No X in Brazil? No problem, Brazilians say
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
There's a lot of people missing X as evidenced in this article https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazilian-judge-suspends-x-platfo...
The WaPo article at least cites some actual stats:
> In 2022, only 3 percent of Brazilians cited the social network as their preferred location to consume political news, the area in which Twitter was once strongest, according to a survey by the Institute for Democracy and Democratization of Communication.
So you agree the WaPo article is crap? Because it uses anecdotes to prove a negative, while the article I linked disproves the WaPo by showing that some Brazilians do care. You can't prove a negative with anecdotes but you can prove a positive.
No, I'd suggest reading the next line of my comment. It "at least cites some actual stats" rather than quoting Cardi B and the admins of a Timothy Chalamet fan page.
3% of Brazilian population is still 6.45 million people who primarily use X for news. There are 23 million X users in Brazil. That's a lot of people.
It's like 6.45 million people primarily using a mix of styrofoam and lead as basis for a healthy diet
A brazilian magazine ran a damning article on one of the supreme court judges. They created a "fake news" inquisition and appointed this judge as the head of it. First thing he does? Censor the magazine as "fake news".
It's under the umbrella of that "fake news" inquistion that X got ordered to censor political accounts.
Recap: Judge requests censoring, X says "no," judge says censor or I'll throw your reps in jail, X withdraws reps, judge bans X (and started going after StarLink, SpaceX, and anything Elon's touched).
The request wasn't for X to filter posts, which is what most people consider to be censoring. The request was to block certain individuals. X refused, the judge ordered the entire platform be blocked, X appealed to the Brazilian Supreme Court who in turn upheld the judge's decision to block the entire platform in Brazil.
You have to follow a country's laws when doing business in that country. As the judge noted, and I'm definitely paraphrasing here but it gets the sentiment across, who the hell does Elon Musk think he is?
Yes. Because of the political posts they made. Also known as censorship. Which is unconstitutional in Brazil. Whose constitution goes out of its way to say that political censorship of any kind is illegal.
There is no problem with Musk deciding to ban something on his website. The problem is some judge illegally compelling him to do so.
Their job is to be a law application machine. We don't want them "redefining" things. That's the job of our elected representatives. Not a single person voted on these supreme court judges. Their jobs are to do what's written on the paper, no more and no less.
The constitution plainly states in very simple terms that anyone can understand:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
> The expression of thought is free
It's very simple. People have argued some impressive mental gymnastics to relativize those very simple lines of text but I'm just not convinced.
The accounts in question were engaged in political discourse. A judge ordering the erasure of such discourse absolutely does fall in the deliberately broad category of "any and all censorship of political and ideological nature". There is simply no way this is justified.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-twitter-elon-musk-x-censor...
The content moderation aspect just doesn't exist. It'll soon become yet another 4chan.
What I'm really surprised about is how X is still operating in the US or here in Europe.
Me too, which is crazy. I remember when news outlets in Europe were complaining about how Russia forbids websites where people could talk freely, complained about arrests over social media posts. That was maybe a decade ago. Hearing "bad fake news hate speech bad" over and over again somehow does something, I guess. You start to seriously question why something that allows people to share text and pictures is not banned.
The path to dystopia is really easy to envision and must be resisted imo. I don't want to see a day where you can be arrested, or worse, for saying you don't like the President when someone else can hear or report you, or because the govt are spying on your phone.
Yes, this does mean protecting speech that I don't like as well. Twitter has a "following" tab, as well as the ability to block individuals you don't like. Between the two, you have all the control you need to avoid content you don't like. I don't need some large, opaque company, government or cabal to decide on my behalf what I'm allowed to, or not to see.
I just don't believe you.
How about you "click around X for a few minutes" and show us all the bad stuff you found.
I also feel there are a lot of chaos operatives on the platform that are spewing garbage and these are likely foreign state actors as much as trolls. Which comes back to who you follow. I am perfectly fine as long as I can block individuals I don't like... I don't necessarily want the platform to do it for me.
The internet has something for everybody, just pick the social media you are happy with.
If you have a platform you like, use it. As long as I have a block button that I can choose to use, I'm okay. If you think Twitter/X is bad, you should splunk around Telegram sometime.
In any case, I can choose who to associate with. I don't want the government to tell me I can't, it isn't right. I don't like flag burning either, but would rather not have that outlawed either. Repressive regimes can come from many directions... best to resist them all.
My timeline notably isn't full of right-wing propaganda, whereas I know plenty of others who complain that this is the case, and who have even left because of it.
I don't understand what is causing people to have these really different experiences with the product, especially given the relatively minimal controls over timeline content that are available (basically follow/unfollow/block).
It's odd.
I offer that the purpose of exTwitter's algorithms is to choose different content for different people - and insufficient controls keep user consent from interfering with that.
As to why exTw algos choose what is chosen: The purpose of black boxes seems to be making sure users never, ever learn why.
Imagine you're in a right wing bubble. You follow right wing people. Some of them start complaining about what some fringe left wing people post on X and link to those tweets. You follow those links. Now you just interacted with fringe left wing people. Little by little the mighty algorithm will start giving you what you seem to like: fringe left wing content. Now you're complaining about how X is full of those tweets.
Reverse left and right and you got the OP.
The rest is filled out with people dunking on Elon. My guess is that if I didn't have him blocked, his stuff would show up there too.
