And no VPN that does business in Brazil will refuse the government’s order to track and report such users, or they can get fined and/or shut down too. Here in the US, it’s the law, part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act I believe, which doesn’t care what part of the US communications industry you’re part of, if you get a court order or warrant, you comply or else, even if you weren’t previously tracking that info. I don’t imagine Brazil doesn’t have a similar law, but my Portuguese is too rusty to get a firm answer.
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Twitter is banned in China.
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Hell - Twitter got and responded to subpoenas regarding an insurrection to overthrow the government in the U.S. Not sure how this is different.
They even gave the twitter records of the former head of state.
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Pretty much the only difference is who was at the top of the company… Musk is in on the plot (here, in Brazil, and in other places) and will refuse to comply with subpoenas if we have violence here in November… He is previewing his tactics for us. We should very much take note.
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Extradition sounds perfectly reasonable then. He travels- they can find him outside of the U.S. pretty easily.
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Nice strawman argument. Would be a shame if something happened to it.
We’re talking about Brazil.
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He’s also quite happy to censor speech at the behest of right wing extremist racist regimes.
He doesn’t like consequences for Nazis on his network. That’s why he’s digging in here.
Also the US government will threaten, cajole, and possibly coup foreign governments that seek to apply their law, rather than US law, on US corporations operating in their territory.
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Elon Musk, as America’s biggest welfare queen… thinks that it is above any laws, rules, and regulations. And also is ‘free speech for me, but not for thee.’
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Sure is! Fining people thousands of dollars for reading Twitter is censorship. Blocking access to Twitter through state control of the internet is censorship. Elon being a hypocrite and a right-wing menace doesn’t change the meaning of the term, though perhaps those things (or the Bolsominion problem) justifies him or them being censored
All these things are SOP and Twitter can expect to be unable to do business in Brazil for failing to meet those obligations. Whether that justifies censorship, especially criminal sanctions for people just reading it, is another matter. Boing Boing doesn’t do business in Brazil and has no local legal agent, and it’s not censoring us! The legal agent/foreign business issue is the legal device to punish Twitter for platforming political disinformation and the bolsominions.
I’d guess because Elon won’t comply anyway, so there’s no point.
ie I don’t care much about Twitter being censored, I care about Brazilians being censored.
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You didn’t just call it censorship though. You called it traditional authoritarian censorship for refusing to jump through expensive hoops. Given that it actually turns out to involve abetting criminals involved in an attempt to overthrow democracy, I remain doubtful of that spin.
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Just because the expensive hoops are justified, that doesn’t mean they aren’t expensive hoops.
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Does Musk comply with other laws that we’d consider “censorship”? Does he comply with the EU or with Russian law? I’d suggest that he is willing to ignore what the Brazilian government is asking of him, because he’s in favor of overthrowing the government. As the thread I posted above pointed out, they changed their constitution to have stronger penalties for attempted coups, which has recently happened in Brazil, with the support and backing of twitter… They have a right to do that in fact. I know you’re aware of the history of US/corporate intervention, so it makes sense for them to have a law like this in order to protect themselves from having yet another coup…
Even our relatively broad free speech rights under the first amendment have limitations based on specific context. You can’t threaten someone, for example.
Given that people interested in being online have alternatives to twitter, I don’t think this amounts to censorship. This is not like when Egypt under Mubarak just turned off the internet in 2011 (which had the exactly opposite effect intended).
Sure, but I just don’t think that this is that. 
I mean, we do have some Brazilians on the BBS, so we could ask their perspectives on this decision… @BakaNeko? Any insights?
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What isn´t necessarily true. The Army uses Starlink, but Mr. Musk isn´t an almight supervilain. The Army has plenty of ways to communicate.
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Bolsonaro’s presidency ended on January 1, 2023, The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is considered politically left-wing.
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Yes. And a lot of people firmly believe we are living under a dictatorship worse than the Chavistas, Taleban and North Korea.
Unfortunately It isn’ t an hyperbole. Many of these people take advantage of the dissatisfaction with Mr. Lula’s government, criticism of the judiciary, passion for military dictatorships and use their anti-communist ravings to support Mr. Musk’s attitudes.
This is the mood of the people I see out there. OK, it’s not a very large sample of the population, it’s more like anecdotal evidence taken directly from my bubble.
The funny thing is that people who deplore dictatorships were begging for a military coup a few years ago.
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Sounds right, but then is this on the same page?
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If Musk shuts down Brazilian Starlink access in retaliation for Brazilian actions against X…
OMG, he would have breached the corporate firewalling of his personal legal responsibility, and lawsuits that would be coming at him directly, the stockholders revolts, the SEC scapula…
Wow. That would be so monumentally stupid! Come on Elno, make my day.
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