Brazil’s X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.

We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).

The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you’d see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.

We’ve been living in a fantasy land of “no political affiliation” in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.

So now in the early stages of this century’s great fight, we’ll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.

And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.

This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I’m specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura…

So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you’re fighting the wrong enemy.

This is happening all over Europe as we speak. And even though it happens to be extreme-right atm, it doesn’t have to be. We’ve seen extreme-left revivals in the past as well.

In the US, a populist just needs to win a primary, ie 50% of 50% of the American votes, and he is immediately at least nr2 in the run, and they get the support of one of the major parties.

Saying that populists / extremists also exist in Europe is just a bad comparison.

The UK is also a FPTP system, but has strong parties outside of the two main, for instance in the last general election over 42% of people voted for a party other than Labour or the Conservatives.

(admittedly that’s an outlier, but looking over the last few elections at least around 20% went to parties outside of the big two)

To be clear: FPTP is terrible, but the reason the UK system isn’t as broken as the US one is because the correct functioning of the Legislature is much more vital to the overall system – i.e. 3 viable parties can exist because they’re fighting over hundreds of seats, and then it’s by the Legislature that the Prime Minister is chosen – rather then by direct vote.

I don’t think that the American election system holds any relevance to the problem.

The problem is fueling divisiveness to manipulate people with a “us vs them” mentality.

How else can you force working class people to vote against their best interests, such as taxing the rich fairly, ensuring access to affordable health care, uphold basic workers rights, without resorting to blatant fearmongering and moral outrage with bullshit like “they want post-birth abortions, impose sexual abuse in schools, import scary criminal gangs from distant foreign lands, etc”?

Not to mention the industrial level of propaganda dumped by foreign actors to destabilize democratic nations.

One reasons out of ocean of reasons – number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.

But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.

Hopefully someone who isn’t a hard libertarian bankrolls one soon so they don’t get pigeonholed as places for exactly one ideology.

The problem is that there seems to be a large overlap between that enemy⁰ and certain arguments on the right side of left/right political debates, so it is very difficult to separate the two even on those matters where that overlap isn’t actually present.

The matter is made worse because right-leaning political groups are less ideologically opposed to being influenced by that enemy’s main power: being able to buy stuff/opinions/people.

—-

(0) I assume you are meaning the arsehole rich¹ here

(1) There are some nice hyper-rich out there, but they aren’t as vocal as the others so we don’t hear much from/about them – much like the more moderate people with right-leaning views, who aren’t heard over the yelling of others.

Obviously for people whose idea of freedom of speech begins and ends at actively promoting vice signalling in regimes which have some degree of speech protection whilst doing exactly what an autocrat like Erdogan asks because “you can’t go beyond the laws of a country”, Musk represents an improvement, but that doesn’t have anything to do with promoting First Amendment ideology overseas.

But giving the “other team” a voice (my team, in some ways) is valuable, and we aren’t going to give it up easily.

And please, don’t point to the fact that there are right-wing loons on Twitter, because there are crazies from all sides all over the internet.

Musk is not perfect by any means wrt free speech.

His version of being a free speech absolutist is that people who agree with him should absolutely have the right to free speech.

And there are outside actors currently working hard to ensure that this happens, because they want a return to the old imperial world order (where powerful nations capture territory and expand, and weaker nations die at their hands and are colonized).

Russia purportedly supports free speech right wing groups, though I think the problem is vastly overstated in order to discredit them. Most of this is organic,too.

Whatever is the case, left or right, we cannot let our own beliefs be dictated by whatever Russia supports or co-opts at any given time. Similarly, vegetarians should not abolish their beliefs just because a notorious 20th century dictator was also a vegetarian.

Musk isn’t hard right. There is a lot of overlap positions between him and Bill Clinton (the original one from the 1990s, I do not know what he says now), except that Musk is anti-war and obviously talks like he was on Usenet.

I can’t understand that software engineers, who vigorously defended free speech and also the somewhat trollish communication style up to at least 2010, came to be assimilated and reprogrammed by their employers.