I often wonder and worry about how they and their social media teams must perceive the world and especially the electorate if they still hang out in this environment.
edit: and as a consequence, most journalists also still have at least an account there. same for them: how do they perceive the world? especially given the propensity for the right wing/fascists for commenting directly on the local news' websites...
In the end, there are things that suck about a general freedom of speech and expression. With Twitter, you have the ability to block those that offend you, as does everyone else. I appreciate and use this function. What I don't want is for some huge opaque organization to decide on my behalf.
X = Twitter
X = variable in mathematics
Personally, I think the name should be changed back.
"POV: VPN companies after Brazil banned Twitter"
Banned what now, Elon?
There's another article on the front page at the moment about grepability as an important metric for codebases.
Similarly, I think Googleability is an important metric for company, service, and product names: X ain't it (although fortunately I have little cause to Google anything related to X/Twitter on a regular basis).
Xitter was already a struggling, much duller shadow of its former self. This is another huge blow, perhaps the last.
That article should be considered more of an opinion than actual news.
From what I've seen on new-twitter, no speech liberals used to say is now banned. It's just been opened up to the right, which I guess is the problem?
Tweeting the mere word "cisgender" will get your post's visibility limited for "hateful conduct".
You really don't see any issue with giving access to hate speech through a mass media platform? What is your suggestion for a solution when Nazis and other hate groups can boost their messaging on a massive scale?
If you say "better education" or "let the marketplace of ideas work" I have a bridge to sell you.
On a slight separate thought, I've always wondered how much of a minority I am in that thinking these days. 10%? 5? 1? It's literally that "Yes, you are all wrong" meme come to life.
I think the Cambridge dictionary definition is a good starting point, even if it doesn't have a consistent meaning across every facet of political/social discussion:
> public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
If your speech expresses hate or encourages violence it shouldn't have a platform, no matter if you are a progressive hating on conservatives or any other group of people.
Don't you agree that's at least a good baseline to start curtailing this on mass media platforms? I'd prefer a world where people calling for the death of Jews, black people, conservatives, white people, whatever group it is to not have a way to reach big cohorts of the population.
> So no I don't see any issue, I'd prefer everyone have equal access to free speech, world wide.
And that's where we diverge, dogmatic approaches like this don't leave any room for discussion or arguments, you have a belief which is not too dissimilar to a religious one... In reality allowing absolute free speech including people calling and encouraging the death of others on a massive scale is detrimental to civilisation.
Quick edit: you can have free speech, it doesn't mean it's free from consequences. One of those consequences is that hateful speech might not be allowed in mass media platforms, you can still spread your hate speech person-to-person, that's not a crime in many places.
We had that for decades and civilization was just fine. Hell, don't we supposedly have that today with Twitter, yet civilization is just fine. What happened after 2016 and 2020 was infinitely worse, with huge segments of the AMERICAN population unable to express their views.
Who are you to dictate what society/civilization is allowed to think/view?
The one thing I'll agree with you on is the removal of financial incentives from these websites. I do want all viewpoints on these websites, but I of course understand the removal of financial payments for posts that "go viral" praising Stalin or Hitler or something.
When exactly did we have ways to spread a message across the globe instantly, effortlessly, while also having the capacity to generate fake engagement/support at massive scale for hate-filled points of view to drive naïve audiences into them through history?
> What happened after 2016 and 2020 was infinitely worse, with huge segments of the AMERICAN population unable to express their views.
They can express their views, just not on some types of media which have a massive reach.
Broadcast radio and TV have regulations on what can be said on air due to its reach, why does broadcast over the internet should be any different? If you post on Twitter you are broadcasting.
You can still tell your friends at the dinner table that you hate Jews, you won't be arrested for that, the worst outcome is being socially shunned for having an abhorrent opinion. You should not be able to distribute that messaging across the larger population.
I ask this with honest curiosity: how do you expect society to deal with this issue? When 14 years old boys start getting bombarded by abhorrent speech such as encouraging the hate and killing of other groups, when some uneducated person falls into a conspiracy theory? How do you deal with the stochastic processes this start without curtailing access to the platform that allows this to be distributed?
You are conflating free speech with free access to broadcasting platforms, those are definitely not the same.
Moral relevancy is kind of a cop out argument. We don't need literally everyone in the world to agree on something before we start taking action. Advocate for your own opinion, don't hide behind theoretical people across time and space.
Finally, I'm going to flip your argument a bit. You're the one who stated that there's no logical way to identify hate speech, so why don't you provide some examples? What are some things that you've seen identified as hate speech, where you disagree with that assessment?
How about advocating for the diminishing of people's civil liberties based on factors such as age, sex, sexual orientation, or religious views - that's difficult for you to spot as hate speech? Really?
We've passed the days of "cultural norms" and have entered the era of universal human rights. This is a recent transition, but it isn't hard to spot hate speech or hate crimes.
The hate speech censorship is just how bullies managed to use political correctness to be able to bully again.
Seems like they're having issues:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/starlink_performs_a_1...
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-starlink-x-block-complianc...
> Elon Musk’s satellite-based internet service provider Starlink backtracked Tuesday and said it will comply with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice’s order to block the billionaire’s social media platform, X.
> Had Starlink continued to disobey de Moraes by providing access, telecommunications regulator Anatel could eventually have seized equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations that ensure the quality of its internet service, Arthur Coimbra, an Anatel board member, said on a video call from his office in Brasilia.
Why? Elon Musk considers deadnaming to be acceptable, hence Twitter - as the original given name - is here to stay.