X and Starlink face $1M in daily fines for alleged ban evasion in Brazil | Hacker News Reader

X and Starlink face $1M in daily fines for alleged ban evasion in Brazil

cnbc.com

> Brazil's national telecommunication agency, Anatel, has been ordered by de Moraes to prevent access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare as well as Fastly and EdgeUno servers, and others that the court said had been "created to circumvent" a suspension of X in Brazil.

Blocking Cloudflare and Fastly seems like a reactionary measure that is not exactly well conceived.

None of this is “well conceived”. De Moraes is way too high on his own supply.

Nation states will always win against a corporation. They are authorized to use force, both physical and economical. They also control access to their market.

I don't think it's always true. It seems like it would have to depend on how the nation state responds to its citizens when the nation state does things like break large portions of the web. And what actual economic leverage the state has (or could bring to bear) over the company.

Losing the citizenry might be more politically damaging faster than economically damaging to X/Starlink.

> Losing the citizenry might be more politically damaging faster than economically damaging to X/Starlink.

Provide evidence Brazil will lose the citizenry over this. It appears that Brazil has been surgical in directing access restrictions to X; millions of X social followers have moved to Bluesky [1], and while Starlink customers might be impacted (~250k terminals) who cannot access X, they are not a majority in any sense (based on ground station count; 250k vs a Brazil population of 215.3 million people).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's also easy to get caught in the trap to believe that other people think how one's own self thinks [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550053

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect

> Provide evidence Brazil will lose the citizenry over this.

Just this month, people literally got out of their homes, went out and onto the street, assembled and protested this judge, demanding his impeachment. This happened in seven of our capitals.

https://www.ft.com/content/142a6d95-b06e-47e3-a605-a203e2bc4...

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-moraes-bolsonaro-sa...

https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2024/09/07/mani...

While this was going down, the judge was apparently attending a barbecue with the ruling party. They made fun of the protesters. "Your homages have already begun", they are reported to have said to him.

These were the same Bolsonaro supporters who lost in the most recent election, yeah? A few thousand people in the streets is not material support in a country of 200M people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Brazilian_general_electio...

From your AP News citation:

> Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X’s nationwide ban on Aug. 30 after months of feuding with Musk over the limits of free speech. The powerful judge has spearheaded efforts to ban far-right users from spreading misinformation on social media, and he ramped up his clampdown after die-hard Bolsonaro supporters ransacked Congress and the presidential palace on Jan. 8, 2023, in an attempt to overturn Bolsonaro’s defeat in the presidential election.

I didn't claim that Brazil would lose the citizenry or anything about this specific situation. I disagree, generally, that nation states can always win against corporations. But maybe it's more a question of time frame.

DuPont adversely affecting the environment and ultimately people during the manufacture of Teflon is a ready example. It's a loss due to decades of severe impact. Regulatory capture and banking also comes to mind as a loss also given the number of people pushed to economic ruin because of it.

I'm curious where you think I made an extraordinary claim? I'm also curious what comes across as so biased?

Cloudflare already isolated X on their network so that Brazil can block just X again.

It would be interesting to see how fast Brazilian network operators are changing things to implement the blocking and responding to things like that.

Most ISPs already blocked X again in this morning.

They are not blocking Cloudflare or Fastly.

They are blocking X IPs being used on Cloudflare and Fastly.

These CDNs agreed with Anatel, to reserve IPs exclusively to X, so IPs can block X without collateral damage, that's all.

That said, Cloudflare is also blocking X. Cloudflare Warp doesn't open X.com anymore, neither iCloud Relay's (which seems to use Cloudflare).

> These CDNs agreed with Anatel, to reserve IPs exclusively to X, so IPs can block X without collateral damage, that's all.

Thanks, the article didn't say anything like that. It, of course, makes sense to avoid the obvious collateral damage. It didn't seem like it started out that way based on this article though:

> X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare and appeared to be using dynamic internet protocol addresses that constantly change...

This seems like a worthwhile fight. I'm surprised to see someone taking it up, though, most of the time company's just seem to comply with government mandated censorship.

"Censoring" literal misinformation is a bad thing now?

It is. What you think is truth today can easily be considered misinformation tomorrow.