Even Zuckerberg now backpedals and says that Covid censorship and suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a mistake.

It’s easy to say with the benefit of hindsight what was a mistake and what was not. Some things need to be censored – that’s how it’s always been. The question, of course, is WHAT needs to be censored, HOW MUCH it needs to be censored, HOW it should be censored, and WHO decides.

In the old days, it was easy: If it wasn’t on prime time (TV, major newspapers, syndicated radio), it didn’t exist. And this cabal served us well, providing a small number of voices to tell people who they were and what to believe.

Now with a potentially unlimited number of voices going up and down in popularity with unprecedented speed and across nations, we’re headed into unknown territory, so there are going to be a lot of mistakes, and nobody can know for sure if our nations can even survive it.

For me, Musk/Trump is indeed fresh trollish air in all this seriousness and iam astounded, that no one else enjoys it. But i also have the feeling, it is a last breath before police state takes over. Because a state can not allow its citizen to go rogue.

You are definitely correct there. Twitter was a shit-show in this regard long before Musk came along and made it worse. They did far too little to enforce their own policies (let alone common decency) on things like bullying and hate content for far too long, for fear of losing users and therefore advertising money or being punished because some of those openly breaking those rules were in high power at the time, and this led to an “open season” feeling for all sides.

(for the avoidance of doubt: I’ve never had a twitter account, after the initial novelty stage it has always been far too full of the sort of people that think twitter is a good idea)

Sure. But Elon changed teams. He used to be bipartisan. But he chose a champion in the aftermath of Covid and–by the looks of it–he’s chosen a bad one.

(In an alternate universe where Musk stuck to what he’s good at, I could see the entire Artemis programme being delegated to SpaceX and a bipartisan adoption of Tesla as America’s EV standard bearer. Instead, there is real political capital in creating a rival to SpaceX. And Tesla is going to have to constantly be on the defence against cheap Chinese imports from the Democrats and establishment Republicans.)

He is a man who owns an electric car company but has been pushing climate change denialism as his political position and supporting politicians who do.

There’s competition because Tesla is not the dominant prime mover it’s valuation implies it should be, and people have sensed – correctly – a market opening. No one I know recommends “buy a Tesla” anymore for your first electric car – they say buy a Hydundai Ioniq or wait for a Chinese brand to get cheaper.

People are actively embarrassed to drive Teslas, which in turn means there’s a growing market for “anything but a Tesla…”. And because of that all of the actual faults of a Tesla are paid that much more scrutiny.

As for Musk, he’s a weird one for sure. He made me realize that I don’t know the politics of most CEOs (or even know who they are). Which is just as well, I don’t want to ponder in the supermarket whether my bodywash is ideologically consistent with my shampoo.

He showed his true colors, there is no correction possible, people just don’t rewrite their core personality. Support for puttin’ and overall war in Ukraine, support for dictators, very bad stance on many societal topics, treats his employees like slaves, proper piece of shit as a parent, utterly childish reactions of an immature boy rather than Man – we haven’t seen the worst yet.

Brilliance in some aspects means nothing if its dragged down into mud by rest of personality. I know some still worship him for the positives and ignore or even appreciate the rest, I can’t and won’t.

He has always said, for many years, that he got into SpaceX to work towards the goal of making humans a multiplanetary species, and he got into electric cars to work towards the goal of having a sustainable energy society.

I think he legitimately believes that “the woke mind virus” is an existential threat to our society, and if that threat isn’t addressed then the other goals don’t matter because society will collapse before they can be realized.

From a near term business perspective his political actions are dumb, but from a personal motivation perspective they make total sense.

Or in other words, Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex, not greed (which is unfortunate for investors).

Musk blames ‘wokeness’ for his daughter rejecting him after he didn’t accept who she was. His entire conflict with the left and the ‘woke’ is centered around this one issue. He can’t accept that he was rejected because of what he has done, so he needs someone else to blame and fight with.
He bought X as his propaganda tool, he doesn’t care about the consequences of his actions on society—he only wants to win.

> Musk is primarily driven by a savior complex

I don’t think that’s correct, it seems more likely that he was always driven by an inferiority complex.

