X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders

https://www.reuters.com/technology/x-close-operations-brazil-effective-immediately-2024-08-17/

by hexage1814 • 2 years ago

344 562 2 years ago

hexage18143• 2 years ago

Brazil is essentially living under a judicial dictatorship for the last 5 years or so. The media and press have been looking the other way (as well as actively helping in the persecution) because they didn't like the people being persecuted, so they were fine with the whole thing.

croes• 2 years ago

That would mean it happened under Jair Bolsonaro

dalmo3• 2 years ago

The President is part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch.

hexage18143• 2 years ago

It did. Their excuse (both the court itself as well as the media trying to justify the court's actions) was/is something among the lines of "Oh, Bolsonaro would establish a dictatorship [an hypothetical that never happen, Bolsonaro unlike the Supreme Court, never crossed a red line], so we will instead establish our actual dictatorship to prevent his dictatorship".

And here we are in 2024, Bolsonaro is not president anymore, the elections (organized by people who pretty much opposed Bolsonaro btw...) are over, but the Supreme Court is still arresting people. They are still having trials were the court is the accuser, the "victim", and the judge – all in the same figure. They are still ordering profiles on social media to be blocked. They are still trying to arrest journalists abroad. They are still sentencing protesters, or at best rioters, to 17 years in prison because they broke some stuff – they accuse those random people without any real power, random common people, to have threaten the rule of law.

It's bad.

silvestreh• 2 years ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship. This also applies to Bolsonaro’s government as well. Just because you don’t agree with the ruling party doesn’t make it a dictatorship.

seydor2• 2 years ago

I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship

That's not how it works

throwaway918299• 2 years ago

You can vote your way into a dictatorship, but you cannot vote your way out.

clarkmoody• 2 years ago

I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship.

Have you read any history?

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 years ago

The Brazilian Supreme Court, like most judicial bodies, is not elected by the people.

woooooo2• 2 years ago

It's true, judges in Brazil are like gods.

I worked for a (large, powerful) company where our Brazilian compliance people were 100% outside of Brazil to reduce the risk of them being thrown in jail because a judge wasn't getting answers fast enough.

Not sure if those judges are elected but it doesn't really matter.

baq• 2 years ago

I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship.

You're a couple votes from becoming a dictatorship in any democracy, by definition: 1) amend constitution or equivalent to allow the vote, 2) vote in the dictator, 3) there is no step 3.

immibis9• 2 years ago

I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship.

The people elected Adolf Hitler, who promptly changed the law to prevent himself being unelected.

dazilcher• 2 years ago

Brazil's Supreme Court is not "a government elected by the people".

robswc• 2 years ago

I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship

Seems dictators get voted into power more often than not...

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don’t see how a government elected by the people can be considered a dictatorship.

Just to add my two cents, even though it's not a link to documents with proof, but Brazil is a tightly controlled country with very little that is democratic. Yeah there are elections but politics do NOT operate here the same way they do in North America. You've got a lot of corrupt government and even if you elect someone else, they can do very little to make it more democratic.

For the record, I'm Canadian, and I've been living in Brazil for almost two years. When you actually experience it, you feel you are under a system that acts a lot like a dictatorship...or at least something VERY far away from democracy.

Teocali22• 2 years ago

Quick question : what’s a judicial dictatorship, for you ?

meiraleal16• 2 years ago

Criminals facing the judicial system (and others doing crazy things to avoid it) is what's being considered a judicial dictatorship in Brazil by some. Crazy times.

epups3• 2 years ago

This is what the far right in Brazil wants you to believe, but it's not true. It's especially not true in regards to X, as they have repeatedly ignored judicial decisions that are very similar to those by European courts (ie, remove illegal content).

ilikehurdles5• 2 years ago

What's illegal in Brazil isn't illegal elsewhere. Their requests would impact people far outside their own jurisdiction.

vintermann• 2 years ago

Well, one of the people calling out this insanity is Glenn Greenwald. How can he be "the far right in Brazil", when his reporting on Lava Jato is one of the main reasons Lula is not in jail any longer?

SpicyLemonZest2• 2 years ago

How do you know that they’re similar? As the source article describes, the court has not published the orders they’re asking Twitter to enforce, and they don’t seem to be available at all to the public.

taway20240817122• 2 years ago

The seemingly unlimited[1] power of the Judiciary is showing its ugly head in many countries: Brazil, the US, Israel and many others. We take it as God-given word, but it's worth remembering that the theory of the separation of the Judiciary from the other powers came from the head of a single man, and maybe he was mistaken. There's no reason for judicial review, despite the name, be in the hands of the Judiciary and not Congress or other elected body. If laws are unclear, let those with the power to change it to determine its meaning and improve the wording.

[1] Frankly, I believe this is Godel's loophole

marcosdumay8• 2 years ago

The Brazilian Constitution doesn't even assign to the Judiciary unlimited power. All of it is legally subjected to the Congress.

But it doesn't matter, the power is there anyway.

dudus2• 2 years ago

Xitter is full of spam and fake news.

Elon decided to take the company in this direction where everything is fair game. Things just got worse.

If Xitter isn't going to up their game the legal system has to jump in and do it for them. It's not going to be pretty.

Now Elon is taking their ball home. Closing the offices, firing hundreds, burning bridges.

It's a power move where everyone loses but his ego.

davidmurdoch14• 2 years ago

I'm guessing you're not a huge proponent of free speech?

Community Notes seems to be highly effective at combatting misinformation, at least of the most popular tweets.

misiti3780• 2 years ago

ya, he/she preferred it when the nypost couldnt share a real article about hunter biden's laptop. I honestly cant believe people want to live in a world where anything (beyond the obvious illegal content like child porn, slander etc) is censored. If you dont like, it ignore it.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

I still remember when Elon was threatening to change how the block function works and how he got a community note saying that Apple's App Store rules would prohibit it, even though they said nothing about it.

