Brazil's Supreme Court makes social media liable for user content
economictimes.indiatimes.com
economictimes.indiatimes.com
We can expect that social media companies will lobby against this. In Brazil they find allies in the far-right which are also interested in moderation-free social media. For instance, two weeks ago Meta and Google sponsored an event from Bolsonaro's PL party about social media and AI, including lectures to train party members into how to effectively employ social media and AI tools. https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/noticia/2025/05/21/pl-anun...
The side that storms the capital sort of gives up its ability to call the other illegitimate in a democracy.
That doesn't mean they're right. Just that the situtation in Brazil clearly escalated to the point that suspending the status quo is if not merited, highly historically precedented.
If only that had been enough to fix things. I watched those judges censor political speech as "fake news" throughout the entire 2022 election. Then they showboated in public about how they had been personally responsible for the former president's defeat.
Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_January_Bras%C3%ADlia_attack...
A military coup is attempted when armed forces actually show up to overthrow you. When the heroic brazilian military showed up, it was to arrest the protesters.
Wat.
(EDIT: Sure? In a country with a history of not managing this well, however, it’s also dangerous. When manifested as a riot, that danger becomes clear and present.)
> it was to arrest the protesters who were begging the military on their knees to save them
Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state…
I appreciate your directness. But respectfully, I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval, or vice versa, those “protesters” which would find your judgement.
Plenty of people out there who enjoyed the military dictatorship.
Did you know the Lua programming language was born in it? The military wanted to replace technology imports with native products. That gave rise to industry and technology. We even tried making our own computers once. That bit of history has been posted to HN at least once.
I can totally see why they'd prefer that to the current Brazil which is essentially the world's soy farm, to say nothing of the endless corruption scandals and crushing taxation.
> Rioters who broke into the federal buildings housing each branch of the Brazilian state
Protesters from the current ruling party have set fire to those buildings before. It's nothing new.
> I don’t think there is anything this Supreme Court could do that would meet your approval
I would approve of their resignation.
Fair enough. I imagine the military dictatorship wouldn’t be too happy with folks trying to overthrow it. Part of designing a stable state is maneouvering against such volatility.
Let’s say that’s true. How is this structurally dissimilar from the military being in charge?
The people in power right now are communists and socialists. It's not even an understatement. Nazis go straight to jail but these socialists walk our soil completely unpunished even though they are far more damaging.
In any case, other, "softer", coups have been happening with alarming frequency in South America, Brazil included.
Developing, yes. (Socialist, I don’t know.)
> we can’t even escape the two party system, imagine overthrowing them and the federal government in one swoop, and doing that by means of citizen protestors occupying a building
Protests are pretext.
The Brazilian protests didn’t anticipate overthrowing the government themselves. They wanted the military to depose the elected government. In America, a protest would be used either as an excuse to impose ersatz martial law or a sign that the people don’t agree with the election (or whatever). The actual killing moves are rendered by those who can command guns.
Exactly! You, just like the people that was there and now are in jail, wanted that to "fix things", or calling it for the right name, a coup. It didn't work well.
Awaiting 4 years for the next election is not that painful.
Supreme court judges are not elected. They don't even have to pass tests.
That's not true. At the very least, they need to be Law Bachelors. Furthermore, after being nominated by the President they need to get approval from the Senate.
Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test. They compete for the judge positions with thousands and thousands of other professionals. The supreme court judges did not necessarily pass such a trial. Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
Just yet another example of how backwards this country is.
Those are essentially admission tests. They're not meant to test the knowledge or ability of the candidates, but rather as a way to filter out the excess because there's higher demand than offer of those jobs.
The Supreme Court justices don't have to do that because they are selected by the President instead.
> Every other judge is a law professional who studied hard to pass the test.
Some of the supreme court justices might have not passed admission tests for jobs they were not interested in but that says exactly nothing about their intelligence or knowledge of the law.
> Therefore, it is entirely possible and even likely for the judges of lesser courts to be more knowledgeable about law than the supreme court.
No doubt it's possible but I find some of the foundational premises of your chain of causation to be misguided at best.