Sure. I don’t think he’s a hypocrite. He has, however, hyper fixated on a topic that’s in vogue in tech circles but totally irrelevant elsewhere.

Unlike in technology, where one can credibly fail upwards, doing that in politics comes at the cost of influence. And in this block order we’re seeing, tangibly, the consequences of Elon Musk’s deteriorating influence.

The Twitter/X experiment seems to have primarily succeeded in demonstrating that nobody has good solutions for this problem, and just repeating words like “misinformation” and “free speech” doesn’t get us any closer to a solution.

Props to Bluesky for trying something else, at least.

Some friends have an ancap libertarian and they were targeted before.

Woke content is not censored and you can find it on X, it’s just that most left-wing people left for alternatives.

I went to bluesky briefly and I was inundated by transgender explicit content. I didn’t open it again.

That kind of monarch-like behavior didn’t exist on Twitter before Musk. Their protocols for hiding and removing content may have been very flawed, but at least there was a process.

Then let’s not focus on some made up boogeyman and ignore the fact that in 2020, the executive at the time was happily reaching out to Twitter and other platforms asking them to remove posts. The guy Musk is supporting was happily asking Twitter to remove posts.

But let’s be clear, they were asking Twitter to enforce its rules. And you can argue that the government asking like that is illegal, but I’ve yet to see a guilty verdict in court so, until that happens, Twitter enforcing its rules isn’t censorship. No one has been denied their first amendment rights.

More importantly, by Musks own yardstick, Twitter is no longer the bastion of Free Speech it was when he took control. So regardless of what you think, Twitter is worse off now.

Wokeism as it pertains to social media’s discussion of the woke mind virus. Everyone has an opinion on it. But it’s not of practical relevance to most people, certainly not most voters. Sort of like modern art.

The issue is that many people who feel this way (seemingly Musk included) swing to the other extreme and embrace policy positions that only serve to further support and entrench systemic racism.

I’m not always comfortable with the methods and rhetoric of some social justice advocates, but I’m not going to present that as evidence that the movement they support is dangerous and we should strive for social injustice instead.

By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about “the woke mind virus”, or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.

When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.

> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan

Not how partisan affiliation works–think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren’t seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).

This surprises me (I believe you though!). I’ve read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I’d blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.

Tesla’s offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn’t mind experiencing one off the line.

Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn’t a depoliticization strategy, and if he’d wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.

There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.

I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.

Yep, and I know people who have sold their Teslas because they don’t want to be associated with Musk any longer.

It’s not only happening in the US but has also started to happen in other countries like Australia.

I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?

Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.

In any thread about EVs there is a typical HN commenter desperate to tell you that they drive a hybrid, not an EV like those silly virtue signalers.

For those who remember the vicious attacks on the Prius it’s a wild shift in attitude.

Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…

This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.

It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.

The thing that is so maddening is that we’re already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren’t really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define “something else”).

This is how science works. Being right is not “science”. Science is verb. If the questioners were right we would be calling them heroes.

The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.

If “woke” involves an understanding that media is mostly filtered through large corporations and crafts narratives used to serve the interests of the ruling class, I’m not surprised a billionaire owner of a media company would consider that a problem.

Rather than identifying actual problems people are facing, media wastes our time with irrelevant distractions. Don’t worry about the opioid epidemic. Don’t worry about the fact that kids increasingly can’t even read after graduating high school. Don’t worry about corporate consolidation and monopolies. You should be worrying about “wokeism”.

> accept the diktats of authority

Is this not what Musk is doing in China? Does he not believe the Chinese have a right to free speech? If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights, you might say that hurts the West.

China has a unilateral ban on all non-Chinese apps. Not just Twitter/X. They have the Great Firewall for a reason. Now for Musk to accept “diktats of authority”, X should have been operating in China in the first place. It is not since 2009 at least. Whereas X was operating in Brazil until few days ago.

> If he actually cared, he would speak out about it. The fact that he’s choosing Chinese money over human rights

When he did he got reprimanded by the Chinese CCP. He did not give a fuck (1).