Good stuff.

lossolo• 2 years ago

Community Notes seems to be highly effective at combatting misinformation, at least of the most popular tweets.

It doesn't, millions of people see it before community notes show up. Musk is sharing fake news himself[1]. This is dangerous, this impacts people emotions and their actions.

1. https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-share-fake-news-uk...

troupo8• 2 years ago

I'm guessing you're not a huge proponent of free speech?

Is Musk such a proponent? His professed absolutist views have been shown to be a lie and farce many times over

angoragoats4• 2 years ago

Please clearly define what you mean when you say "free speech." It's an overloaded term that confuses people every time I see it in this context.

I don't support the artificial broadcast/amplification of content that is hateful, bigoted, misinformation, etc to thousands or millions of people that otherwise wouldn't see it, were it not for an algorithm that picks it up due to it generating more eyeballs to sell advertisements to.

If we, as a society, can manage to muster the courage to regulate social media algorithms, then we can start talking broadly about free speech rights. Until then, people who want to post vile garbage should be banned permanently and forever from participating in social media sites that use unregulated and opaque algorithms. They are, of course, still free to post whatever they want on their own sites, blogs, or on social media that doesn't make use of opaque algorithms (e.g. some Fediverse sites).

gruez• 2 years ago

Now Elon is taking their ball home. Closing the offices, firing hundreds, burning bridges.

Google did the same thing for China in the 2000s. Should they be castigated for the same reason? How are the circumstances different aside from "google is good and musk/x is bad?"

soerxpso• 2 years ago

Opinion here basically seems to depend on whether a "fascism!!" fascist regime or a "democracy!!" fascist regime is doing the censorship. Brazil is run by a "democracy!!" fascist regime so any government overreach there is good. China is run by a "fascism!!" fascist regime so government overreach there is bad.

dudus2• 2 years ago

They are both entitled to their decision. And I certainly wouldn't blame either X or Google for leaving in that situation. Even though I disagree with you it's the same circumstances.

What I'm saying is that everyone loses when that happens.

ahiknsr• 2 years ago

How are the circumstances different aside from "google is good and musk/x is bad?"

You forgot to mention the Chinese government literally hacked google. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

Teocali22• 2 years ago

If Elon and X thinks they cannot in good faith comply with the laws of a country in which X operate, they are right to leave it.

I personnaly see the attacks against the judiciary of Brazil more troublesome that this move.

akira25013• 2 years ago

Things just got worse.

I hated twitter 5 years ago, and I hate twitter today. People act as if Elon's presence changed anything. From an outside point of view, it changed nothing, the site never had any value to begin with.

It's original existential proposition was: "Artists can now talk to fans directly instead of going through third party media companies."

It really has done a _fantastic_ job with that. It was never possible that it could effectively do more. Unsurprisingly, the people who need this media exposure, are the most devoted to pretending that it could be, as it would mean their time spent there is not just naval gazing but somehow "social activism."

It's typical lazy American politick.

tim333• 2 years ago

Things just got worse

I quite like twitter now. I wasn't enough of a user five years ago to judge if it's better or worse.

Even the 'free speech' stuff is not so bad. The mainstream media can be a bit prone to blocking things at times.

neverrroot• 2 years ago

When there’s nothing left to do, one does what’s needed, especially to protect the Brazilian employees from being caught in the middle.

taway20240817122• 2 years ago

X was being fined for not taking down certain account linked with allegedly criminal (as in anti-democratic) content.

While seemingly noble, some of these accounts were from people not living in Brazil, and supposedly being read by people also not living there. So there's the question of if an American corporation should censor the (one-way?) communication between, say, two US residents at the request of a foreign government.

The court should have issued a more reasonable request of restricting those accounts to be reached by accounts based in Brazil, which should restrict the judge's decision to his jurisdiction.

addaon• 2 years ago

The court should

Why? This seems to have been very effective in both accomplishing the court’s goals in this case, and improving life in Brazil a bit in general.

acedTrex2• 2 years ago

Elon is not blocking Brazilian internet traffic to X. He is removing their assets from the country physically, from the article it looks like that means divesting of legal resources

quote > X claims Moraes secretly threatened one of its legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform. Brazil's Supreme Court, where Moraes has a seat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil, billionaire Elon Musk's platform said on Saturday.

sroussey4• 2 years ago

So, Estonia should be able to block anyone in the world that says anything about Estonia with low sentiment, for example?

matheusmoreira16• 2 years ago

improving life in Brazil a bit in general

My life is not at all improved by this nonsense.

Teocali22• 2 years ago

When reading the article, you see that the threat seems to come after X failed to comply with legal order to block some accounts.

BadHumans2• 2 years ago

Media platform X said on Saturday it would close its operations in Brazil "effective immediately" due to what it called "censorship orders" from Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.

Elon has complied with "censorship orders" from other countries[0][1] so what makes this one so different?

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

He didn't agree with this one.

mort963• 2 years ago

Guessing the difference is that Brazil is currently controlled by a left-wing government and these censorship demands have a left-leaning bent to them, whereas India and Turkey have right-leaning governments and the censorship orders were to strengthen the right wing?

Musk has been increasingly open about using his ownership of Twitter as simply a tool to champion his own political ideals, and those ideals seem to skew pretty far right.

kernal• 2 years ago

Elon has said he’s more of a centrist. So it’s always amusing to see the far left brand him as far right because he opposes their radical ideology.

olalonde7• 2 years ago

Erdogan is practically a socialist, government spending and inflation have ballooned under him. Pretty much the opposite of what Elon Musk advocates for.

copx2• 2 years ago

I assure you, that no Western right-winger likes the Islamist Erdogan.

samarthr13• 2 years ago

As for the Indian government, I would argue that it is still largely socialist (high direct and indirect taxes that translate to strong social spending in poorer parts of the society, and rural areas[1]), and is still considerably more to the left than much of the west.

