Brazil Court votes unanimously to uphold X ban. Users switch to Threads, Bluesky

And of course, complying with the law and courts order

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.

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”)

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.

He has, in fact, zero rights to communicate in Brazil.

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.

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 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.

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.

Luck for you it was not the national government who banned someone on a social media platform, it was a Court of Justice.

They can send someone to jail, expel someone who is illegally in our country and "banning people" on twitter is what gets you? Weird hill to die on.

In Brazil, Judges = Gods.

I have seen the barbarities that some people say in Brazil . It’s an incredibly racist and classist country sometimes.

Also you can get arrested for breaking the law?

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?

This was the justice system that ruled that some content should be blocked, and this decision can be appealed bu the person that was blocked..

The problem here is that twitter, that was not a party in the case, decided they wanted to appeal, something they cannot do in Brazil legal system..