If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro who can't follow simple logic and has repeatedly demonstrated a profound ignorance of how the Brazilian Civil Law system differs from his FBI training on Common Law concepts and strategies?
One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled because it was so full of vices that Cracolândia junkies seem productive and well adjusted in comparison.
Furthermore, you have complained in other comments that the justices are not elected. Leaving out any arguments around why that's the case, and why this is a desired feature of the system, how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests? There are so many goalposts in your messages that it's very difficult to understand what you actually think could be any better than what's currently in place.
I disagree. I have far more confidence in judges who competed vigorously for their positions than in judges who were merely appointed by presidents.
> If these tests were actually that good in filtering the cream of the crop, how do we end up with people like Sérgio Moro
Every test has the potential for false positives and false negatives. We want to select good judges and reject bad judges. There is an inherent risk of selecting bad judges and rejecting good judges.
Of course, the exact statistics have never been determined. It's reasonable to assume that the tests optimize for low false positive rate. Rejecting good judges is not as bad as accepting a bad judge.
By reading court cases, I formed a very positive opinion of concursado judges. I've always found their argumentation to be lucid and persuasive, even when I didn't agree with their rulings. I simply can't say the same of the supreme court.
> One of the largest corruption scandals in the history of the country ended up mostly annulled
That fact deeply disgusts me. It really does. I wish things had worked out differently.
> how is that compatible with the lack of admission tests?
It's not. I believe supreme court judges should also have to pass admission tests. That should be the one and only way to become a supreme court judge.
I claim the supreme court has amassed so much power it is now openly legislating. It's effectively running the country. These people are not elected representatives. Therefore, it follows that Brazil is not actually a democracy. That is the point I sought to make in this thread.
I don't actually want judges to be elected. I just think that's a requirement for Brazil to be called a democracy at this point in time. If we're a democracy, and judges hold all the power, then we should be able to vote for them.
The only reason I go out of my way to point out that these are unelected judges is to highlight the fact that Brazil is a democracy in name only.
No, they don't. They can do whatever they want and nobody can do a thing about it. Whatever they write on a paper becomes law, simply because police enforces it.
The fact they weren't and aren't following the constitution was a major cause of January 8th. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. And political censorship is exactly what they engaged in. They just happened to use euphemisms like "fake news". I remember one case where they censordd a documentary before it was even published. A priori censorship, something not seen in these lands since the military dictatorship.
> And judge criminals.
Supreme court's purpose is to judge politicians with immunity and assorted privilges. Not common citizens.
I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone. Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
pretty much the opposite: when the same STF changed laws to put Lula in jail, I did not supported people that wanted to overthrow the rule of law. You do. Now. But at the time you were in favor of the same supreme court change the law in favor of your ideology, which removed Lula from the election that he was leading.
> I do hope I'm still around to post about it when it does. I wouldn't wish such a fate on anyone.
Do you think you have it hard? That this is some kind of torture? The same people that worship coronel Ustra?
> Even you, someone who thinks I should be imprisoned for my thoughts, should not be censored and persecuted for it.
You should not be imprisoned for your thoughts. But corrupt politicians and criminals should not be protected by unrestricted free speech.
I don't doubt you. Feel free to elaborate on the matter if you'd like, in good faith.
I don't support "judicial activism" at all. Judges should be machines that implement the law exactly as written to each individual case, no more and no less. Any deviation from that is a power grab. In other words: judges must not legislate, that is the job of our elected representatives.
Any attempt from a judge to legislate is a small coup against the people. Actual lawyers have told me: "instead of applying the law, the surpreme court decided to legislate". This is normal in Brazil and it shouldn't be.
Law is not that simple and is full of tricky edge cases and outright vague ambiguity.
Lower Courts can easily rule to a clear letter of law as stated in a great many cases.
eg: Does evidence exist to prove a defendant broke into locked premises or not? Does a jury all agree that multiple pieces of submitted evidence are sufficient to establish a conclusion on balance despite all pieces of evidence having some issue?