I know in the post-truth era everyone can pretend their bubble is fact, but come on. Some things actually are misinformation.

Sure, somethings are actually misinformation. Nobody is denying that. The problem is giving the government the ability to determine what is and isn't misinformation.

If [politican you don't like] had the power to consider his misinformation to be truthful and truthful information to be misinformation would you still be in support of this? He could supress all the negative information about him calling it misinformation and prevent his misinformation from being banned.

So what happens when misinformation is posted and the corporation won't act to remove it?

In twitter's case, what happens when the corporation actively works to avoid accountability for it?

Nothing negative should happen to the company. In an ideal world the company should be lauded by everybody who values free speech for not bowing down to government censorship. The politicans supporting censorship should be voted out and the government should pay back any money it took in fines with interest. Those in the company who stood up for free speech should be given a medal by the new government.

Of course, we live in a society which loves censorship and hates free speech. Given the hatred of free speech we are seeing in this thread, I am guessing the ideal situation won't happen anytime soon.

That's a very American view of "free speech"

It is also the view of the Brazilians? This is from their constitution:

> Any and all censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.

They seem to be quite explicit and make no exemption for misinformation.

The misinformation and regulation dodging is happening right now, and the functioning Brazilian government is taking steps to stop it. So we should just be happy with the small win as a citizens of the world.

> If [politican you don't like] had the power to consider his misinformation to be truthful and truthful information to be misinformation would you still be in support of this?

If an evil person is trying to rewrite reality from their position of power, you'd hope the checks and balances in the government prevent them from doing so. While the Brazilian government can stop misinformation from spreading, they can also allow real information to continue to spread.

But if we go down this reductive doomsday scenario all the way to the bottom, where there are evil people stacked from top to bottom, your nation failed a long time ago. And maybe part of the blame sits on the people preaching do-nothingness and requiring a perfect system of laws and governance before taking action.

The constitution of Brazil explicitly protects political speech and makes no mention of exempting misinformation.

> Any and all censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.

We should not be happy seeing a judge going after free speech that is explicitly protected by the constitution. This is a loss for the citizens of Brazil, not a win.

Putting "literal" in front of a word does not clarify the definition of that word.

https://time.com/7016537/brazil-blocks-elon-musk-x-twitter-c...

Brazil's judge lays it out quite reasonably?

I don't see any explanation in that article about what illegal "literal misinformation" Musk is allowing on X, so no it's not very reasonable.

Apologies, it was a link from another article (hooray posting while on mobile!)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3rnl5qv3o

>The row began in April, with the judge ordering the suspension of dozens of X accounts for allegedly spreading disinformation.

>Justice Moraes had ordered that X accounts accused of spreading disinformation - many supporters of the former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro - must be blocked while they are under investigation.

Still not seeing any explanation of what the supposed "literal misinformation" was in that article either.

"Justice Moraes had ordered that X accounts accused of spreading disinformation"

Not sure how I can make it any clearer for you than that. Surely if they're innocent then the accounts can simply be reinstated?

Oh, Judge Moraes said it's misinformation, so clearly it must actually be misinformation! Thank you so much for clearing that up!

Why do we have silly laws and courts? Obviously the world is black and white and puddle deep :)

Yes, because who gets to decide what is or is not misinformation?

I feel for your pain, and I'm interested in paths that overcome the collapse of trust we're going through. I think your question matters a lot, to reach solutions all of us need (and not quit until we find a positive one)

Essentially, the larger the scope/influence is of the body of people deciding what speech to censor, the more dangerous it is to give them that power. This is irrespective of the actual information being censored.

Misinformation... According to whom?

You?

These partisan judge-kings?

Politicians who lie pathologically?

So who gets the honor of being the ministry of truth?

You do realize that the "censorship" being mentioned is of literal terrorists?

Terrorism: the use of violence to achieve political aims (if you are not yourself a recognized nation).

This is exactly what these people did in their coup attempt. I for one would rather not have another coup organized on Twitter, thank you very much.

(and before anyone brings it up - even if someone works for the PR or leadership arms of a terrorist organization, rather than actually performing the violence personally, that does not mean they stop being a terrorist)

Remember kids, free speech means that everyone is contractually obligated to algorithmically broadcast everything you say, even if it is literal terrorism, to as many people as possible. Failure to do this is literally 1984.