> you might say that hurts the West

The West does more trade with China than with any other country. And yes it does hurt the West considering it is so dependent on China for everything including medicines! And a lot of that has to do with “wise men” in politics who decided it was cool to establish trade relations with a Dictatorship in the 1970s and ensured that the entire World’s supply chain relied on said Dictatorship. If not for these “wise men”, none of us would have been dependent on China in the first place.

(1): https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/28/chinas-ccp-warns-elon-musk-a…

“while Musk is a proponent of free speech, he believes that moderation on Twitter should ‘hew close to the laws of countries in which Twitter operates”

India has laws on content moderation, so does China, Turkey and other countries listed in the article. What Law in Brazil did X break? Or was it the whims and fancies of the Judge?

Quoting from X post below (1):

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.

We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that.

In the days to come, we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.

Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders.”

(1): https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1829296715989414281

Now he is slowly rolling back some of those hard won achievements, and competition catching up and/or overtaking in many others.

Firstly, Twitter took that down because it violated their long standing policy against doxxing/posting hacked materials, not for any political reason.

Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn’t really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.

And now it’s 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes).

That was a BS reason chosen by Twitter. Twitter Files exposed that already. You are late.

> Secondly, Twitter leadership realized very quickly that their policy wasn’t really designed for this specific event, and within a day they changed the policy and unblocked the posts that they had blocked.

Yeah you clearly haven’t read the Twitter Files. It shows.

> And now it’s 2 years later and uninformed people still bullshit here about election interference and this being a first amendment issue.

Because it clearly was and now even Zuckerberg has come out admitting that it was interference.

> (Twitter is a private company and can block whatever posts it likes)

Sure. But if FBI is involved, it does not become a Twitter issue alone but it becomes Government censorship through a private company. That is election interference and a first amendment violation.

I’m sure pre-Musk Twitter wouldn’t have lost the entire market in the 7th most populous country.

I’m not qualified to tell if the judge giving them is a partisan hack or not, just like I can’t make that distinction with the judges that Musk appears to shop for in the US with what others describe as SLAPP lawsuits.

But obeying a judge isn’t optional in either case.

To the individual representatives of a company? That’s very rare, and not common like you make it sound.

“The company you’re representing in this legal process hasn’t complied with my orders so I will have you personally arrested”.

Twitter refused the order, which means that Twitter is interfering with the legal process in Brazil. This sounds like “contempt of court” to me, which is a thing which results in a judge sending people to prison — no idea what it is in Brazil, but IIRC the maximum penalty in my country of birth is 2 years’ imprisonment.

Brazil’s legal system requires companies like Twitter to have an office in the country in order to receive such orders, which I think means it’s literally her job to make those orders happen. Regardless, by closing the office Twitter was directly violating Brazilian law.

As companies cannot themselves be imprisoned, I do not see what alternative there would be than directing obligations onto a specific human. Buck has to stop somewhere, and while I know a lot of people who would celebrate if this judge decided that the correct somewhere was “international arrest warrant/request extradition of Elon Musk personally”, I suspect this judge would have to go through a few more checkboxes before that doesn’t get “major diplomatic incident” written all over it.

(Perhaps less of an incident if it’s concurrent with the EU saying “We’re issuing Twitter with a 6% fine on their global annual turnover for non-compliance with the Digital Services Act”, which seems to be another battle Musk is Leeroy-Jenkins-ing himself into).

So your explanation should be rewritten as “remove people from the way of legal consequences from breaking local laws they/Musk can’t control (buy) in their favor”.

It sounds like the same thing but it’s the difference between fleeing persecution and fleeing prosecution.

But HN seems to think that Brazilians are NPCs without politics or constitution of their own.

DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.

You’re welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I’d hesitate to claim that these companies were “strongarmed” into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.

The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that’s been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. “We need to do this because it will look bad if we don’t” is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.

Sorry pal, you’re going to have to make it on merits, not your gender or skin color.

>See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.

Racial quotas in the workplace is not progress.

>At least I now know which to boycott..

