Hey… Isn’t it weird that it seems of the times he caves to pressure it’s at the behest of a right wing authoritarian or authoritarian-aspiring. And every time he refuses it’s to defend those who want to install right wing authoritarians…
Whats up with that. Weird coincidence, huh?
More seriously, Brazil’s history provides interesting (and fury-provoking) reading of what a quite different (from the US) sometimes-socialist, South American democracy can look like - and how fragile it can be. Colonization and exploitation or enslavement, followed unstable attempts at democracy interspersed by coups and hounded by economic struggles, prolonged military junta (with American backing), and a newer fragile democracy - vibrant but vulnerable and divided by old factions.
I have no idea what the best approach is. The last thing they need is the same meddling and misinformation the USA is exposed to, but it’s fair enough to be suspicious of government’s trying to exert control over media apparatuses. I think that at least we need to consider that it’s probably arrogant to be too confident that the American model of free speech is the best model for all countries as to how to safeguard democracy,
Yes, it simply won’t do that a multibillion company has to bring in a local law firm to represent them just to fulfill a legal requirement. What is the world coming to, I ask.
This is not “state censorship”. Xitter has been willfully ignoring court orders and has not complied with the reasonable requirement to have a legal representative in Brasil after shitting all its local offices there.
This is a characteristic that unites right-wing and left-wing rulers in the country. Take the case of Rede Globo television, part of a large media conglomerate that emerged with the support of military dictators in the 1960s and that still has a lot of influence today. Brazilian society. The Right had the wisdom to take advantage of the animosity against Rede Globo, the the growing discomfort with different thinking, the strange reactionary wave that swept the country and then they promoted alternative means of disseminating alternative narratives without much connection with reality.
The Globo is the enemy to be beaten. They say people shouldn´t trust in media because all of them are communists and must rely in getting info through Whatsapp and Telegram and maybe watching videos in Youtube.
The left also have their own digital militias, called Virtual Militants, but it was used mostly to smear the reputation of former allies (like the Ourobouros). The left was caught by the Right social networks tactics and still doesn´t know how and what to do.
[The dizzying array of legal threats to Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro - POLITICO]
I believe that this search for those responsible for the chaos only happened because the coup plan almost succeeded, for some reason the military remained in the barracks and the United States clearly said it was against any coup.
[Bolsonaro Coup Plans: U.S. Pressure Campaign Kept Brazil’s Generals at Bay (foreignpolicy.com)]
I wonder whether it’s technically possible to allow individuals to post on X but block advertising so the company makes no money in Brazil. ‘Free speech’ but expensive to implement.
No? Where is the US gov’t going after ordinary Americans who choose to access TikTok, or indeed intend to do so (for example) through a VPN after it is banned from the US?
If we see actions like putting TikTok on some sort of Terrorist watchlist and marking Americans who access it as supporting terrorism or something, then yes, that is the same sort of douchbaggery I’m talking about.
It’s been a wild ride watching the debate around this unfold on the Fediverse. Just an absolute deluge of libertarian freeze peach absolutists wingeing about slippery slopes as if this all wasn’t a well known issue with centralized corporate social media and pretty much the whole reason why the Fediverse exists as a concept and (allegedly) why they are on there in the first place.
I did not have Fediverse chuds simping for centralized corporate social media as if they don’t even understand their own stated ideological position on my bingo card, and yet here we are.
Libertarians tend to be okay with corporate overreach, as that is just rational men doing rational things, which is generally speaking, enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. That’s “freedumb” to them… they just object to the gubmit regulating the economy, because they think it’s a force of nature, not a social relation. ANY government intervention is “evil” and anything that a corporation does is fine, because that’s freedumb.
It’s not surprising that they’d be using an alternative to corporate social media and whinge about government regulation. Their belief in liberation is entirely based on destroying the state and letting rational corporate man run shit. It’s the flip side of people who wish to see a technocratic state. It’s merely technocratic corporations running shit instead.
In general, self-identified libertarians these days are not of the actual anarchist school of libertarianism. Ayn Rand’s drivel dominates their thinking.
Oh don’t get me wrong, understand all of that. I just wasn’t ready for them to throw the pretense of their beliefs so openly and completely to the winds of hypocrisy in defense of the very thing the purport to stand against, namely corporate controlled centralized media. Of course they really don’t care as long as the “correct” oligarch is the one at the helm, but I guess I expected them to be a smidge less painfully transparent about it.
People are full of contradictions. But libertarians constantly excuse about corporate misbehavior while over-emphasizing state overreach. Many oppose basic shit like Civil Rights laws and other basic protections for human beings.
Why should they, though? They talk a good game about “freedom” when it comes to their own personal freedoms, but they don’t give two shits about anyone else and frankly never have. They tend to not be very consistent as a result. We’re all sometimes contradictory, but it’s really at the core of the ideology.
Libertarians, or at least that kind of libertarian, seem to be oblivious to imbalances of power aside from the power of the state over the citizen. They assume that people who have equal rights in theory have equal rights in practice.
Yes, I’m aware. They often stubbornly refuse to acknowledge reality and instead keep pushing theory that clearly doesn’t work. “Surely, capitalism will work and bring wealth and prosperity to all THIS time!” Like… my dudes… look at some facts! Look at society and look who benefits and who does not! It’s bleeding obvious that capitalism is an inequality machine…
I always looked as them as cranks, until I realized that they had completely inverted things where human rights were somehow a subset of property rights, because you own yourself, and then built up an entire alternative reality based on that.
Okay, that right there. Human beings can’t be owned, and anything developed from that idea is dangerously wrong.
I’m so glad that my view of the Fediverse doesn’t have a corporate algorithm deciding that any of those people need to appear in my sight, and that the people that I follow have probably had their seconds deal with such people in the back alley.
