and claim your rights are violated if they refuse.
The coercion inherent in the Brasilian ban (massive fines for users who dare use VPN to access Twitter, massive fines for ISPs who don't comply) is many orders of magnitude greater than the coercion inherent in a paywall.
Apparently Twitter/X did have such a representative and this judge froze her bank accounts and threatened to imprison her.
> “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,” the post from X Global Government Affairs notes.
I'm no lawyer, but the claim is that the request made by the Brazilian judge doesn't comply with Brazil's own laws. Presumably if X (not Elon) has complied with other censorship requests they found the requests to be lawful.
It's not up to X/Musk to decide that though. If they feel that way, there are legal avenues to pursue. They should always comply with the court orders, then challenge them. Not doing so is breaking the law and should be punished as such.
That really depends on leverage. The Brazilian Supreme Court really has very little leverage over Twitter (or Musk directly).
Twitter has little to gain by complying with the judge's ban before challenging it in court, but they do have a lot to lose. It'd be a different story if Twitter was being challenged by the US Supreme Court, they have mhch more leverage to damage Twitter if they don't comply.
They have essentially lost all ad income driven by Brazilian users. I'd say that's quite a bit of leverage. Furthermore, SpaceX have had local assets frozen. That seems like some leverage to me. Starlink have now decided to comply with X blockage in the country [0] after Musk rattling his sabre saying they wouldn't. It _feels_ like there is at least some leverage.
> They have essentially lost all ad income driven by Brazilian users
This one, at least, isn't really leverage. If they did comply the ad revenue would be lost anyway. If Twitter does somehow win a legal challenge they can at least try to sue for lost ad revenue, they likely couldn't make that case if they chose to comply.
I'm not sure how they can legally go after SpaceX here. Definitely not claiming to know Brazilian law here, it just seems surprising that they could be roped in only for having the same founder/CEO. Unless I'm mistaken they aren't even sibling companies under a shared corporate parent.
> If they did comply the ad revenue would be lost anyway.
If they had complied, only a subset of Twitter accounts would have been removed from the website. All over 100 million Brazilian users would still be generating traffic to them and the ad revenue that comes with it. I think this is pretty large leverage.
> I'm not sure how they can legally go after SpaceX here.
> it just seems surprising that they could be roped in only for having the same founder/CEO.
From my understanding (which is developing along with the whole situation), even big names in Brazilian law are disputing this. So far I haven't seen anyone say the decision was illegal, but I have seen some questions being raised.
That said, my (very poor) understanding is that it's not because Musk is founder or CEO, but because he is the largest investor in both, exerts significant control over both, and essentially uses both in tandem in order to pursue his interests. Again in my very poor understanding, these factors combined made the judge rule the 2 companies more or less like one large financial group, giving him the ability to freeze one company's assets as insurance for the other's unpaid fines.
Pardon my lack of legalese or proper understanding and description of things. Hopefully this helps a bit on your own journey of understanding.
I also don’t want companies to have to have offices in every country where they operate.
X is big enough but it’s silly of Brazil to require a literal physical presence. They can serve whatever they need electronically to wherever X is these days.
It's not about serving them. They have already been served multiple times, refused to comply, got fined and refused to pay the fines. Pulling out their office was simply a means to avoid paying fines, that's all. There's no big motive there but cash.
One can argue about the politics of this all day. There are political views to be discussed about the morality of the requests to ban accounts versus the morality of keeping the accounts online, but the law is the law. If you want to operate on a certain country you need to abide by that country's laws, there aren't really any exceptions anywhere in the World.
Lots of platforms operate in Brazil without a legal representative, the country is actually very lax about that. There's no Substack or Medium office as far as I know, and I'm writing this comment on Hackernews without any issue. Generally, the legal representation is only required when someone takes legal action against the platform for some reason.
Obviously larger platforms like Twitter, Instagram and their likes have lots of legal actions in local courts. They also collect a shitload of ad revenue from local companies, and in both cases they are required to have a local representation. Twitter has laid-off all their engineering and marketing in Brazil when Musk bought it, and just recently decided to close down their legal and finance office to avoid paying the said fines. Whatever the political stand-off that brought them to this, there's no reasonable justification to stand with Twitter now.
"I don't aggree with your laws" is not a valid reason for a company to break these laws in any country, for any law.
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.
If you believe the law is immoral, then break the law and accept the consequences.
You are always morally responsible for your actions. The fact some of your actions may have been compelled by law does not absolve you. Nazis who were just following orders were still punished.
It may seem strange, at least to me, but the company Lumen Orbit (YCS24) [1] aims to offer data centers in space. If they, or another similar company, succeed in the future, it could change jurisdictional rules.
Why not just be glad they're taking a stand now? I'm so confused.
Edit: also looking at the history here... They fought those bans too. I'm guessing, due to Indias importance to the IT industry, twitter was unable to pull out entirely, leaving their employees vulnerable if they didn't comply.