Oh, so your boycotts are fine? Classic leftist hypocrisy.

But most of Europe is still sane, luckily.

Ps rather than blaming transsexualism it might be smarter to blame the Tories who have been skimming (and selling off to their own companies) the NHS until there was nothing left.

That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn’t concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)

Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn’t outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.

What I can say is that the protocol is a neutral global layer for data, which can then enable multiple applications with their own moderation policies and decisions. There’s always going to be moderation decisions we make that people will disagree with. The point is that something can be done about that disagreement – you can have other applications on the same network that makes their own decisions. I think one of the best things that could happen is that Brazilian developers fork the Bluesky app and build locally-owned social platforms on the atmosphere.

PS. Somehow all of this feels very natural when done by Musk. It kind of makes sense. It feels like “yes yes, he’d do this”.

You grant them power they asked. They don’t deal with it, but ask for more power. At some point they stop asking and label you as the problem.

more precisely wanted to understand how do you generate the event stream from sqlite

1. data repos are actually signed merkle trees, which gives at-rest authentication of the data as it gets shipped across organizational boundaries

Bluesky is built on atprotocol (atproto.com) and can be thought of as an open distributed system. The event stream is for replicating throughout the various services.

I wonder about:

> Hybrid on-prem & cloud.

I wonder about the factors/considerations that led to hosting a given data/services on-prem or outside. Were there purely technical considerations or were there also about “self host what can’t get leaked” (think GDPR, privacy concerns, things like that) ?

Moraes essentially wanted a hostage. Executives of companies shouldn’t be arrested for things they have no power over, such as content moderation. My guess is that Moraes wanted to force Musk’s company to not have a legal representative in the country, because the moment you know if you accept a job there’s a high chance that job will result in you being arrested, those business men and women won’t want that job. So Moraes clearly forced a situation that drove X out of the country.

If anything – it would still have been incredibly draconian and abusive from Moraes part – but it would have been “less bad” if the had skip the whole “arresting the legal representative” thing and had went straight to “block Twitter/X for not complying with his orders” part. But I guess Moraes really wanted to go for the “they didn’t have a representative in Brazil, so we ban it” narrative.

Which by the way, this requirement, even if it’s in the law, it surely not demanded from the vast majority of online companies that offer their service in Brazil. Otherwise they would have blocked Blue Sky as well, because (I assume) it doesn’t have legal representatives in the country. So at best this law is being selectively enforced.

If Twitter/X were to hire a rep in Brazil, regardless of the title they’re given, that rep would have little to no power over the moderation choices of the parent company.

Musk could choose to furnish the Brazil office of Twitter/X with the necessary resources to do content moderation to conform with local law. He chooses not to, with predictable consequences in terms of legal liability for any local representative.

Which is kind of weird and illegal in many countries, but in the US it is almost the norm.

“Is it ok for foreign companies offering services to Brazilian citizens to ignore Brazilian law? Even if that company is Twitter and it means you lose access to Twitter?”

The average person does not really care about what’s right or wrong or fair – just what’s in their interest.

The average person cannot or does not think – “But what if a bunch of other companies were doing this thing? What if we had to treat them all fairly?”

That’s why it’s good when you have a legal system that at least attempts to be fair – instead of just populist and doing whatever people want.

These decisions hold until ratified or rejected by the court as a whole (which they all eventually will, but it’s not fast) or successfully appealed. Appeals can be made only to another Justice or to the court as a whole – no expedited process, because there’s no higher authority.

Besides, who’d make the appeal? X has no representation in Brazil (that’s why it’s been suspended), and there seems to be consensus on that specific point, of legal representation being a requirement by law, so the general attorney or other officials will not question the main decision.

The side decisions are a different matter, that about VPN apps and app stores had been withdrawn. The fine for accessing X is more controversial: hardly enforceable (for just browsing, at least), ongoing hot debate in the country about it being within the Justice’s power.

In fact, the Court will probably expedite a whole court judgement on that, and apparently there’s no consensus across the Justices on that.

There seem to be two Supreme courts in Brasil, STF and STJ. Which one is … supreme-ier?