High Courts and Supreme Courts exist to ponder whether lower courts have correctly applied the laws.
This would not be required if it were at all possible to have machines that implement the law exactly as written, no more and no less.
The STF vote stands at 6-1, and the result is now irreversible. With only 11 justices, even if the remaining four voted against, the majority would still be maintained (6 votes vs. 5).
But there’s only one more fascist judge left on the bench, so the final tally will end up 9 to 2. The decision is final.
Even then, the detailed justification for each vote is interesting. Just the first one is nearly 200 pages, and presents the whole history of the discussion, mentions precedents from not only the country but also about related laws all over the world, explains what would be the consequences of this particular article being considered invalid (it's not a simple "make them liable", it's the removal of a specific article which prevented them from being liable, which means other articles still apply), and so on. This is much more detailed and nuanced than what a single six-paragraph article can tell. That's the reason I prefer to go to the source for things like that.
Side note: The density of ads on that page is almost impressive.
So how can we allow social media platforms to escape responsibility? Children are dying.
Brazil wants to become like China. One of the judge-kings even declared his admiration for the chinese and their control of communications. It's quite terrifying.
Donald Trump has been threatening sanctions against these people for a while now. What's he waiting for?
* https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-praised-china-tiananme...
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/11/donald-trump...
( and numerous other reports since his 1990 comments )
Literally kicked the Associated Press out of the White House because they wouldn't toe the line on calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America [1].
[1] https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/white-ho...
Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech speak a lot louder than his words defending it
https://theconversation.com/trumps-aggressive-actions-agains...
Yes it (or at least the presently ruling faction) absolutely wants that substantively, but with a White Christian nationalist rather than Communist rhetorical focus.
Not really the kind of “by that logic...” that is useful for rebutting the argument it targets.
dissecting? discussing?
It serves to make a reader ponder whether an individual (judge or POTUS) sets the mood of an entire country (does Brazil or the US 'want' what a judge or POTUS wants?) and reminds us that the current US administration admires strongarm tactics.
Here's a clear sign of a typical "Bozotário" paranoia: reduce every sensible discussion to a leftist conspiracy.
> One of the judge-kings even declared his admiration for the chinese and their control of communications.
Sure. And since you found that in your WhatsApp group then it has to be true. Because no one lies in WhatsApp, right?
Nobody mentioned Bolsonaro. He's history.
> And since you found that in your WhatsApp group then it has to be true.
You don't have to take it from me. Here's a top Google search result:
https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/politica/somos-admi...
"We are admirers of the chinese regime."
Take it up with whoever wrote that article if you disagree. Either way, refrain from replying to my comments in the future. I really have no inclination to engage with sarcastic "WhatsApp uncle" arguments.
Good for Brazil, maybe they can slow down the fascist disease that rots our democracies from the inside.
Everything a user does on a social media platform is visible to the company and is monetized. Is any other sector spared any accountability when they know the customer is breaking the law?
This will be expensive for the company because they have to not just moderate, but do it under a patchwork of different countries' laws. But they were more than happy to make bank for years from this, put all that money to good use. It will also create some opportunity for abuse but then again so is allowing anything and everything on the platform.
Well, it's visible to the computers. It's potentially visible to a human, but no company has humans actually reading all that content.
And no, an AI is not adequate to filter it, either.
Here's the thing that confuses me. In every country I know, TV and radio stations are liable for the content they broadcast. Both in terms of programs and also ads. I've seen several fines being issued for such breaches, and my country is very liberal and loosely regulated here. So then why do we let social media broadcast whatever poison they want, plus all those scammy and predatory ads to people and get away with it?
That's how big-tech social media oligarchies got so insanely rich compared to brick and mortar businesses. All the scale of the global internet, with none of the liability. Maybe it's time to change that?
That is, in a way, similar to the problem of user-generated content. There is a limit to how much control a social media company will be able to have over the actions of its users. Unless you replace the system entirely with one where all posts are manually approved by a person before they go up, you will need to have at least some reduced liability for the platform owner.
