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Comment by BadHumans | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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

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.

Perhaps but that's just speculation and not supported by evidence.

That’s true, but there are some publicly available facts like Brazil’s content moderation team no longer exists.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...

https://restofworld.org/2022/global-twitter-employees-layoff...

And the policy team:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/twitter-has-a-new-wa...

We could all pretend that you’d be able to deal with operating in hundreds of countries with a bare bones team, or we could speculate that it’s hard & opens you up to many legal problems.

I know that they're closing down their Brazil operations, that's literally the title of the article. The speculation I was referring to was your claim that they're really closing down because of financial considerations rather than their stated reason (e.g. unwillingness to comply with the judge's orders).

The links I shared are from 2022/2023, long predating the current dispute. Financial considerations are most definitely at play.

That's speculation. You see how that's speculation, right?

Tagline for future HN comment annotation bot.

In TFA it says X told the court that they had failed to follow its orders previously because of operational deficiencies. GP is not really going out on a limb here.

They could implement those teams again if they wanted to. It appears they don't want to do that.

It appears the solution is to fire people until the problem goes away. Musk’s favorite leadership strategy.

Weakness masquerading as strength. Anybody can fire, cancel, or cut to make a problem go away. It takes no strength or intelligence.

Do you work at X? I'm sure you wouldn't be speaking in such confident terms if you didn't have some inside knowledge. Are you meeting with Elon to discuss these things?

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.

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.

"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)

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.

> 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

Yes, can’t say Twitter has been principled or consistent about it.

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

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.

It's not about islamism, it's about power. Musk has met Erdogan in person multiple times, and took his son to meet him when he came to the States. How many other heads of state did Musk take his son to meet?

Musk's whole schtick is quid pro quo and thin-skinism. He complains about Chinese EVs, then dashes on a jet to fly to China to meet Xi and scores a deal for Tesla -- no more whining about China. He publicly entertains Jewish conspiracy theories, claims he's pro peace in general, then gets on a jet to meet Netanyahu and the next thing you know he's clapping Netanyahu's speech in Congress.

His whole transition to his current persona can be traced to when is son announced their own transition and disowned him. His bumbling political outbursts are all self-serving garbage all the way down.

All speculation.

I guess a day without bashing Musk is a day not lived hmm?

Which part is speculation? I wasn't bashing his tech accomplishments fyi.

Turkey

2017: Elon Musk Meets Erdogan in Turkey, Turksat and SpaceX cooperation discussed.

https://apnews.com/article/cba761ce3c1c4e5a9e5485f03a632cda

Sep. 2023: Elon Musk takes son to meet Erdogan, who wants Tesla plant built in Turkey

https://fortune.com/2023/09/18/musk-son-meet-turkish-preside...

China

Jan. 2024: Elon Musk says Chinese EV firms will demolish rivals without trade barriers

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

April 2024: Elon Musk flies to China, agrees to Tesla/Baidu cooperation

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-01/tesla-sea...

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/tesla_map_backtrack_b...

May 2024: In about-face, Elon Musk opposes Chinese tariffs

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/elon-m...

Israel

Nov 2023: Elon Musk visits Israel after antisemitism row, gets Starlink deal

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67544945

There does not seem to be official Tesla or SpaceX presence in Brazil, coincidentally. The only Tesla presence in South America seems to be in "lithium-rich" Chile.

Musk has built amazing companies and can legitimately take credit for pushing the automotive industry towards EVs. But judging by his actions, in my book he's also a complete asshole. These two facts can co-exist.

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

The former, absolutely. Your refusal to believe this seems to come from the idea that Musk has clear principles that he adheres to. He does not. His only concerns are money and power.

> His only concerns are money and power.

So why not stay in Brazil and get more money?

The obvious explanation being that the costs to comply are too great, the fines would be even worse. Therefore it's not worth it.

That and the robots on twitter are Legion and they are paying well with all those verified accounts, no way he is going to endanger those. So he would lose his bot money AND be on the line for more staff to update algorithms to handle the vitriol on twitter; thus it’s a no-brainer to leave Brazil until the government lightens up or a new regime comes into play

Given a lack of actual data, we can explain away anything.

> Seems pretty obvious that ideological sympathies are not the deciding factor here

It's not about left and right. It's about who's Putin-aligned and who isn't.

Musk is not personally signing off on every take-down request. It's his "pet projects" that he amplifies to his acolytes on Twitter you need to look at.

Musk recently personally donated cybertruck to effin' Kadyrov which was very thankful for it and promptly installed machine gun on it. A confirmed mass murderer and generally firmly in pool of the lowest human scum this planet has ever hosted. Lets be realistic for a while and not assign some stable high morals to mr musk.

Apart from his morality being flexible, his admiration for various murderous oppressors is famous at this point and his very obvious continuous mental issues only allow him to act in several modes. At the end, brilliant broken little boy with severe daddy issues and uber massive ego, stuff which he can never hope to fully tackle and it doesn't seem he is even trying to.

So, trying to map his responses to simple if x then y won't work like with normal balanced folks, he is too unstable and emotional for that.