I would concede that on social matters the government does lean conservative, and is not as liberal as one would expect, but in many ways, that is an indictment of current society, and a part of life, that I don't see changing in the near term (25 years or so).

The social fabric of a nation is intrinsic to it's continued stable existence. Mass upheaval in a short duration is dangerous for the continued improvement of welfare of the people. So, it can be argued that preventing mass change demographics is a part of the duties of the government. [2]

[1] See central government schemes like Jal Shakti, LPG subsidy, Urea Subsidy etc

[2] This is a subjective opinion, but imo mass immigration is dangerous, and recent examples in Europe do demonstrate the dangers of sudden changes in demographics. At the same time, diversity is important, and so is immigration by _skilled_ professionals, with the eventual transfer of skills (and technology) to native (for whatever value of native) people.

sedatk2• 2 years ago

Also, complied censorship requests can be applied per country in Twitter’s case. So, an account would seem closed in a country but visible to anyone outside. That applies to censored tweets the same way. I wonder what prevents that here.

jsheard3• 2 years ago

Also, complied censorship requests are applied per country in Twitter’s case.

Except that time a censorship request made by India was enforced worldwide, which I don't think was ever explained.

https://archive.is/BnUhm

immibis9• 2 years ago

This time he was ordered to censor something he likes a lot. He complies when asked to censor things he doesn't like.

copx2• 2 years ago

So you are telling me, Musk is a fan of the Islamist regime in Turkey and its persecution of non-Islamists..

Somehow, I don't believe that.

Especially given that X also censors for India's anti-Islamic government..

Seems pretty obvious that ideological sympathies are not the deciding factor here, but the question wether an unwillingness to comply would lead to X being banned in the country in question.

olalonde7• 2 years ago

It sounds like Musk didn't like the secrecy and lack of due process around it (not sure how accurate this is, but that's what he says).[0]

[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1824839784852013125

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

This is not a moralistic position. Brazil always has been a big market for Twitter and there were always significant resources invested by the company for legal compliance. This included dedicated cross functional teams. These teams no longer exist, since the owner thinks 90% of the people in the company were useless. Now they simply don’t have the ability to stay compliant and therefore run into the risk of being fined. They’re minimizing that risk.

aa_is_op• 2 years ago

It doesn't sound like Musk did anything of value here. He just complies with dictators and fights democracies because dictators let him run wild while democratic countries will soon put him in jail for market manipulation, money laundering, fraud, labor law violations, environment pollution, and the rest.

You people really need to broaden your views about this guy.

marcosdumay8• 2 years ago

He complied with other censorship orders like this from the same source in Brazil too.

In my impression, the relevant detail is that this one comes with monetary fines, that are expected to increase if he fails to comply again.

handoflixue• 2 years ago

"Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest" suggests a pretty clear difference in procedure here

(https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1824819053061669244)

stickfigure5• 2 years ago

The future of this is that international companies need to pick a single jurisdiction, keep their servers and employees there, fight extradition requests, and leave it up to other countries to try to block their own citizens from access.

I always thought Gibson's concept of "data havens" was kind of silly; data doesn't care where it lives, why would it matter where it's physically located? But apparently he was a bit more prescient than I originally gave him credit for.

TZubiri• 2 years ago

Because someone can pull the plug or drive an axe through it, that's why we care.

sroussey4• 2 years ago

Many jurisdictions, including EU, China, and others, require data on their citizens to be hosted locally.

acedTrex2• 2 years ago

Then it would be up to those countries to block traffic to said social media companies. This is what china already does.

throwawayk7h• 2 years ago

what would happen if a US company, with US servers, ignored those requirements?

miki1232112• 2 years ago

But that only applies to companies that the EU has any kind of control over.

If you're in a hypothetical country that the EU has no relevant treaties with, the EU has no power over you. They might claim that EU laws are extraterritorial and affect everybody who dares to appear on the internet without blocking EU citizens, but that claim can't be enforced in such a country.

wredue3• 2 years ago

And that’s the way it *should* be.

When Steven Harper unilaterally attempted to empower private data to be offshored, it would have been an absolute nightmare.

North American security is bad enough as it is. Imagine handing all your health, credit card, government information over to a Nigerian prince just for free.

gcbirzan2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure about Chinese law, or any other law, but GDPR for sure does not require that. The fact that the US is not an option doesn't mean you cannot store data in any other country, just that the safe harbour and then the privacy shield were considered inadequate. For example, storing personal data in the UK is just fine.

M2Ys4U• 2 years ago

The EU does not require data to be hosted locally, though.

krapp2• 2 years ago

The premise that "data" and "cyberspace" somehow transcend the physical and legal universe was always naive on the part of cypherpunks.

redleader55• 2 years ago

Initially the internet was a chaotic place where anything was accepted. This stopped around the early to mid 90s. Then the pendulum swinged the other way and governments started imposing more and more restrictions - from copyright, to actual information filters and now trying to dictate international companies what their citizen are allowed to see. Like any pendulum, it will likely swing the other direction soon.

x0x0• 2 years ago

That's fine until you want to conduct business, such as accepting advertising, hiring employees, or even taking direct to consumer subscription payments, in a country.

praptak2• 2 years ago

Countries can do more than just try to block network traffic. No legal presence in our jurisdiction, no business in our country.

It's much easier to block local advertisers' money going to such companies.

Zak• 2 years ago

Is it? Ad networks are often multilayered and opaque.

vitorgrs3• 2 years ago

I was thinking exactly at this. I think a block of ads would hurt even more X than a total-block of X.

If you block X, you block obviously ads, but you also block local traffic to the website.

If you just block ads, and the traffic continues, you are actually losing even more money.

Sure, Musk could just implement crypto on X, but I think it would still be very effective.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

That philosophy will often fail if you need to handle payments or advertising or sale, etc. once you reach a certain scale.