Not sure about turkey, but it looks like in this case, they are able to avoid censorship by pulling out entirely. Brazil is an inconsequential country.
The issue in Brazil, based on what I read, was that Twitter’s lawyers in Brazil and Elon believed that the requests being made violate Brazil’s constitution.
That's for the nations courts to decide and not Elon. It's just an excuse to support authoritarian governments that have no checks and balances in their constitutions at all.
That is not an argument in a nation of law. If twitter thinks this is unconstitutional in Brazil, then they can by all means sue! Courts are the institutions that rule whether that is true or not, not some billionaire with a bad day.
The judge threatened the company's legal representative with incarceration for a failure to comply, so Musk unappointed the company's legal representative.
The judge demands that Musk now appoint a legal representative, which Musk refuses to do.
Why would Musk appoint someone for the judge to incarcerate?
Brazil could attempt to ban the accounts somehow, they don't have jurisdiction to force Twitter to ban them. The whole play here is a game of chicken - "ban these accounts or we cut you off from the Brazilian user base"
Local law says censorship is unconstitutional. It goes out of its way to spell out that on top of censorship being unconstitutional, political censorship is especially unconstitutional. That means it's super mega ultra unconstitutional.
That's the whole point, you know. We think this supreme court judge is violating the constitution by doing things like ordering the censorship of "fake news". These were political accounts engaged in speech of a political nature. They cannot be censored.
What do you do when the guy who's supposed to interpret and apply the constitution starts blatantly violating it? I have no idea. People actually tried asking the brazilian military to intervene. This guy called that an antidemocratic act despite the fact not one soul voted for him. Called it a coup attempt. Then he put those people in a gulag.
PL 2630/2020, the proposed "fake news" law. Not approved, despite their unrelenting attempts at passing it with urgency. At least not yet. And certainly not before all this stuff began, which would be in 2019.
> They literally just approved a law against misinformation.
Huh? I searched for newly approved "fake news" laws but couldn't find any new information. Why don't you cite some?
There is no problem with requiring X to appoint local representatives. This has nothing to do with that.
Follow the chain of events.
The "fake news" inquisition started when some magazine ran a damning article on one of these judges.
In retaliation to that, they granted themselves extensive powers. They gave themselves the right to investigate, prosecute, judge, sentence and punish crimes against themselves.
Then comes the 2022 election. These judges become openly partisan. They start censoring Bolsonaro supporters for "fake news". This is what I claim is unconstitutional.
Obviously, Bolsonaro was not reelected. These judges are very happy about that. They're so happy they go to public events and showboat about being the ones who personally defeated Bolsonaro.
Fast forward to today. The censorship continues. They keep ordering X to ban accounts. Which led to it pulling out of the country. Which led to it getting blocked due to not having a local legal representative. Which led to everything we are witnessing in real time right now.
There is no problem with requiring local legal representation. The problem is with the B point in your timeline. They shouldn't be "asking" (actually ordering) the removal of accounts for "misinformation" at all. That is political censorship and it is unconstitutional.
Therefore everything that happened after B, should not have happened at all.
Big Tech representatives have been jailed for failing to comply with judge orders. I remember those news... They were told to do things like wipe out a woman's nude pictures off of search results if not the entire internet. Judges even used their success against them. What do you mean it's hard? You're Google right? Maybe use your smart people and your trillions to figure out a way to comply?
It's not exactly impossible to ban since the court is threatening individuals with a $9k daily fine for trying to access via VPN. The court also previously ordered Google & Apple to delete VPN apps off people's phones.
Note that Elon Musk's definition of free speech includes anything that is not outright illegal, including fake news, see links below. I find it disturbing. The world will be better off without X.
Brazilian government would get mercilessly fact checked on X pretty much every single time they posted anything. It was actually pretty funny. These people lie through their teeth about anything and everything. It comes naturally to them. I have videos of our current president admitting he makes up numbers on the spot when speaking in public. Yeah, these people just make stuff up, admit it and people still believe them. They say something stupid like "100 million brazilians are dying of hunger" and people eat it up.
Would you have us trust these clowns to tell fake from fact?
Making this a about about free speech is astounding in multiple ways. First, are people not aware that Brazil is a different sovereign nation, where the US idea of free speech may not apply? And a country with a military dictatorship not many years ago, with laws specifically in place to prevent another coup, which Twitter chose to ignore here?
Germany prohibits certain types of speech, including Holocaust denial and hate speech, which are considered threats to public order and democratic values.
>Elon Musk's definition of free speech includes anything that is not outright illegal, including fake news, see links below. I find it disturbing.
I find your proposal of banning speech that is "fake news" equally disturbing. Trump was very happy to slap the "fake news" label when he was in power. What he also had the ability to shut down speech on the same basis?
Mainstream media outlets often publish fake news or don’t publish legitimate news that do not support their agenda. I don’t see anyone hyperventilating about that. Would we be better off without them, too? I happen to think that we would.