(/s)

So you think only government censorship is a speech violation?

Well cool! You'll happen to be on the right side in this case, because in this case the censor is a government.

Well, perhaps I layered in too much sarcasm, but the idea is that it's not a free speech violation for the government to say someone can't post on social media. That person is still free to say it, just not to have it broadcast to everyone.

> you do realize that the "censorship" being mentioned is of literal terrorists?

I don't follow this very closely, but I wonder: if the Brazilian state or justice system consider them terrorists, what is getting in the way of bringing them to justice?

Their version of January 6 took place after ours, so they're still going through early stages of the process. At least 86 have been convicted and sent to prison so far, likely low-level stooges since the higher-ups take longer.

There was no "coup attempt". There was a protest. Like many before it. Brazilians occupying Brasília buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. There's just no way you can convincingly claim that a thousand people armed with flags and bibles amounts to a coup or even an attempt at one. The only thing they did which you might object to was beg the military to launch an intervention.

The legal basis for that is a bit of brazilian law that dates back to our independence. It says the military is the so called "4th power", the "moderator power" which is supposed to intervene if the balance between the other three democratic powers gets too screwed up. That's exactly the situation we find ourselves in: unelected judge-kings that legislate and run the country. These protesters tried to invoke that bit of law by asking the brazilian military to intervene and put an end to it. They did not try to seize power for themselves, they asked the military to do it. The military refused to do it. Then they were arrested. Then the judges put them in a gulag.

Your comments have helped me in the past. Sad to see that you believe in this narrative.

If it looks like a coup and quacks like a coup, don't tell me it's actually a sedan.

Can we not use duck typing logic to interpret the politics of a nation?

They called the impeachment of one of our former presidents in 2016 a coup too. In fact, they still call it that to this day. It led to one of the Brasília protests to which I alluded in my reply. Amusingly, even back then there were calls for mililitary intervention. Those were never a big deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015–2016_protests_in_Brazil

What these judges did certainly looks like a coup to me. As far as I'm concerned, they gave themselves limitless powers and installed a dictatorship of the judiciary in this country. There's no point in electing representatives when these unelected judge-kings "creatively interpret" the laws they create however they want. What you're calling a coup, I see as a desperate failed attempt to restore order to this place.

See how fruitless it is? Everything looks like a coup to somebody.

The tone of the responses from X have changed a great deal since the whole thing began. There’s much less of a confrontational approach, presumably because given the declines in revenues, they’re realizing they can’t afford more of it.

What should be shocking business is right in front of our noses: Other reports say investors in Musk's aquisition of Twitter are on the hook for billions of dollars.

How do they (and other investors in X) stand by while Musk sacrifices large markets for personal political battles? It's not just Brazil - look at how he gives up advertising revenue in order to promote far-right hate speech on X.

More broadly, if a corporation invests in DEI or ESG, which are relatively cheap, there's an uproar that it's not appropriate for businesses. If Musk (or others) lose large amounts for partisan political battles, it's accepted. In part I'm just saying the obvious: the uproars about DEI and ESG is has nothing to do with business or profits, and is really about reactionary politics. On the other hand, it's still shocking that investors give sacrifice this much money for Musk's and other people's partisan 'cause'.

Perhaps they feel they have much wealth to gain from the 'cause', which arguably is about big business and wealth seizing political power (see the Lewis Powell memo and, for example: https://the.levernews.com/master-plan/ ).

How do they plan on collecting on that if the money is moved out of Brazilian accounts?

According to the article, they've previously collected by just withdrawing money directly from X's and/or Starlink's local accounts:

> Brazil previously withdrew money for fines it levied against X from the accounts of X and Starlink at financial institutions in the country.

I saw that, but I was curious once X decides to pull the money from the accounts (assuming they can, which I guess is a big assumption at this point).

If the fines don't get paid those Space X ground stations can possibly go away too.

Starlink is still active in Brazil.

Could they get sued in a different country? I know when Argentina defaulted on bonds a naval ship was impounded in Ghana https://archive.is/Q7pB9

SpaceX has physical infrastructure in Brazil worth millions. They can start there, just confiscate the Starlink ground stations.

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