Because consumers and advertising partners want to pay in the local currency, using local means of payment, which are often only available with a business bank account available only to locally registered businesses.

And then things like salespeople on the ground who can visit advertisers' offices, go to conventions, etc.

If you want to actually be a viable business in a particular country at a large scale, it often becomes impossible to avoid having to incorporate there and hire people locally, even if your actual product is entirely digital.

praptak2• 2 years ago

It also doesn't help if your customers can neither legally pay you nor account your invoices as costs for the tax purposes.

numpad0• 2 years ago

Yeah, so that means, China is doing it right with Weibo and Douyin. It's Twitter and Instagram respectively but built top to bottom for full Chinese ideological, legal, and financial conformance. I used to think that's weird, but it could be where we're headed.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

The future is actually the opposite: platforms putting servers in every country the operate in and having slightly different rules according to each country

stickfigure5• 2 years ago

This, I am quite certain, is not the longterm endgame. For small countries with mostly-similar regulatory regimes, sure. For large countries with authoritarian leadership like China, they're not going to tolerate companies publishing "nation of Taiwan" stories anywhere.

emporas• 2 years ago

The future could be the opposite of the opposite also. Governments which want to operate in the physical realm as well as the web realm, could pay fees to the private company, so as the government of said country and it's citizens not be banned from the platform. The fees could be rephrased as taxes.

quitit• 2 years ago

I don't disagree with keeping staff within safe regions. There are some issues surrounding that, as some regions require local representation.

Modern services, including Twitter, have the ability to geofence content/compliance policy to specific regions. Search, Social Media, Maps and News are examples of typical services which engage such techniques. So there's not a lot of reason why Twitter couldn't comply here, since they already have already demonstrated this capability.

Twitter's non-compliance will likely just end up with a ban.

asadotzler3• 2 years ago

Only if you don't care about doing any business in those countries, which, I'll enlighten you, you do.

anotherape4• 2 years ago

I doubt that even what you said is enough hence the cookie banners everywhere and back in the day US blocking for gambling sites etc.

meiraleal16• 2 years ago

As a Brazilian, I must say, great day!

sigzero2• 2 years ago

No, no it is not.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

Are you Brazilian?

henriquenunez• 2 years ago

BORA BRASIL!!!!

arp2424• 2 years ago

I don't really use X, but I still have an account because it's just more convenient to view stuff with an account, and for better or worse, sometimes I want to view what people are saying. Typically I don't really bother flagging stuff, but recently I flagged two posts which seemed very obviously beyond the pale to me:

"Zelensky is an expert on false flags (he is jewish, obviously) like Bucha" [1]

"Still think it's because they are "Muslim"? Wake up. Same story in every continent on global Earth. Southern equatorial dark skins have a higher demographic percentage of low IQ and low impulse control future criminals. It's not worth mixing. https://t.co/D0lQuEUV8L" [2] (context here is the competitive racism riots in Britain last week, which makes it even worse IMO)

Both flags were denied.

Now, I don't really know about this specific disagreement or if blocking those accounts is reasonable or not, the story doesn't really have enough specifics on that. "Spreading fake news and hate messages" from governments can be used over-zealously or even in bad faith, but if the platform also doesn't do anything about naked unambiguous racism and antisemitism, then we clearly can't trust X on this either.

[1] https://x.com/WWIII_Affairs/status/1810377249126035535

[2] https://x.com/TruthForgeX/status/1820184515190665543

wslh• 2 years ago

I think X/Twitter gives you a real taste of hate, which I personally prefer to [choose or not to] watch rather than hypocrisy. It is also a good source for studying street cultures around the world. If I were an American, I would be more concerned, for example, about weapons and fentanyl.

johngladtj• 2 years ago

What exactly do you think justifies censoring either of those examples you gave?

anotherape4• 2 years ago

This is the sort of rot you want to get rid of if you want a platform not to descend into 4chan. There is plenty of scope to criticise anything you like in society in a way that isn't just provoking hate. There are riots on the streets because of posts like this!!

ilikehurdles5• 2 years ago

Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities. There's a lot of this unhinged stuff on X - no question - but IMO I've seen so much more good, critical discussion come out of the Elon takeover that I'm firmly in the camp that says it was a net good.

arp2424• 2 years ago

Free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities.

Obviously, and that's okay, but if you want to have a discussion platform then you need to deal with the worst of it one way or the other. Otherwise it's just going to regress to the nastiest. No normal person wants to casually engage with people like this, so when you let them free they will turn any thread into a toxic flamefest.

When push comes to shove, very few people are 100% free speech absolutions. That would include people just replying "fuck off you moron", "kill yourself n--er", "gas the Jews", etc. etc. on every post. The internet makes it very easy for slightly unhinged people to spend a lot of time posting these types of things hundreds or thousands of times per day. So stuff like "free speech includes things that are offensive to your sensibilities" is just a discussion stopper truism.

My post from a few years ago applies here: https://www.arp242.net/censorship.html

yashap• 2 years ago

The platform is absolutely overrun with bots and extreme racism and sexism (as well as extremely racist/sexist bots). It’s a complete tire fire, advertisers are pulling out en-masse because they don’t want to be associated with this cesspool, non-bot users are fleeing, the company is outright tanking.

Musk bought it for $44 billion in October 2022. Over the first 13 months under Musk, we saw X internal memos marking themselves down to $19 billion, then Fidelity marked down their investment to a level implying a $15-16 billion valuation, then in November 2023 they marked it down again to $12.5 billion. All signs point to it losing even more value since.

I’d be surprised if X doesn’t declare bankruptcy within the next few years, Musk has rapidly taken it from social media giant to poor man’s 4chan.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

no it's not. I'm a power user, I don't have some tremendous amount of bots as followers and I have made very out-of-reach friends and acquaintances on twitter. I get paid an okayish sum each month for posting on the platform and the most serious issue which was fixed earlier this year was the ***-in-bio spam.