We are all still using it via VPN. We get all the govt related info from it, and no one is asking, how come the govt dept themselves are using twitter when it’s banned?

No one will move to bluesky/threads/mastodon because as I said everyone is on twitter.

Afterall, if I want to know about the next road blockage or electricity outage, I know I need to go to twitter to check, where else would I go?

these are bullship tactics, but they seem to be working, and the internet is fracturing. It was nice while it lasted, but we will no loner have a ‘world-wide’ web, just national networks with passport controls on accessing external nets.

Turned out officers run their entire dept on Whatsapp.

Everything is adhoc, emails are in the old 2MB email, 50 MB inbox era, websites have not been updated since they were created and only page that gets changed is the organogram, (got to advertise the new minister in charge).

So no websites are NOT a reliable source of info. For example, there does infact exist a website to check loadshedding and work shutdown schedules… but my area was split off from a previous feeder and now has a new feeder code, but the website was not updated so I don’t updated for my meter.

But I can check the twitter account and see tomorrow’s shutdowns, and if I am regular, I can be prepped for tomorrow’s 5 hr shutdown.

same for other things like road closures, due to protests or security corridor or whatever. Maybe other things, twitter is the best source of info.

Officers maintain an active twitter profile (despite the ban!) because ministers also are there, and they want their work to be visible.

If your boss sees the tweets of your work and people praising you in the comments, that improves your chances of a promotion and better postings.

Personally I would check my providers website/status page in such circumstances.

I hate than many providers now consider updates to Twitter/ Other social media sufficient and do not bother to publish to their own website!

So I read that this is all because musk refused to appoint a Brazilian citizen as an X representative, as dictated by Brazilian law. I have not verified this part.

Musk refused because the last person to fill that role had all their bank accounts frozen by the judge.

The judge also cut off payments from Brazilian citizens to starlink, something about relating star link to x. so musk said “well then starlink is free for Brazilian citizens because I don’t want to cut people off from their internet connection.” Or something like that.

Edit: blackeyedblitzar child comment of this has better information.

The whole thing started because X refused to take down posts judged as defamatory against some politicians in Brazil, as well as some profiles accused of consistently posting fake news and borderline illegal content. One can disagree with the ruling and appeal, but ignoring a Supreme Court Justice order is not a legal option, which led to the escalation.

True that no one would want to step in as a legal representative of X in Brazil right now, but that doesn’t change the legal requirement – it exists so that the State has the power to enforce law over companies effectively operating in the country. The US is doing something similar (in process, motivations are quite different) by threatening to ban TikTok, for instance.

The Starlink ruling is mostly being considered an overreach by the Justice. It may take some time, but it will likely be withdrawn. Him deciding to keep the service for free, as long as it complies with the law, bears no matter and should be read most likely as a publicity stunt.

It’s only for existing customers and because they can’t charge them anymore, but don’t want to drop the customers just yet. It’s a business continuity plan, not some altruistic gesture.

What a goofy assertion.

Yeah, the big concern for Starlink and Musk is maintaining non-paying customers.

It’s not altruism either, it’s political.

I made the comment, because parent suggested that starlink did something for the citizens in general. That’s not correct. The good they did was incidental to preserving customers until they can start charging again.

And specifically I mentioned that, because the good part gets played up as some kind of freedom stance by many people online… but it’s not. Even the announcement didn’t describe it as such.

Musk could cut off Brazilian Starlink subscribers in the hopes that the backlash would change things in Brazil. But instead he probably thinks keeping those customers on (and happy) for free is the better choice for his business.

I agree with you that altruism exists, but I’m not sure I’m willing to give Musk the benefit of the doubt for many of the decisions he makes.

The root of the issue is that Alexandre de Moraes, a single justice on the Supreme Court, has been issuing secret orders to censor content, ban accounts, and jail people over political speech. This is unconstitutional in Brazil per article 5 of the 1988 constitution, so X refused the orders. Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”). If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries.

Also the “Musk refused” part isn’t accurate. Ultimately these decisions are made by Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X.