If they made no reasonable attempts to move the camera away or cut the feed to something else, yes absolutely they are held accountable. That's why you have TV directors in the studio. Do you think you can get away with lengthy broadcasting of obscene nudity just because you're live?
Have you seen major sporting events like F1? Their broadcasting rooms look like NASA, dozens of people looking as several camera feeds simultaneously and picking the best one. They'll definitely see a naked man running on the field with his junk out in due time and not share that feed. I assume it's the same for FIFA, NFL, NBA, NHL, Golf, Tennis, Cricket and any other major sporting event.
I'd argue any algorithmic prioritisation whose rules are not made public, or where discretion is applied, constittues editorial slant. It's why I'd argue HN up/down voting (even flagging) is not editorial slant, while e.g. @dang removing a post is.
And would this allow Brazil to prosecute hacker news for cyber security violations if a user posts content regarding Flipper Zero or Japanese IC cards, or data breaches of Brazilian companies...
I think the line should be drawn at ads... and maybe even all profit centers of social media companies.
HN features group-based passive moderation based on well-communicated rules. And active moderation based on a fuzzier standard. The latter is absolutely an editorial standard.
> would this allow Brazil to prosecute hacker news for cyber security violations if a user posts content regarding Flipper Zero or Japanese IC cards, or data breaches of Brazilian companies
If it were posted here, moderators were notified and they chose not to flag (or geoblock) it, yes, I think that’s not totally unfair.
Where this current ruling is ambiguous is in being totally non-specific about how it should be complied with.
It is the editorial standard of the community not the company. It seems that this law would pit the company against the community at the behest of the local state.
Whereas I suggest removing bias introduced by and benefiting the company (ads). This legislation forces the company to introduce additional bias which, though not financial, benefits the company legally.
> If it were posted here, moderators were notified and they chose not to flag (or geoblock) it, yes, I think that’s not totally unfair.
To clarify, it would be fair for hackernews to be sued for failing to remove or geoblock such content? Doesn't this in essence balkanize international communities and defeat the spirit of the Internet? The cesspit of social media is due to forced bias and the solution is to introduce more bias?
Passive moderation, i.e. upvoting and downvoting, is a standard of the community's. Active moderation, e.g. @dang removing a comment, is a standard of the company.
> Doesn't this in essence balkanize international communities and defeat the spirit of the Internet?
We passed that turn-off a decade ago.
I didn't realize @dang was employed by Y Combinator.
If you mean, "this user viewed A, B, and C. Other users who viewed them also viewed D; let's show D to this user", then no, that's not an editorial slant or an editorial choice. That's an unbiased algorithm driven by users' choices.
If you mean, "Let's identify posts that are related to position Y on subject Z, and boost them extra", then yes, I agree that is an editorial slant.
My impression is that, when people talk about "editorial control", they usually include the first kind, not just the second.
So: How much of the second kind is going on? More than none, I agree, but how much? Does anyone have data? If not, then we're left with impressions, and my impression is that it's fairly small. (Rather, that it's a quite small number of topics, but since it's probably fairly popular topics it may still amount to a fair number of user impressions.)
Content on TV stations is also mostly third party generated. Channel 5 didn't make The Punisher, they bought the rights to play it on air. Radio 2 didn't make In da Club, but 50 Cent did, they're just playing it on air. Newspapers also publish letters and content from readers, yet unlike social media they're the ones responsible for that content.
Because in many countries, content is age restricted per times of day, so the TV and radio statins need to edit the songs and movies they play to cut out various swear words, violence and sex scenes if they want to air to to general audiences, otherwise they get fined.
So why are social media companies allowed to wreak havok?
Disagree here, all social media platforms have "the algorithm" which chooses what to show and to who, in order o maximize engagement and ad revenue.
If they don't want to be responsible for what they show to users, maybe they should leave all that ad money on the table, but it seems like they have no moral issues cashing those cheques while outsourcing their externalities to society. It's not like Meta is scrambling for change between the couch cushions and can't invest in better human plus bot moderation and curation. But then Zuck will only be able to afford a gold trim on his yacht instead of the platinum one, and a smaller island. Oh no, how sad, how terrible.