Everything works betters since Elon, the site runs better! - All the people who keep repeating the 'cesspool' argument don't use the service. It was a cesspool it's entire life. People say any website that doesn't agree with them 100% of the time is a cesspool. Reddit, Insta, Tiktok, etc: Cesspools for people who can't spend time online with people that disagree with them.

I make $1k+ a month posting the same stuff I posted for free. I love the site more than ever, and I don't agree with Elon politically. and no i'm not a bot yaddah yaddah i really cannot get over how often people yap the same doom and gloom, commentators said the site was going down when he fired everyone - it works even better!

BlueTemplar2• 2 years ago

It was already a "poor man's (?) 4chan" long before Musk : it's baked in in its structure : platform + algorithmic selection of messages to show + short limits on numbers of characters per message.

olalonde7• 2 years ago

Primary source: https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1824819053061669244

deisteve2• 2 years ago

cynical part of m says X is doing this to reduce operating costs as revenue is down significantly rough 95% since Twitter went private and advertisers pulled out

X premium revenue has been disappointing. Elon paid $50 billion for a company worth less than 5 billion today and its ad revenue is dropping not increasing,

virgulino4• 2 years ago

Brazilian here. If anyone wants a great introduction to the context and the bigger picture, there's this great article from the NYT in 2022, written by an excellent reporter who lives in Brazil. I highly recommend this article to anyone who hasn't lived in Brazil for the last 10 years:

"To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/world/americas/bolsonaro-...

https://archive.is/plQFT

It covers the judge at the center of the current issue: "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. And this year, 10 of the court’s 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a livestream."

Rumble has been blocked in Brazil for over a year, and WhatsApp and Telegram have been briefly blocked multiple times.

addicted• 2 years ago

None of this is unique to Brazil and happens in countries all over the world where X continues to operate.

jsheard3• 2 years ago

Regarding takedown demands, Twitter used to publish transparency reports on who was making them, but they stopped after Musk took over.

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/removal-requests

In the final report 97% of all takedowns were made by Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and India (from most to least). They also broke down the number of takedowns against verified journalists and news outlets, which was led by India (114 takedowns), Turkey (78), Russia (55), and Pakistan (48), and Brazil was down the list with 8. It would be nice to have a more recent version of this report to see which way the tides have shifted.

throwthrowuknow3• 2 years ago

Not surprising since the US is the only country in the world with freedom of speech.

akira25013• 2 years ago

Yes, but Brazil has the most natural wealth available to steal.

HPsquared3• 2 years ago

Looking in from outside, the judiciary in Brazil seems to have a lot of "hard power".

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

More or less than the US?

hexage18143• 2 years ago

They pretty much decide about anything they want to decide, it's that simple. It's not like "oh, we only judge constitutional matters", as it happens in serious countries. I really mean ANYTHING.

There is run of the mill lawsuits involving defamation that the court decided to judge out of the bat. The accuser is a mainstream journalist (mainstream media as a whole have been – essentially – acting as public relations of the court – similar to how they acted as public relations for Biden during the 2020 elections btw), the accused part being another brazilian journalist living abroad, called Allan dos Santos (Moraes personally hates the guy and failed to extradite him from the US countless times - USA authorities essentially answering "it's only words, this is covered by our first amendment").

And instead of this lawsuit following the normal procedure as any other defamation lawsuit in Brazil. Moraes decided to elevate this case to automatically judge it in the highest instance of the country. His excuse? “Oh, Dos Santos is investigated in other procedures here, so I think they are related". And this has been essentially their trick to investigate/trial anything they want.

They say it's related. Hell, the Brazilian Supreme Court decide to investigate Ellon Musk himself.

Sources:

https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/moraes-abre-inquerito-cont...

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2024/03/eua-negam-extrad...

https://www.poder360.com.br/poder-justica/justica/moraes-abr...

matheusmoreira16• 2 years ago

They do. Literal hard power. These guys have the pens which make federal police do their thing. I call them the judge-kings.

You know what's worse? Deep down, every brazilian knows it. Everyone here has always known this truth. Even before all this began. There's an old saying here: "doctors think they're gods, judges know it". Judges making arbitrary and monocratic decisions is a completely normalized thing here. We're witnessing in real time just how far their godlike powers stretch. We now know for a fact that judges have enough power to violate the brazilian constitution and get away with it.

Talking to actual brazilian lawyers is a surreal experience. Sometimes they'd sound confused while explaining a supreme court decision to me. They would say: "the supreme court was supposed to apply the constitution but they decided to legislate instead". Yeah, an actual lawyer told me that once. I was his student and I never forgot that lesson. The judges legislate in this country. If the judge-king doesn't like the law, he just doesn't apply it. If the law says the guy is innocent but the judge-king feels like punishing him, he gets punished.

"Judicial activism", they call it. Oh it's nothing, just a harmless euphemism for a silent coup that installed a dictatorship of the unelected judiciary. And even on HN my fellow brazilians will come and flag my posts to oblivion while insisting that I'm actually living in a democracy.

smrtinsert• 2 years ago

At a quick glance the answer is yes. The power to silence speech the government speech the government deems fake is the power to silence speech the government doesn't agree with. The answer to fake news are outlets that allow free speech against the fake news like we have in the united states. Unless billionaires buy them all up and prevent the actual facts from coming out of course.

atbpaca• 2 years ago

The judiciary system in Brazil is a little different than the US one. It does not make Brazil a dictatorship as many of Bolsonaro's supporters claim, nor does an article in NYTimes.

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

How can that be so? The article says this:

In Brazil, the 11 justices and the attorneys who work for them issued 505,000 rulings over the past five years.

Can that really be right? That's an average of 276 rulings per day, or one ruling every five minutes around the clock 24/7/365 for five years straight.

