Starlink U-turns, will block X in Brazil after all
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Also, Twitter has legal representation in Turkey and people are routinely detained, imprisoned or made pay fines for their tweets in Turkey. The country also ranked very poorly on any freedom or democracy index, political figures are routinely held in prison. Erdogan government often dismisses orders from the Turkish constitution court, if you think that Musk is into constitution - it doesn’t add up.
AFAIK Twitter is also blocked in China and Russia.
What is the fuss around Brazil? Why this is not just another day with business as usual?
Flávio Dino (Appointed by Lula) Cármen Lúcia (Appointed by Lula) Cristiano Zanin (Appointed by Lula) Luiz Fux (Appointed by Lula)
These are the only ones that voted.
What I did do was quote EuroNews who reported (as was linked on HN yesterday) that:
Brazil's Supreme Court voted unanimously on Monday to uphold the decision by one of its justices to ban Elon Musk’s social media platform, X. [1]
The panel that voted in a virtual session was comprised of five of the full bench's 11 justices, including de Moraes, who last Friday ordered the platform blocked for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required by law [2]
[1] https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/09/02/brazilian-court-to-...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/2/ban-on-elon-musks-x-...
Add in a bit of personality dramas, corruption and typical billionaire and politician bullshit and you have the full picture.
Elon just thinks he can make Brazil into an example, while he knows he would get blocked in Turkey in 2 seconds.
See here: https://www.thefp.com/p/matt-taibbi-on-the-global-censorship...
The law is the law. The Supreme Court has voted unanimously. If he doesn't want to offer service there due to his morals, that's up to him.
Let's be honest, the Steve Bannon connection to Brazil is probably a factor here.
When the supreme court is the victim, the prosecutor, the law maker, and the law aprover all at once, the only thing you need to do to break the law is not do as they say.
For him the ends justify the means. Such people are more political and emotional than truthful and rational. When the current president, Lula, was (rightfully) arrested for corruption they put a show about right to due process. But clearly they don't care about right to due process and it's just another tool in a political toolbox.
Subsequent examination of the case pointed out the judge conspired with the accusation forging evidence causing many sentences, including Lula's, to be nullified. Lula's was nullified because the judge in question didn't even have jurisdiction over the case, so the forgery of evidence wasn't even litigated. The judge was subsequently named to head the Ministry of Justice for Bolsonaro, who won the election since Lula was unable to run.
> The judge was subsequently named to head the Ministry of Justice for Bolsonaro, who won the election since Lula was unable to run.
And so? Lula recently appointed his lawyer and minister of justice to the supreme court. Of 11 supreme court judges 7 were appointed by Lula and his party. Another one is a name close to his vice-president (Moraes). And even one of the two Bolsonaro appointees is a man that made career under Roussef.
Under duress. Prosecutors were threatening to arrest their families if they didn’t comply.
I guarantee Turkey is a minuscule revenue source for Twitter and that he doesn't care. His position is that he obeys lawful orders rather than the extralegal and often obviously illegal means centrist administrations have been using to surveil and censor. Starlink may have changed direction simply because the Supreme Court confirmed the dictator's twitter ban.
If you're confused by the self-righteous of upper-middle class Brazilians about this, they had the same reaction to disappearances and torture during the dictatorship. You wouldn't dare take over a country without the support of the upper-middle class who will have to administer it. You can convince them of anything that doesn't affect their comfort at all. They supported Bolsonaro's coup, and now they'll support the destruction of freedom of speech in their country to keep Bolsonaro from speaking. They're actually beaming with pride about how they're not free to speak, similar to neocons in the US.
I thought Lula was mostly a good guy, but he seems more a passenger than a president at this point. The administration must be very confident of being able to prevent future elections, because they won my a tiny margin (just as Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US), but they think they have the mandate to come down hard. Brasil nunca mais?
[*] the evil of Elon Musk being a bit libertarian means that all Brazilians should be censored.
Why did they do a 180?
Bolsonaro has his supporters and a share of then did ask for a military coup, but those are minority..
Majority of the country was against a coup.. But popular support changed nothing..
The military coup did not worked because the US send messages indicating they would not support it, so the air force and army commanders backed out of it..
You may be technically correct but the comment above has a point. It’s not a strong mandate, and it’s more fair to emphasize that the Tories collapsed than that Labour won.
Dubious. He was born in 55. Military dictatorship was from 64 and 79. At 64 he was 9 years old.
What do you mean by that?
The constitution on article 5 and 220 is clear on freedom of expression being a guaranteed right. e.g "manifestations of thought, creation, expression, and information may not be subject to any restrictions"
> responding specifically to the notion that Brazil was a thriving democracy before Lula took office, which is clearly absurd
Brazil has a long history of authoritarian and populist governments yet it's a democracy since 1988 despite the erosion. And certainly more thriving than Cuba or Venezuela. This notion isn't absurd at all. If you think that a party that is part of an ideological block of authoritarians like Castro, Chavez, Maduro, Xi, Putin et cetera and that has stayed in power for 16 of the last 22 years has done nothing to consolidate and perpetuate power you are beyond naivety.
Don't talk as if this guy actually tried something. He ran away to the USA like a coward, like the rat he is. Literally abandoned everyone who ever supported him.
> they literally asked for a "military intervention"
You bet they did.
What are you supposed to do when the supreme court usurps all power and installs a dictatorship of the judiciary in your country?
There's actually a device in brazilian law that lists the military as a superior "moderating power" that's supposed to intervene and bring order to things if the balance between the other three powers gets too fucked up.
