Sometimes Mike Masnik misses the mark. I think he basically is arguing that Brazil’s goverment is engaging in active censorship and i guess this offends his usanian sensibilities.
Bu we know twitter has been complying with other regime’s censorship requests… but very selectively leaning to right-wing regimes, and usually against left-leaning activists. This is not a censorship issue, is an issue of Musk wanting to control twitter narrative, and goverments not happy about it.
Engaging at bothsideism by pointing that Brazil is not as free as USA (debatable) may make sense to some of his intended audience, but to most international one… will not.
This is precisely what many people think nowadays in Brazil. These people argue that the judiciary is overstepping its bounds and that we are living in a dictatorship where we cannot give our opinions freely. As happened in the United States, many people here believe that the hooligans who vandalized Brasília were just protesting peacefully and that everything was nothing more than a false flag operation involving crisis actors.
Today the deadline for Mr. Musk to meet the requirements of the law ended. As he decided to double the bet, the Brazilian judiciary will ask telecommunications companies to block the old Twitter throughout the national territory.
This type of concern about unrestricted and absolute freedom of expression on the part of some Brazilians seems to have been imported directly from segments of society in the United States. The funny thing is that many of these people called for a military coup and for the freedom of expression of those they didn’t like to be suppressed as violently as possible. For some reason the Brazilian military decided not to do what they wanted and since then, they are being demonized too.
Moraes also decided to block the accounts of Musk’s company Starlink in Brazil as a way to enforce fines imposed on X for failing to comply with a court decision. The decision, kept confidential, argues that the two companies are part of the same economic group.
However, blocking a social network like X is not an instant process and requires a series of bureaucratic and technical actions.
For the platform to effectively cease functioning, Moraes needs to order Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency) to take it down. The agency then passes the notification to the operators.
In a statement, X announced that it would not comply with the justice’s “illegal decisions,” asserting that they are intended to “censor his [Alexandre de Moraes] political opponents.”
“Attempts to defend ourselves in court were met with threats of arrest for our legal representative in Brazil. Even after her resignation, the justice froze all her bank accounts. Our challenges against his evidently illegal actions were either rejected or ignored. It appears that Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unable or unwilling to confront him,” X noted.
As with the article above US corporations have a long history of getting to decide just what is and isn’t illegal outside the US. Examples of things that they decide are illegal: governments of foreign countries using the resources for the people’s benefit; deciding what IP law applies: holding elections that put people in favour of taxing rich corporations in power.
Examples of things that they decide aren’t illegal: death squads; the disappeared; football stadiums full of political prisoners; booting people who don’t agree with the Chicago school’s radical views of economics out of helicopters over the ocean.
As they say in grafiti around the world when they want to remind the uppity natives: Jakarta! Jakarta!
Apartheid Guy knows what he’s doing and knows the backing he’ll get. There is exactly zero desire in American government to rein in their lawless oligarchs.
Why isn’t using a PAC to steal voters’ personal information by misleading them into thinking they are registering to vote, and flood them with political misinformation a criminal offense? I feel like the one idea missing is “lock him up.”