If that claim is true then it's clear that the Brazilian Supreme Court is not like supreme courts anywhere else in the world. It must be normally issuing rulings written by people who aren't the justices themselves. And, it must be a truly massive organization to create so many rulings on so many topics. Seeing as it appears to answer to nobody, nor follow any normal judicial procedure (being both accuser and judge in one body), it would seem fair to describe that as a parallel government acting as a dictatorship. How else could you describe it? What checks on their power do they recognize?

wredue3• 2 years ago

You get sent to X jail for criticism of Musk on X. It happens on X itself.

In general, I agree with pulling out of a country that doesn’t exercise freedom of speech (as in criticism, not threats). But the hypocrisy is somewhat funny.

There’s probably better (for society) ways such as providing higher anonymity for criticism (not threats). But that seems like a nightmare overall.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

I am power user with a large following on X and I have never once had any trouble, despite numerous times criticizing Musk.

ben_w• 2 years ago

For now there's important differences between "X jail" (ban/shadowban) and "actual jail", for example expensive phone calls and not being able to visit Canada.

EuAndreh• 2 years ago

From the same article:

Brazil’s Supreme Court has drastically expanded its power to counter the antidemocratic stances of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.

The title is a leading question. I can come up with different titles for the same article or topic, that could be leading somewhere else:

1. Brazil Top Court's Actions to Defend Democracy

2. A View On Moraes' Decisions In Face Of The Crisis Created By Bolsonaro

3. Brazil's Supreme Court Reaction After The Presidency Went Too Far

---

A legitimate question I have is:

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

(Not a trick question, an honest one given the crisis)

HDThoreaun2• 2 years ago

No one is saying the court shouldnt defend democracy. We're saying that censorship is not the way to do that.

brigadier132• 2 years ago

You can't claim to be defending people's rights while also jailing people without trial.

geertj4• 2 years ago

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

I am not familiar with Bolsonaro's movement, but censoring people under the guise of protecting democracy doesn't seem very democratic to me? At the very least, you have to admit here that there is a slippery slope where a good intentioned government or justice system could progressively get further away from these good intentions, and start using its power merely for the preservation of it?

It seems to me that censoring ideas that seem dangerous is far more dangerous than trying to correct them, and that a very high level of free speech is one of the most powerful antidotes against this slippery slope.

dmix• 2 years ago

There's always a new excuse to take away peoples right or aggressively censor things. "This time is different" "It's just an exceptional situation" etc they say every time until the next time.

dakial12• 2 years ago

This is a catch 22, because Bolsonaro team was using social media and fake news to move dumb masses towards their objective, pretty similar to Trump in the US. The judge in question, with his despotic tendencies, was in an open war against Bolsonaro (started by Bolsonaro) and stretched the powers of the judiciary to bring Bolsonaro down. Now, we have 2 wrongs here. But how one should react to all of this?

ufo• 2 years ago

In theory, Bolsonaro's actions should have gotten him impeached a long time ago. However, congress was more than happy to keep a "weak" president in power, because it allowed them to grab more power from the executive branch. It's no surprise that the percentage of the budget allocated to "earmarks" ballooned during the Bolsonaro administration.

marcosdumay8• 2 years ago

Justice persecutors, that sit on the fence between the Judiciary and the Executive (but are nominally in the Judiciary) should be the ones starting those actions. The federal police should be the ones feeding information for them to act on.

On the case where Alexandre de Moraes is the victim, it should have been judged by a normal regional court, first by a judge and then by a panel of 3. In case it ever reaches his court, he should have sent it to somebody else (decided by a draw).

In no situation a court should be commanding a police investigation.

naasking• 2 years ago

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

I find the notion of fighting extremism with more extremism dubious. The legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the people. If the people voted for Bolsonaro and are not opposing his actions, the judiciary will not be able to stop the slide, their extreme actions only give him fuel.

wtcactus• 2 years ago

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

To start, the fallacy here, is to assume there was indeed an "extremist anti-democratic movement led by Bolsonaro".

matheusmoreira16• 2 years ago

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

None.

There is no "anti-democratic" movement here. To be against democracy, you need to actually be living within a democracy. Unfortunately, Brazil is not a democracy. Brazil is a judiciary dictatorship.

These unelected judge-kings run this nation. They have been running it for years. They're basically gods here. Untouchable. Their powers have been expanding continuously. In the months leading up to the elections, it got to the point they started disregarding the brazilian constitution and engaging in blatant political censorship. And their power keeps expanding.

What's more anti-democratic than a bunch of unelected judges doing whatever they want? This is the real coup.

If Bolsonaro intended to do anything, it was in reaction to this sorry state of affairs, and I don't blame him for trying at all. I blame him for failing.

jalapenos4• 2 years ago

If you have to censor your opposition it's an admission they've made points you can't refute.

The solution is to bring some smarter people into your movement with better counterarguments. Often those counterarguments are going to have to include some minor concessions and soul searching. Maybe your side has gotten complacent and drifted in its beliefs away from the sensible. Maybe you're become equal but opposite to those you call awful.

I.e. produce new ideas that resonate better than theirs and they'll disappear like a fart in the wind.

edgyquant2• 2 years ago

“defend democracy” has become a rhetorical device unrelated to actually doing so. Expanding your power and censoring people is tyrannical no matter what spin you put on it. And tyrants always have a spin, no one ever says I’m looking to end democracy.

lobocinza5• 2 years ago

What extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro? The guy was president during pandemics with strong popular and military support. The facts are that he had the bread and the knife and yet no coup was attempted while he was in power.

Bolsonaro is a straw man used by the extreme left which currently is in power to justify an institutional authoritarian escalation. And this escalation was happening long before Bolsonaro.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Rumble has been blocked in Brazil for over a year, and WhatsApp and Telegram have been briefly blocked multiple times.

It's a near certainty those who are still operating are obeying censorship / takedown requests by the Brazilian government.

