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Comment by cowsup | Hacker News Reader

The core facts are: Brazil demanded information regarding Brazilian users, and believed it was in their right to do so. X believed that the requests did not comply with Brazilian laws, and refused. Neither side yielded, so X closed up shop in Brazil, and, as a result, Brazil is blocking access to X.

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There is actually more to this here, it was not just information about Brazilian users, the request was actually to shadowban (block without notifying the users) specific accounts. Some of those accounts happen to be political opposition (actual politicians too) to this judge and his party in general. I believe twitter or musk himself leaked all court documents when this request came in.

Twitter/X closed shop because, after stating that they would not comply with these requests, the judge threatened to jail every Twitter/X employee in brazil in retaliation. So to avoid putting these employees/people in danger they chose to immediately close all offices.

Something similar happened in Argentina with twitter as well I believe, and in that case they relocated most of the employees and their families via political asylum in Brazil at the time, if i'm not mistaken.

Just a year ago Musk was happily complying with censorship orders in Turkey [1] and [2]

In Brasil's case he decided to abruptly pull out if the country.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-defends-ena...

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

The difference is: Brazil is being run by Lula Silva, who opposes Bolsonaro, while Turkey is run by Erdogan, and India is run by Modi.

If you want to connect the thread, look into what kind of leaders Bolsonaro, Modi, and Erdogan are.

You could also spin it the other way, the only countries that have banned twitter so far are very authoritarian or dictatorships. Why does "Brazil being run by Silva" want to be part of the club?

That's some conspiracy theory.

Musk is pretty right wing, it's not unreasonable to conclude he'd support other right wing governments and oppose left wing ones.

What is this judge's party?

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