So tell me again, why do we have double standards for super wealthy social media oligopolies compared to traditional mediums?
That's not true, Bluesky has "chose your own algorithm" and Mastodon even less, it's just in chronological order (or "chose your own client"), and lots of other social media sites that don't have algorithms that decide what you're seeing. Classic web forums (which I'd call social media too) also typically show content in chronological order.
If the company providing the fire hose also wants to supply the agent, or even lock its users into its own agent, that sums up who’s responsible.
Brazil has flirted with that sort of tyranny as well. This is what this is all about. Censorship of political "fake news" that harms the ruling party. They decide what's fake, of course.
Having something like the First Amendment in the constitution means no politician can fuck with your freedom of speech too much. It's one of the things that makes the US the longest running democracy to date.
americans really live in a different planet. you only have freedom of speech when your speech is irrelevant or when it doesn't conflict with the views of the elites.
Let's address your points:
2) There's nothing illegal or wrong with student visas being revoked with reason. You break the law, your visa gets revoked, it's that simple. It's part of the terms and conditions of immigrating on a visa in any civilized country with a rule of law (barring Germany maybe). Have the students on a visa tried, you know, studying, instead of breaking laws? I myself never struggled to not break the laws where I travel to foreign countries. I don't see where the issues lie.
1) Who is being put in prison just for speech? Is that speech consisting of throwing rocks at police by any chance?
3) Which activists did the government kill?
Those are all some wild accusations that require citations form some reliable sources in order to be taken seriously.
>americans really live in a different planet. you only have freedom of speech when your speech is irrelevant or when it doesn't conflict with the views of the elites.
Let's put freedom of speech to a test. If you're in Germany, go on X, go to the profile of chancellor Friedrich Merz and call him a "corrupt politician and traitor of the people" and also say how a certain group of illegal immigrants responsible for majority of terror attacks doesn't belong in Germany. Then let's see how far your freedom of speech goes in Germany. Post a link here with the comment as proof when you're done. Otherwise, please refrain from criticizing other nations speech laws since you're throwing rocks at a stone castle from a glass house.
My point with this is there's no perfect freedom of speech, but myself I'd much rather the unrestricted freedom of speech of the world's oldest democracy, rather than the government controlled speech of Germany or the UK.
I'll end the conversation here since I've had enough.
I don't find this to be too much to ask. Every other platform has to do this. The only reason you have a bunch of ridiculously wealthy anti-social people rampaging across the world "disrupting" whatever they see fit is because we decided the rules arbitrarily should't apply to them because of some wide eyed and ridiculous utopian bullshit how "the internet is for free love and knowledge mannnn, and it should be like, freeee brooo". I'm not even slightly sympathetic to that argument and I don't think the Internet has proven to be valuable enough either culturally or productivity wise to justify even the slightest loosening of the rules that apply elsewhere. The whole thing starts to look like a rent seeking scam that was used to destroy a lot of higher quality information resources and businesses if you squint at it for even a second.
No, I don't have a proposal or solution, I'm ultimately out of my depth here. But I do think it's a little more complex than it is sometimes made out to be.
They're not the same thing, if you care to know.
The first is about accountability, about being responsible for the consequences of one's acts.
The second is preemptive coercion and is indeed a tyrant's basic tool.
That's how it works for books, magazines, newspapers. That's why they have legal advisors to define the boundaries of what and how they can publish.
The supreme court has decided that the court order requirement for removing content is unconstitutional.
There is no "after the fact investigation and due process" anymore. Platforms are now expected to police themselves or face arbitrary fines.
In fact, because of them the regulation on mere hosting services have increased sharply for no reasons, just because the regulators wanted to have more control on social medias.
If magazines, newspapers, movies and TV stations are liable for what they publish why shouldn't social media also be?
The "but it is only transportation of information, like telephones" argument is just ridiculous. It is valid for email at best, it is not valid for social media. They already routinely practice filtering of what is posted.