Elon Musk said the EU Commission tried to attack X: "It'd be too bad if you were to get big fines uh!? So take down any content we ask you to take down and in exchange we'll make sure you don't get those fines".

These are mafia tactics and it makes me ashamed to be an EU citizen.

This has nothing to do with democracy: it's its opposite. Dictatorship.

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech..."

People, worldwide, are beginning to understand the importance of the first amendment. I do genuinely fear that very soon people in several countries (including mine) may learn the hard way what the lack of the second amendment leads to.

Barrin923• 2 years ago

I don't think there's a lot of democracy in having some gazillionaire buy a social media platform and then interfere in the politics of other sovereign nations/continents.

As a EU citizen I hope we get rid of Twitter at some point and build a sovereign communications infrastructure and domestic firms abiding by our local laws, because that is what a democracy is about.

muaytimbo2• 2 years ago

2nd amendment protects the 1st. You either have both or neither.

gcbirzan2• 2 years ago

You're ashamed to be an EU citizen because the EU is asking X to take down posts instigating racial violence? Well, good riddance is all I can tell you...

throwupo• 2 years ago

UK courts are sentencing people over social media posts too. M

com2• 2 years ago

If they said it over a megaphone during an incipient riot, and it would have led to an arrest warrant and charges laid, it would probably have happened as well. A good thing too.

Social media isn’t a consequence free zone.

matheusmoreira16• 2 years ago

A related article which I submitted to HN before the elections.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/world/americas/brazil-onl...

Good comments from fellow brazilian HNers which provide the appropriate context:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36543423

jalapenos4• 2 years ago

Well it's not quite sentencing people to death for blasphemy, but you've got to walk before you run I guess.

Perhaps "failed state" just takes a while to bake.

johnea• 2 years ago

The specific Brazilian issues aside, it would be great if we coiuld shut down these platforms in the US!

Proprietary mis-information platforms aren't helping anyone except their over compensated ownership...

bottlepalm2• 2 years ago

I'm glad X was taken private so they can do stuff like this without worrying about the effects on the public market. It's been too easy to push through censorship on social media platforms, I'm glad at least one has the strength to push back.

deisteve2• 2 years ago

Same. But I somehow doubt that Elon paid a premium of 1000% for Twitter for free speech.

Its more likely that after he scared away all the advertisers, him doubling down as "champion of free speech" was the only face saving act

If you think about it, paying $50 billion dollars and then within two years ending up with a company worth 95% less isn't very smart.

Sure Elon might be a centi-billionaire but a lot of it comes from Tesla which also is struggling.

For the little guys, his loss is a gain for us all. I especially love that he openly supports Trump

TaylorAlexander• 2 years ago

Doesn’t X censor usage of the word “cisgender”?

bottlepalm2• 2 years ago

Do a search for it and find out. (The answer is no)

csouzaf3• 2 years ago

Brazilian here. I find it very bad when someone from another country criticizes our Supreme Court, especially when it seems driven by ideological motivations. As others have pointed out, similar situations occur in other countries without bring Elon's comments

Brazil doesn't have an equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment, and that's not necessarily a problem. Our legal framework reflects our historical and cultural context. Why he feel the need to impose his vision of what's best for Brazil, without fully taking account our legal and social nuances?

quotemstr2• 2 years ago

The UN declaration of human rights speaks to free expression being fundamental to human flourishing. As an American, I'm not terribly inclined to accept cultural relativism when it comes to censorship. Governments banning political speech they dislike is always and everywhere tyrannical.

csouzaf3• 2 years ago

I don't think it's comments they dislike. I think it's accounts spreading fake news and feeding a narrative of 'current government bad' to impose what they think is the right way. I mean, there are limits, and they're being imposed by the force of law

tankenmate6• 2 years ago

Unless of course that speech also incites lawlessness or is actually otherwise unlawful.

Your rights end where my nose begins, etc.

asadotzler3• 2 years ago

Plenty of Germans are fine with banning public praise of Nazis. You are free to spew the boring old pablum, but most people in the world aren't absolutist like you.

Besides, "political speech" isn't as easy to nail down as you seem to think it is. Child porn is political speech if I want it to be so you're opposed to banning child porn. Good to know.

maronato2• 2 years ago

“Free speech” has limits. Spreading lies about people with the purpose of undermining someone’s reputation is defamation, which is a crime in the US.

In Brazil, it happens that lying about the democratic process with the intent of getting people to not vote or to get people to support your fascist coup is also a crime.

The Supreme Court ordered X to ban people who commit these crimes and subpoenaed it to reveal their identities so they can be arrested. Subpoenas happen all the time in the US.

Complying isn’t the problem here though. Twitter complies with similar requests all the time. The problem is that Twitter is failing to comply in time and is being hit with ever-increasing fines for it.

Musk could hire more people to deal with it or pay the fines, but he decided that firing everyone and leaving the country would be cheaper.

nosefurhairdo2• 2 years ago

Brazil doesn't have an equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment, and that's not necessarily a problem.

That's an interesting perspective. The way I read our first amendment, it seems that the rights granted therein are a prerequisite for a free society.

If Brazil's leaders are unwilling to allow a speech platform go uncensored, why not ban X? Should X have to comply with every country's censorship requests? Elon alleged that Moraes requested private user information as well. Should X hand over any and all user data that governments ask for?

Teocali22• 2 years ago

If Brazil's leaders are unwilling to allow a speech platform go uncensored, why not ban X?

Because it’s not black and white

Should X have to comply with every country's censorship requests?

X must comply with the laws of every country it’s operate. If it cannot, or not willing to do it, it must leave it. That’s exactly what Elon have done

Elon alleged that Moraes requested private user information as well. Should X hand over any and all user data that governments ask for ?

If it’s done legally, yes.

