If you had ended that with "Twitter" (or "X"), rather than "Brazilian Supreme Court", the comment would have read just as credibly.
I think one could expect a bit of self-reflection to not have states shut down online spaces. And that is true for those that I do not personally like as well.
But I guess the rules play differently when you are a billionaire, so here we are.
> While certain restrictions on freedom of expression may be motivated by principles of equality and non-discrimination, “direct and public incitement to genocide” and “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” are strictly prohibited under international law, and are considered the “severest forms of hate speech”.
Also no one cares what the UN’s “international law” is. They just all support it or ignore it as convenient, because it means nothing.
But that was only to say, responding to who asked me the original question, that it doesn't matter what I think. I'm not a legislator. What matters is what's enforceable.
*I'm deliberately side-stepping religious law because there's no way to reasonably debate it logically. So this is meant to read "all secular law"
> So you think it's a crime to allow people speak things you don't like?
That was the original question which was clearly designed to trap me in an opinion pitfall. I was making sure I was referencing external sources when responding to that, but nobody seemed willing to take what I wrote in context.
Source: https://www.un.org/en/hate-speech/understanding-hate-speech/...
Even if it wasn't, censorship by an individual or a company is not a crime, are you confused by the first amendment which is a restriction on the government?
X or Musk are not the government.
> He asked our reporter James Clayton for specific examples of hateful content.
> When he couldn't pinpoint individual messages, Mr Musk said: "You don't know what you're talking about… you just lied.
That is hilarious, thanks for the article.
And I don't see examples of crimes committed by X or Musk in there?
> Several fringe characters that were banned under the previous management have been reinstated.
> They include Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, and Liz Crokin, one of the biggest propagators of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
From that same hilarious article.
Links from the BBC article you appear to have missed: "Antisemitism on Twitter Before and After Elon Musk’s Acquisition"[1] "The Musk Bump: Quantifying the rise in hate speech under Elon Musk"[2]
Additional studies: "Hate Speech Spikes on Twitter After Elon Musk Acquires the Platform" [3] "Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots" [4]
1. https://beamdisinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Antisemit...
2. https://counterhate.com/blog/the-musk-bump-quantifying-the-r...
3. https://www.montclair.edu/school-of-communication-and-media/...
Which is fair enough, I think.
To be frank, this censorship and threats of censorship is much scarier than whatever X are doing.
Laws have been broken, and this is the justice system's reaction to that. This is not censorship. Brazil (and most of the world) don't subscribe to the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of press are unbound.
The rest of the world should subscribe to the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of expression are (nearly) unbound. The USA is the only major country which gets this right.
No, it's not.
> The Brazilian people will have to decide whether they want their judiciary to have such excessive control over freedom of expression.
This is a very loaded comment, full of personal opinions. Which is fine, but let's not pretend it's factual truth.
In any case, we have. At least within the limits of our USA-inspired representative democracy. Federal law goes through 3 houses of elected representatives: the National Congress, the Senate and the Union Executive.
The Constitution goes through even more scrutiny.
> The rest of the world should
More personal opinions. Which, again, is fine. But it's not factual truth.
> The USA is the only major country which gets this right
I think this says it all. We have very little common basis for discussion. I would say the USA is the main major country that gets the _most_ things wrong.
I would like to hear you expound on this.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
When any party, either government or private, blocks free expression then that is literally censorship. It might be legally or morally justified in some circumstances, but it is still censorship.
Words mean things. You don't get to redefine words to support your argument.
Article 10 of the Human Rights Act [0] says:
> 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1
What's being done in Brazil falls within that definition and, as such, is not censorship.
Although I can't imagine why you would cite a UK law in a discussion about censorship in Brazil. It's sad how the UK has been growing ever more authoritarian and totalitarian, but that's an entirely separate discussion.
For the record, I would like to note that this sort of censorship is utterly unconstitutional here in Brazil too.
Every single time this gets discussed, I cite the literal words from the constitution:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
These are very simple words that any citizen can understand. There is no room for misinterpretation here. Yet every single time people respond with impressive mental gynmnastics to justify the judge-king's actions. I've had people argue with me by citing laws lower than the constitution, by getting into asinine arguments over the definition of free speech and censorship, by arguing about "isonomy" as if it somehow invalidated the very simple words written above, and also by calling me a moron for presuming to do the judge-king's job as if the contradictions weren't there in plain sight for all to see. The guy you're replying to once called me a sterotypical reactionary WhatsApp uncle right here on HN.
In the eve of the 2022 elections I witnessed this judge censor a documentary a priori. Without even watching it, before it was even released, he judged it was "fake news" and ordered its censorship. This is the sort of thing that used to happen in last century's military dictatorship. There is no justification for this whatsoever.
If a brazilian is harmed by someone's speech, they get to answer. They get to be made whole by legal means. They don't get to straight up censor the other guy or in any way prevent them from speaking. I see this all the time, even in politics. Some guy insults another, gets sued and is made to pay damages or whatever. That's all there is to it. The original insult is not censored. This is fine.
With these judges it's different. Some magazine ran some damning article on them back in 2019 and they granted themselves virtually limitless power to investigate, prosecute, judge and punish "fake news" of all kinds, with themselves as the victims. They determine what's fake of course. Their powers just kept expanding until they essentially usurped all power in this country. It got to the point the judge started proposing changes to laws directly to our representatives. The changes were rejected but he just rammed the "fake news" nonsense down our throats anyway via his "resolutions".
This is not a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the judiciary. Unelected judge-kings with lifetime mandates whose pens directly make the people with guns do their bidding. It's kind of ridiculous to even discuss "laws" at this point. These guys could write whatever they want on a piece of paper and it becomes law.
Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request https://restofworld.org/2023/twitter-blocked-access-punjab-a...
Elon Musk caved to government pressure to censor tweets ahead of the Turkish election. https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-censorship-elon-...
The greater point to my comment is that they have a track record of siding with the Mohdi's, Bolsonaro's, Erdoğan's et al when it comes to blocking accounts and otherwise standing on principal as "free speech absolutists" when they like the disinfomation being spread.
That's just the new face of X-Twitter.
Do you have any factual observations to add about censorship by Twitter 2.0?
The law's about power, not rationality.