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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as an American who probably has a pretty typical perspective of Brazil—my impression was that Brazil was the country in South America with values closest to those in the US. If Twitter's leadership had the same misapprehension then it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for them to push back against an order that clearly wouldn't fly in the US.

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.

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Not long ago an average Brazilian expected this from Turkey and expected different from Brazil but the times they are changing. And Brazil is a canary for implementing this modus operations on US. Thankfully US constitution and institutions are much more robust but they will try and will have popular support.

> If Twitter's leadership had the same misapprehension then it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable for them to push back against an order that clearly wouldn't fly in the US

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.

That's why I specified that this clearly shows incompetence somewhere—either the US entity made the call without listening to anyone in Brazil or the people in Brazil didn't adequately clarify the situation. Either way, it sure looks like the US leadership (probably mostly Musk) misjudged the situation by projecting US law and values onto the Brazilian system, which is a mistake they would never make with Turkey.

> misjudged the situation by projecting US law and values

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.

Oh you'd be surprised how about any US company tries to push their world (and legal) view on the local subsidiaries, regardless of the local legal system. Managers are appointed on the basis of "just make it happen" and of course they cannot make it happen so they get replaced - with the next one, who again does their best to ignore what the local legal or employee or middle management tries to tell them.

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