Brazil justice orders ban of video platform Rumble
dw.com
dw.com
It's nothing new.
However we (English speakers) hear only about high profile sites.
Many journalists and nonprofits have called him a threat to Brazilian democracy for good reason (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...). Also see this comparison of the Brazilian constitution and example censorship orders from de Moraes (https://x.com/alexandrefiles/status/1829979981130416479/phot...).
Or perhaps you're right and people really have no moral principles and just say whatever is more convenient at different times. That's a scary thought. I choose to believe in the first alternative. Plenty of people complained about Moraes when he was bashing Musk.
Top comment: Discussion on Moraes, not Musk
Second comment: References Elon/Elon's past compliance, some replies bash others support the policy
Third comment: About how companies will have to deal with more international events like this
Fourth comment: Mentions X but not Musk, some replies get into Elon back & forth though
Fifth comment: A pretty plain Musk bash
Overall sentiment of Musk certainly wasn't in overwhelming favor of Musk but the top commend and many other threads were focus on Moraes or things other than Musk. Of those that were, most seemed to mention him to bash but certainly not "everyone" bashing him by any measure of the word.
I think you see a lot more "dunk" on posts when it comes to the general political area around "Rumble" or the like. Personally more dunking on than I think is often fair as well, even though that direction is not my personal leaning. Musk himself is actually much less of a downvote trigger, even though he's got a way of getting mentioned way more often than he should in threads (like how the comments on this article have become largely about him when it's about Brazil and Rumble).
They’re getting blocked because they won’t staff the company there and they’re getting into legal trouble for the content they post.
Twitter went through this and they were able to get legal and they’re fine now. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being persecuted for their right-wing political beliefs and they’re simply dealing with the natural consequences of their actions.
Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
I'd argue that if applied as a universal principle, then:
* It would make it even harder specifically for smaller companies, who don't have ~200 employees to position one in each country, to get started online. If for instance you're an independent designer based in Luxembourg, maybe making fonts or website templates, would you only be allowed to sell to other people in Luxembourg?
* It would likely segment the Internet, and render much of it inaccessible to anyone living in smaller countries, because realistically most websites aren't going to bother with all countries.
* The intended goal, that websites would more likely bend to local law because they have employees there to be imprisoned/punished if they don't, seems questionable to me in the first place. In many cases the demands they'd be caving to would be "remove anti-government content" or "give us the IP and phone number of this journalist".
> Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
The world is not as it was before the takeoff of the Internet, and trying to revert back would be "unreasonable" to many.
In this case Rumble is a business model that didn't exist pre-Internet, and has to compete with Amazon/Google which have global availability (or close to it). Just because brick-and-mortar stores used to manage does not make it feasible for businesses like Rumble.
A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.
If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.
In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.
https://restofworld.org/2021/social-media-laws-twitter-faceb...
If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there. Brazil would be wise to lock them out like they would any would-be criminal organization.
> There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US. A legitimate legal system does not censor free information, does not jail people without trial, does not empower a court system to launch "investigations" according to the whims of judges, and does not make demand on outside organizations with no operations in the country (lack or jurisdiction). The situation is this: Like other regimes (China, India, etc), the government of Brazil has enacted a hostage-taking law so they can threaten and intimidate foreign companies into getting what they want. Instead of complying with this law, companies would be wise to protect themselves and their employees by ignoring it.
>Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
Brazil has a TFR of ~1.5 and is rapidly aging. It's just a bigger Italy, and another country that will never be wealthy.
They are throwing their coup plotters in prison, I don't know if the US compares favorably lately.
Or maybe you were alluding to a certain president? Hard to say because he wasn't there, or involved.
So the way somebody looks is half of your argument?
"The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions" https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00160-0
shows why this is pseudoscience and harmful.
But the guy has definitively decided on turning his country into a dictatorial hell hole.
Brazil had already more than enough problems nobody was doing anything about, it really didn't deserve someone with a beyblade as a moral compass.
Let's hope he'll get a "Am I the baddie?" realization and doesn't enjoy it.
Reading them, they mostly seem acceptably divergent political opinion, nothing that worrisome imo.
Political discussions quickly lead to polarization and abuse of the vote system. Doesn’t help that 90% of comments are simply parroting known opinions and not offering anything of particular interest for most readers.
(If political discussions quickly become uncivil, that is a separate issue solved like with any other uncivil discussion.)
I find he is consistent on his ideology, but I don't follow him closely to confirm my speculation
If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"
They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?
EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".
(just a side note: personally I wish Europe as a whole would shift its stance on freedom of speech to be closer to the US's stance on it then it currently is over here, so I'm not going to complain if the VPs statements do actually help kick our leaders up the arse.)
So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:
This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:
List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)
The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)
Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)
How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)