We shouldn't expect the U.S. to advance this cause. Their congress is too deep in the pockets of lobbyists to be accountable to public interest. It has to come from the E.U. and responsible governments.
Edit: this is a repetition of history. There are a lot of tragic examples of tragedies sparked by publications meant to extract profits from people's paranoia and fear. The most famous one is the witch hunt started by the book Malleus Maleficarum[1] that caused more than 30 000 deaths. We created means to contain these abuses in new media too. The genocide of Rohingya people could have been avoided if Facebook were liable for it.
I'd like to know where did I say that, because I can't find it.
The deep distrust of unmoderated, un-nannied communication is also apparent:
>The "but it is only transportation of information, like telephones"
>argument is just ridiculous. It is valid for email at best,
>it is not valid for social media. They already routinely practice
>filtering of what is posted.
The at best you use to describe the freedom of communication in email shows that your position has no bottom: everything and anything the masses express, even in private communications, must be policed. You also do not understand that freedom of speech in the US is not moderated or regulated by the government, and is something enjoyed by the people, not just interest or power groups, which adds to the authoritarian vibe of your post.
Social media is not the same. The content being posted is not vetted by any agent of the platform, so the liability at least in part falls of the person who posted it. You could argue that the platform should share some liability that is waved as long as they at least try "hard enough" to police their platform, with whatever definition of "hard enough" is chosen. But no automated filter will be perfect, so if you demand the same level of liability as a print publication you are effectively outlawing social media entirely.
I thought about this a few months ago and came up with this <strike>rant</strike>completely reasonable proposal[0] that tries to balance internet freedom with assigning limited responsibility for user content published by web sites.
Summary: under some conditions based on the number of views, whether any money changed hands, and whether the post was widely shared or mostly private, a publisher should be liable for some of the damages caused by a post.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/section_230_and_internet_freedom%...
Then the same companies will be penalised in other jurisdictions for being overly censorious. There’s no way to simultaneously follow all the rules.
And if you’re thinking “good, I just want to see those companies fined”, that’s fine too. But then that’s just about feeling good, rather than setting good rules for discourse.
Maybe those topics shouldn't be discussed on general-purpose online forums?
If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhere, we're not going to be able to discuss very much at all.
I'm with you on finding this personally annoying. But the question is whether a dedicated forum for discussing suicide or rape, one where the incentives of an unqualified influencer paid by views and product endorsements are better considered, is superior for these matters.
We don't, by analogy, randomly launch into suicide and rape in the middle of a cocktail party. Instead, we naturally seclude ourselves with the people we want to discuss it with, people we tend to have chosen thoughtfully, and usually with some warning that what we want to discuss is weighty. Not doing any of that online strikes me as, if not a problem, a legitimate concern.
The folks who go to these [1] and these [2].
We are way into that at least I am not knowledgeable about. I’d be curious about an expert’s take on the value of unmoderated YouTube and TikTok content on this issue.
Newspapers, magazines, and TV are at the other end: If they publish naughty stuff, they're going to be held accountable, and therefore they exercise editorial moderation and selection over what they publish.
Social Media and Internet forums are in this weird separate bucket that was simply conjured up by Section 230. They get to have their cake and eat it too. They can both 1. editorialize and moderate their users' content but 2. dodge liability over what they publish. What a great deal!
I think whether you are liable for what your users post -should- come down to whether or not you editorialize and put your thumb on the scale of what gets posted and shown. If you're truly a "dumb pipe" that allows everything, then you should not be liable for what your users send over the dumb pipe. But the minute you exercise any moderation or curation, you are effectively endorsing what you are publishing, and should share liability over it.
You can draw a swastika and a machinegun for sale on your regular mail envelope and it will show up in informed delivery, but as black and white.
If you try to get it displayed more prominently in an advertising campaign, it violates their second set of 'guidelines' that stop what you can put in the more prominent colored advertising image.
They use this mechanism in a matter different than most social media curation, but it's still a form of curation, and favoring the particular kinds of speech they like, using two different sets of guidelines -- one guideline for de minimis B&W presentation and a second set of 'guidelines' (which even at USPS are a bit vague) about whether you can get the pretty color image in informed delivery.