Why, that's the exact situation we found ourselves in back in 2022. Hell it's the situation we still find ourselves in. Unelected, unaccountable judge-kings not only censoring political speech but getting away with it.
So they tried asking the military to bring order to this mess. Not only did the military refuse, when the military actually showed up, it was to arrest them.
That's what happened on January 8th. That's the story of the "heroic" brazilian military, and the complete fools who actually believed in them.
So let's drop this silly "coup" narrative. There was no "coup". There was not even an attempt at a "coup". There was a protest where they asked the military to sort this mess out. The result of that protest was the protesters ended up in a gulag.
Twitter is following the law in all cases.
In Brazil's case, the orders are illegal and in some cases contradict the law of other countries. This was all explained pretty well by X Global Affairs: https://x.com/GlobalAffairs
But... Yeah... They were a bit more subtle.
Moral relativism at its finest, when a person selling cigarettes at a gas station is equal to Pol Pot.
I'm curious where would you rather live:
1. A place where they sell cigarettes and deceive you how dangerous they are, but you don't have to buy them if you don't want to.
2. A place where you and you family can be disappeared in the middle of the night. Mind you you can still get cigarettes here as well, but with a lot less variety.
And blaming companies that produce weapons for the deaths caused by them is silly.
Even if we include all tobacco and opiate related deaths, governments are winning in the death toll game by a lot. And if we factor in pollution related deaths we will also need to factor in lives saved from products produced by businesses as well.
So I don't think you are winning this argument.
Philip Morris? Purdue Pharma? American auto industry and seatbelts?
Governments however, will be corrupt even when corruption loses them money and is contrary to their own self-interest.
All of Latin America is like this, and if X wants to do business there, this is the cost of business.
Twitter was happy to do this in Turkey and other countries. But Brazil has Steve Bannon and Bob Mercer with their hands there, so that should be a factor.
Since right-wingers are pretty much the core audience of Twitter nowadays, they complained, it reached Musk, he decided to take a bold stance, he lost the entire market. Simple as that.
I know 100% crap things happened before social media, but the scale of the nonsense is for sure unprecedented.
Now, this does suggest either that they completely ignored their Brazilian legal team, didn't have one, or said team was incompetent. So this is not an excuse for their behavior so much as an explanation.
An average American in the US expects this from Turkey and expects different from Brazil. That's apparently a rather ignorant perspective, but such is life.
Huh? If the team is in Brazil, why would they oppose something that "would fly" in Brazil but not in the US? Doesn't matter if the entity itself (Twitter in this case) is in the US, if you're doing business in another country, even with a office there, you follow that country's laws and regulations.
This happens almost by rule when US companies operate outside of the US, this is not some exception to this rule, so hardly surprising that it also happened here.
I'm not sure sure it's "incompetence" as much as just a cultural difference.
The orders in Brazil were issued in secret. X couldn't even show that the accounts were withheld by legal demand. Turkey government is considered authoritarian by most where in Brazil the waters are still shallow.
Read @AlexandreFiles.
If that’s the argument being made, then fine. Let’s just accept that Brazil shouldn’t be treated like a democracy anymore and that Musk should be coherent and accept Brazil’s autocratic whims the same way he accepts Russia’s, China’s and Turkey’s ones.
When it's a company they hate, it seems people are more willing to look the other way.
Generally, I believe that companies should never act against the laws of a country. If China orders a company to censor something, I'm mad at the government, not the company.
Especially if latest tech bro's new toy is breaking some country's law.
Well, no. If you want to protect your users, don't keep servers/data/legal entities in countries where the government can order you to wiretap your own services and also serve you with a gag order.
So no, the US isn't a great place for people who value free expression.
Sure, but there are plenty of other countries that has "one of the strongest regimes for protecting expression in the world" also, but also doesn't have gag orders, so I'm fairly sure what country I wouldn't host a service like that in.
Name 3
You yourself said "one of the strongest regimes", so since you didn't say "#1", I'm sure there are other countries in that list of yours. Want to share three of those other ones you were thinking about?
Lol, to also be 100% PRISM compliant.
1. Companies are not your friends. This goes for any company;
2. Companies will always choose profit over everything else, including moral stances. Companies may make moral stances. These are temporary blips.
The second is really important because it debunks a lot of propaganda.
A common one is "we can't tax companies (or billionaires) because they'll leave". No they won't. There's really no evidence of this. Even if they do, you, as a government, can say "ok, you've lost access to our market". The US wields access to the US financial system quite effectively as a weapon both domestically and with foreign policy. Yet we continue to give mostly ineffective corporate subsidies.
Drug prices is another one. It often comes up that US customers pay 10-100x+ for the same drug you can get in Europe or Canada. Lots of excuses are given for this but the reality is that prices are so high because the government has been bought and importing drugs has been made illegal. Even things like Medicare negotiating prices with drug companies is (mostly) illegal.
But consider in terms of (2): would companies sell a drug in Canada for $50 when it costs $500 in the US if they were selling it at a loss? No, they wouldn't.
So Starlink is still for sale in Brazil because it's profitable and because following the law in Brazil (whether you agree with the law or not) is more profitable than opting out.
You can only play “fuck you I don’t have a legal entity in your country you can’t touch me” game…
…if you dont.
Now he’s gone and set a precedent for “how to bully musk into compliance”:
1) find something he owns that is actually making money.
2) blockade it.
Feels like that was a stupid game to play, with a predictable outcome, for no really good reason.
Flawed as it is, Brazil is a democracy. Judges stepping out of their lanes is something up to the representatives to deal with, not a foreign company.
He's certainly winning some stupid prizes now.