This take is quite bizarre, honestly, given how personal data protection laws are subpar in the US. Even from the government (remember patriot act).

anotherape4• 2 years ago

Other countries like Australia rely on common law and statutory law.

ggreer• 2 years ago

Some of the orders were not just to prevent people in Brazil from viewing certain things, but to take down content and ban users globally. The court also wanted Twitter to provide personal information of overseas accounts.

jwrallie• 2 years ago

So what you mean is that the nationality of a person makes it better or worse for them to criticize Brazil’s Supreme Court? It does not matter.

If people are driven by different ideologies, well this is just how it is.

I’m not saying Musk is right, but I want him to be able to criticize freely “our Supreme Court”, and also for him to be able to do with his business as he wishes. His vision might as well be for the best according to himself, who can decide if something is good or bad?

paul7986• 2 years ago

X is now 4chan to faces of death as i just was scrolling through and saw CTV security footage a guy suckering punch a guy .. the victim got up.. hurried out the door then turned around a point blank shot his assailant and it was gruesome. Ive never something like that and was fine with not seeing such before. Yet X is a trainwreck I am drawn ever more to especially with Grok 2 images.

ineedaj0b4• 2 years ago

click under the video and choose 'not interested'.

you wouldn't have liked the internet in 2000s. there were isis beheading videos to stumble upon randomly.

arp2424• 2 years ago

you wouldn't have liked the internet in 2000s. there were isis beheading videos to stumble upon randomly.

What are you trying to say? That this was somehow a good thing?

And you can say "you wouldn't have liked «something in the past», there was «something worse than today» going on!" on pretty much anything.

chairmansteve2• 2 years ago

He huffs and puffs about democracies blocking single accounts, but is quite content when Xi blocks twitter in it's entirety.

seydor2• 2 years ago

It seems most people here would rather he did nothing

cryptonector4• 2 years ago

What would you have him do in that case? Maybe load a starship with tungsten and drop it on Xi?

thih9• 2 years ago

"To protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately," X said.

Would they also fire said staff because they have now ceased operations in Brazil?

Hopefully not. Still, I’d like to see a follow up, confirming that this action indeed benefited the employees, as they claim.

jrflowers• 2 years ago

This is neither here nor there but does anyone know what content/account(s) was ordered “censored”?

meiraleal16• 2 years ago

life threats to the judge, harassment of surpreme court family members, fake stories about relationships with mafia. All of them links with adsense ad monetization on youtube, obviously.

0xcb0• 2 years ago

Tbh, sometime I wish the same would happen in whole europe. This platform is out of control. It's threatening democracy if it keeps on publishing fake news en mass with no control whatsoever. Let the platform die, it was a good time. But it's time for sth. new that keeps society intact.

Yeul• 2 years ago

Lucky bastards.

anotherape4• 2 years ago

National pi hole :)

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

Not surprising. Shit happens in Brazil, and it's a lot different than it is in North America. I wouldn't have believed it myself (as a Canadian) if I had not lived here for almost two years. It's like a labrynthine system filled with corruption and the unwritten rules that make anything very difficult down here unless you are a master of those rules, or the jeitinho brasileiro...

Basically, even in daily life, anything that you KNOW is easy in North America is a real pain in the ass down here.

meiraleal16• 2 years ago

Not surprising. Shit happens in Brazil, and it's a lot different than it is in North America.

Yeah. Brazil should follow he US lead and demand nationalization of Twitter.

dhosek2• 2 years ago

It’s only some government censorship that Twitter objects to.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/08/india-twitte...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65609123

Musk is not a free speech absolutist: he puts his thumb on the scales to promote the speech he likes while cheerfully suppressing that which he does not.

danlugo92• 2 years ago

2nd article is opinion by wikipedia founder, one of the most censored and astroturfed websites there is

gverrilla• 2 years ago

X for Xandão

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, claims Moraes secretly threatened one of the company's legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform.

I agree with this decision. If it was my staff a judge was bullying and threatening, I’d close up shop too. It paints a very bad picture for the ethics of the country. Brazil should be ashamed to have a person like this presiding over matters of law.

matheusmoreira16• 2 years ago

Many of us are ashamed. Myself included.

mmooss4• 2 years ago

It's interesting that Musk is willing to throw away money: The ~$40B he spent on Twitter (though he did try to back out), the destruction he's wrought on Twitter/X's revenue by trolling and by censoring (journalists, etc., including by blocking, reducing their reach, and suing them), by pushing his far right social agenda (including by allowing hate and violence on Twitter/X), by suing major business partners, and now by abandoning a major market.

Does any other businessperson behave this way? And the things he advocates are absurd; they have no value to Twitter/X or to society.

h_tbob• 2 years ago

All right, I have a suggestion.

In the modern day, nobody should be able to be put in jail without a jury.

The amount of times people go to jail based on somebody just literally, waking up on the wrong side of the bed is a lot higher than you’d think.

For example studies show that the time of day your sentencing occurs is a factor on your punishment.

The problem with letting judges throw people in jail for any reason is simple:

I watched a sniper movie. The young junior sniper who had never killed asked the older experienced guy what it feels like.

He said at first he felt awful. But as he killed more, he said “what’s even worse is I don’t even feel anything at all”

When you have people who are allowed to imprison humans and they do it regularly, they will inevitably lose the same feeling that a regular citizen goes thru. You should feel something very deeply because you are about to do something very big.

So I recommend reform such that only a jury who doesn’t have experience imprisoning people have the ability to do it.

Overtonwindow• 2 years ago

Any expansion of government power is wrong.

cynicalpeace3• 2 years ago

Strong first amendment-like system solves all these questions. Not complicated

meiraleal16• 2 years ago

Tiktok case proved you are wrong.

cynicalpeace3• 2 years ago

In what way?

worewood• 2 years ago

Be aware that the brazilian tech-literate tend to have far-right opinions, and as such like to think that there is a dictatorship because they're not able to voice opinions defending violence or discrimination openly.

X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders

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