(Do I trust AI to do a first-pass review? No, I don't.)
You can reduce that to some degree by putting a threshold of number of views. But that just moves the problem. Then you won't have many posts that exceed the threshold. (Though it reduces the problem somewhat, because social media posts that exceed the threshold will be the one that they make the most money from.)
But the worse problem is, who decides what's "damaging"? The politicians do. That means that posts that are damaging to the politicians are going to be among the first things removed. That makes this a very dangerous path.
It is the courts that decide damages.
My argument in the post is that it is really only the widely distributed "viral" posts that cause enough damage to for liability to be an issue. Since the social media companies have a lot of say in what goes viral and closely monitor popularity for advertising reasons, they are in a position to fix the problem and a liable if they do not.
They don't even have to remove posts - just stop pushing them.
https://www.usps.com/business/informed-delivery.htm
The image that goes with the mail is required even.
"Buying a service" is how advertisers get placement of certain content curated.
If it fits in the guidelines, you get the special placement and image, if it doesn't fit the special guidelines, you can draw it on your mails and it gets scanned and all they see is the scan. I can draw a swastika on the front of my envelope and it will show up on the feed (but only in black and white), but can I get the swastika on the advertisement image in color? IDK because the link you sent was literally just tossing back what I already mentioned which is informed delivery, not a link to their policies (the policies themselves are a bit vague, but under them it appears not, and they definitely have stronger 'guidelines' than the black and white for instance regarding weapons).
If your content on Facebook 'fits the guidelines' and the guys 'buying the service' benefit from it, then it gets curated more strongly. If it fits other less strict guidelines, I can still see it. But there's nothing stopping you from paying facebook lots of money and getting something that fits their guidelines displayed more prominently, so that wouldn't be curation!
Your argument is highly specious. "Buying a service" is a total red herring, and "guidelines" is just a hack here so you can pivot around it's a mechanism by which the curation happens.
As for the image, you claim it's required, but my mails don't get it, it appears to be 'required' as part of a particular 'campaign'. I have no trouble believing that some services might require an image, but this doesn't somehow disprove curation.
Social media companies are actively curating what you see, or don't see which is the stem of all their problems.
I don't think anyone thinks of them like a government service (post office). Rather, when they talk about social media being a conduit/provider, what they have in mind is a variation on a search engine.
Do you think search engines should be liable for content? That's a slippery slope.
A stronger argument is that they are claiming to be like a search engine, but actually being nothing of the sort. So they should have a choice - make all algorithmic content opt in, with tunable, open algorithms, or be made liable for what the algorithm shows to users.
And to that extent, social media platforms need to step up maintaining civility within their community.
The primary issue mentioned in the article is illegal content. That certainly requires high level of moderation.
Brazilian courts have the intent correct to hold social media platforms responsible if they don’t moderate. However, who knows how the execution of this judgement will look like.
This is always the line that will be crossed though, there are some comedians who I find in bad taste, but I'm not going to tell them they can't make their jokes. There will be those who feel entitled to 'moderate' what their beliefs and preferences dictate.
It might be done better, but then the same people will complain that social media is stifling free speech when their own narratives were found to be blocked.
But lets see how it plays out. I don't see why anyone would even attempt to create a social aspect to their services in Brazil with this hanging over their head though.
I don’t think it is a question of entitlement. Just because you have a mic and want to go on a racist rant about other cultures, I don’t think this should be protected by free speech.
Similarly, the core issue from the article is stated as illegal content. One can only imagine why social media platforms don’t want to take action on that.
You're essentially making the claim that somebody shouldn't be able to say something that offends some people even if it's true, which is a great way to shut down discourse and enforce the status quo, because there's no limit to what people can claim to be offended by.
If your intention is to hurt or humiliate someone, or make jokes at the expense of others, then yes, you should not be allowed to voice or participate in such discussions.
One can freely discuss whatever they want, but that should not mean not maintaining decency during discussions.
Maybe that's a good thing.
Persecution of political enemies, of course.