> “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” Musk wrote on X

Would such donation even be legal currently in the US? And AFAIK neither Tesla nor Musk ever donated a car before, for any reason or to anyone else in those 20+ years.

On the other hand, he is the largest private donator to Ukraine, via SpaceX and Starlink.

If you believe that you'll believe anything. Like Beyonce coming to the DNC

I think he simply doesn’t care as that area of the world is far from his top 10 list of concerns, but he does always seem to be interested in Europe and the Americas

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.

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.

"Watch what they do, not what they say" is a useful principle, here. There's no reason to take his attempt to self-label as a centrist at face value, but there's mountains of evidence that he seeks to amplify the right.

The previous regime of twitter censored accounts that are to the right, so when that's your idea of a normal, any change that allows all sides to share a platform could be interpreted to "amplify the right".

It isn't clear to me that accounts to the right were more or less likely to break platform rules. Has there been any analysis?

In 2019 Quillette claimed to have hard data that "Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals".[1]

Their data includes upstanding examples of Conservatism such as The American Nazi Party. I kid you not. There's a bunch of accounts in their set where you can have a reasonable discussion about where the limits should be, but tons of them are literal actual self-described Nazis. There's an overview at e.g. [2].

So yes, colour me sceptical on these types of claims.

[1]: https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-tw...

[2]: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette#Banning_Neo-Nazis_is...

This assertion is commonly made but never backed up with data, because it’s fiction. Elon Musk even gave full access to various people to try to find something to back that up and they found no evidence of anything like the alleged censorship campaign. Even Matt Taibi was reduced to tricks like pointing to the Biden campaign reporting tweets and hoping his readers were credulous enough not to see that those tweets were non-consensual nudity.

he's just a reactionary; he doesn't have any coherent principles beyond self interest and reacting to things

[flagged]

"North Korea says it's a democracy. So it's always amusing to see the far left brand it as a dictatorship because it opposes their radical ideology."

Sure, and the nazis were socialist

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

Elon Musk, who's companies take plenty of government spending and incentives? Sounds like a socialist to me.

Might indeed not be in his self-interest, but yes. He talked about it in his discussion with Trump on X. Here's an article about it: https://www.nbc24.com/news/nation-world/elon-musk-pitches-co...

"take plenty of government spending" is a funny way to say has plenty of contracts with the government to provide services...

And yeah, when incentives are available, why wouldnt he take them? It's the same way people who advocate for higher tax don't choose to donate more money to the government.

Tesla has received over $2B in subsidies since 09, accepted $750M from New York for a SolarCity plant in Buffalo, SolarCity also received $500M in federal grants.

I could keep going but you get the idea. To be clear, I have no problem with him or any company accepting the money but this isn't "contracts with the government to provide services."

Government has had a 10x ROI with musk, that’s the purpose of govt investment.

As it does under most socialist ideas

Spending is not socialism.

Spending also ballooned under Trump and Trump is most definitely not a socialist (aside from socializing losses) (spending increased *before* the pandemic).

It was a bit of an overstatement but second part of the comment stands.

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

I wish you were right, but you're not: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-praises-turkish-presiden..., https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/13/politics/donald-trump-rec..., etc

Unless you’re gonna claim Donald Trump to be some kind of centrist, I can think of at least one.

Left and right are not the real dimensions here. It's pro-Putin and against Putin. Russia has long made a mockery of ideologies, and indirectly of those who would be easily manipulated to do its bidding under one pretext or another.

Yeah they do. He fits the idea of the authoritarian which they want to further. They may not agree with what he is doing, but they like the way he’s doing it.

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.

Really, it’s that Musk likes authoritarians and nationalists and Modi’s government meets that test quite well. After all, Musk has no problem with high government spending if it’s spent on him.

Correct me if I am wrong, but there has been no investment/subsidy/sop given to musk by this government?

Modi and the BJP are avowed, proud ethnic nationalists, seeking to preserve and enforce their version of traditional religion.

Last I checked, being nationalist is not a bad thing?

If your government does not stand up for your country, who else will?

Two things:

First, I said they were 'ethnic nationalists', which is not about a country but about an 'enthnicity', in this case Hindus. Inside their own country, they 'stand up for' Hindus ...

Second, that phrase, 'stand up for', misrepresents nationalism in the most serious way. Here's the Oxford English Dictionary's defintion of nationalism:

Advocacy of or support for the interests of one's own nation, esp. to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations. Also: advocacy of or support for national independence or self-determination.

Whereas patriotism usually refers to a general sentiment, nationalism now usually refers to a specific ideology, esp. one expressed through political activism. In earlier use, however, the two appear to have been more or less interchangeable.

Nationalism includes discrmination against others, in Modi's case against Muslims and other non-Hindus. 'We're superior' inevitably leads to rationalizing harming others; it's been responsible for much of the worst of humanity - millions dead, over and over, including in India's post-colonial history. Allied leaders in WWII, including Churchill, though it was a leading cause of that war. We can already see violence and opression against Muslims in India - we can't wait to see if this time will be different.

That's why universal human rights is so essential. It says we stand not for ourselves, not for our superiority, but for our equality. It says people in India of every religion, and people elsewhere, have the same rights and are fundamentally equal in their value.

He didn't agree with this one.

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