Brazilian election filter in X For You timeline
github.com
github.com
I'm not sure if this is a good or bad idea. But if I were Brazillian, I'd be immediately following all ~700 accounts (and probably unfollowing all 700 after the election).
Love or hate X, it deserves a massive hat tilt for its transparency here.
I wonder how many normal people actually follow political accounts like this. I follow my local government because they sometimes tweet emergency info but I don’t follow candidates at all. I don’t follow political influencers either. It’s far too noisy.
I would certainly not, as it is most likely propagandists; these aren't interesting.
But either way, the purpose of this is to protect democracy, and by mentioning the very accounts, this could have a Streisand effect. That by itself is influencing the election, and Musk knows this. That is the purpose of his action. Musk does the same with regards to other democracies, such as AfD in Germany.
I couldn't think of a seasoned KGB commander with more totalitarian reasoning than what you are voicing. Not even the censors you are defending have anything against the public knowing which accounts are limited and why.
Not if you consider the context of external influence, e.g. [1], and not wanting a Jan 6 in Brazil. Not letting such know their efforts are ineffective, is a tool to combat their effort. It is akin to shadowbanning.
Amplification of radical right by external entities is nothing new, btw. Russia did this in 2016. Musk does it now. But Musk won't show those parts of his machine. He still does shadowbanning, too.
[1] https://medium.com/dfrlab/election-fraud-narratives-surge-on...
Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections). The control fantasies of hackers aren't aligned to reality in this affair. Only aligned to Soviet doctrines which have been obsoleted for 40 years now.
The external influences are documented. We know the Russians meddled with elections in The Netherlands (the 2016 Ukraine referendum), Romania (recently), Brexit, Trump 2016 (via the Clinton hack), 2020, and 2024, and likely also Hungary. In regards to Romania, yes the elections were repeated. That thing tends to happen when elections are fraudulent.
> Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections).
Because it is about a local law regarding airtime. A law Musk doesn't respect. But because now it requires an active action of the mark to get into a propaganda tarpit, instead of the timeline, it is a reasonable deterrent.
There is no such secrecy within these measures in Brazil. The accounts are limited specifically by function of belonging to political candidates. The election tribunals - the censors - want the public to know who has been limited and why. As does X. And it has nothing at all to do with any supposedly foreign influence, as hackers are dreaming up in their paranoia. Foreigners cannot run for political office.
But I've noticed that people - especially on HN - will frequently use paranoia as an excuse for not making any mental effort or taking the time to understand what an article or discussion is about. Always looking to steer anything and everything into familiar thought channels where there's an already familiar conclusion, and a familiar enemy to hate.
> But because now it requires an active action of the mark...
The "mark"? Are you talking about voters?
To many people, they believe there is a constant and persistent threat of Nazis and that it is the duty of enlightened government officials to continuously stage interventions to stop them. They think people are the problem so it is good to be totalitarian. It is kind of a type of paranoia it's just widely accepted as fact and it's a part of Western institutional ethos.
This to be fair is why the CIA had to move suitcases with money instead of bragging about it on Fox News...
Ironic, isn't it?
nationalism doesn't oppose US if US has bought all the nationalist movement (like f.e. in Ukraine circa 2014) - you get all the minuses of totalitarianism without all the bonuses of independence from US
They banned it to have reality comply with Brazilian electoral law which is written so that every candidate has the same amount of airtime.
It is not the job of the judiciary to determine whether a law should or shouldn't exist, but to make sure all laws are correctly enforced. Remembering this fact isn't optional.
Said differently, arguments about such decisions should revolve around whether the law says what the courts say it does or whether it was applied correctly—not whether the law should exist.
It is almost a perfect definition of sovereignty—to shape reality such that it fits what the state deems appropriate.
This by no means imply it's perfectly effective, but that's besides the point. We're debating what the state ought to do, not whether it succeeds.
The brazilian judiciary legislates on a daily basis.
Actual quote from an actual laywer I knew, one of my professors, around 10 years ago.
My legal medicine professor, who was a doctor and a cop, was onto something as well:
> Doctors think they're gods, judges know.
Here's another interesting thing an actual lawyer once told me to my face:
> Judges = gods in this country, and supreme court judges even more so.
This is nothing new, it's been going on for decades and decades. Anyone who deals with legal matters can see it. Start observing and you too will see the pattern of judicial activism. Every single occurrence of it is a small coup against the representatives we actually elected.
DeepL:
>Starting August 16, Brazilian election law requires providers that use recommendation systems to exclude from their recommendations the official accounts of candidates registered with the Electoral Court and the posts from those accounts.
>On X, these accounts and their posts will no longer be recommended in the “For You” tab during the election period unless the user explicitly follows the account. Official candidates are not suspended, and their content will remain available on their profiles. This measure is expected to affect the visibility and reach of these profiles and their content.
>We are implementing this measure to strictly comply with TSE Resolution No. 23,610/2019. This is neither a penalty nor a change to X’s rules. We are committed to setting a new standard of transparency regarding our algorithms. Follow our work here: https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
Sounds good to me. Filtering all recommendations is fair, and they are not censoring the profiles.
Proportionally to their incumbency.
Some company distorting the reach is way worse than favoring the incumbents. But the access is not even supposed to be equitable.
I am not against these attitudes. I just want to point to that.
A possible reason is that these platforms are seen as either monopolies or American imperialism agents. In both cases these are very damming perceptions. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have been disastrous in branding their platforms.
And those platforms are absolutely agents of American imperialism. Latin American countries in particular should be very wary of these.
Were it just one or two candidates, then it would indeed be a form of "soft censorship". That doesn't seem to be the case here.
Brazilian regulations just dictates that candidates cannot be recommended, regardless of party.
Candidates are forbidden of doing many things to keep elections free and mostly fair.
What interests me more is that Elon has completely reversed his anti-censorship stance. He was always censoring while opining against censorship and getting sued for millions of dollars for ignoring a Brazilian censorship law. Now he's just quietly complying with Brazilian censorship law.
Censorship is deletion of the candidate's social media presence.
Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.
Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.
Which country are you referring to here? I’m not familiar with any that work like this. In the United States, Trump famously spent less than his competition and won both times. Bloomberg outspent his competitors by multiple orders of magnitude and endured a humiliating loss.