This is unconstitutional according to their interpretation of the (very extensive and vague) article 5 of the 1998 constitution, maybe. At the same time, if you disagree with a judicial order, you probably should appeal the order, rather than refuse/ignore it. Ignoring judicial orders has consequences.

> Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”).

It says a lot of things (that can be interpreted in many ways). Note that it also says “é livre a manifestação do pensamento, *sendo vedado o anonimato*”. Did Twitter/X refuse to give information about accounts, after having been asked by the Supreme Court? If yes, then it can also be said that they are breaking article 5 of the 1988 constitution.

In general, constitutional laws (in Brazil and elsewhere) tend to be rather vague. The devil is in the details. Just because it says somewhere that “é livre a expressão da atividade intelectual, artística, científica e de comunicação, independentemente de censura ou licença”, doesn’t mean that you are free to express your art of screaming “fire” in a crowded theater, for instance.

> If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries.

In general, a person (or other legal entity) are not free to pick and choose what laws or judicial orders they want to follow, depending on their own interpretation of the law. Or, I mean… they can… but there are usually consequences to ignoring judicial orders.

Also, it probably is not a great idea to try to intimidate/aggravate/insult/threaten the judge (https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1829005086606901481…) during those legal proceedings. Judges tend to not love that.

If the argument is that it is illegal to “censor”, due to the Brazilian constitution, then Twitter is already engaging in illegal behaviour whenever it bans accounts (or auto-removes tweets) for using terms Musk dislikes (like “cis” or “cisgender”).

I really don’t buy the “free speech” argument here, since Twitter has never been an “absolute free speech” space to begin with. Note that Musk had no problem censoring and banning accounts when asked by the Turkish or Indian governments.

In the US first amendment protections only apply to the government. Is that different in Brazil?

Furthermore, there is already a precedent here: both Telegram and Meta have been previously (temporarily) banned from Brazil until they decided to comply with judicial orders (after which, they were unbanned again). Why does Twitter think they are special in this regard?

If the judicial order is (correctly) justified by an inconstitutional law, then it’s that specific law that has to be challenged, not the judicial order.

Sure, but we are not discussing the first amendment, or US law in general. As you must be aware, protection of freedom of expression rights are different in different jurisdictions.

> Obviously I’m not fully aware how exactly this works in Brazil but I doubt if it’s fundamentally different.

I would not be so sure. For example, it is not legal to display a swastika in Germany (even though Germany is usually considered a democratic rule-of-law country), even though it might be legal to do so in the US.

> That’s still unreasonable.

Just stating this (without any further argumentation) doesn’t make it so. My only point is that, apparently, there is legal precedence for such kinds of things (i.e., banning a certain social network when it refuses to appoint a legal representative in Brazil).

> Also you’re still dodging the VPN ban order…

I’m not dodging anything… that is a different issue, that we can further discuss, if you want to have a discussion in good faith. Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made could be seen as moving goalposts, though.

> Anyway.. I understand that authoritarianism has a certain appeal to some people (…).

Ad hominem argumentation is not the best approach to argumentation, if you want to be taken seriously and have a discussion in good faith.

I assume that the judge in question used a specific criminal or civil law to justify his judicial order. If Twitter believes this law to be unconstitutional, the correct venue for their legal recourse is the Constitutional Court, not the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, until the Constitutional Court decides to hear their challenge and (possibly) revoke the law in question (possibly with retroactive effects), they still have to comply with judicial orders.

From what I understand, the Senate (if they believe the judge in question to be acting outside the law) has the necessary powers to boot the judge from the Supreme Court, if necessary. Twitter doesn’t, sorry.

> Nobody is arguing about that, though.

People are arguing based on the supposed protection that the Brazilian constitution reserves for freedom of expression. This protection is not absolute, though (as pointed out by my example).

And constitutional law is not something that is directly applied: it mostly serves as guiding principles for the production of specific civil and criminal laws by the legislative power.

“This judicial order is inconstitutional” is simply a bad argument (from a legal point-of-view); a much more reasonable argument is “this judicial order is justified/based on an unconstitutional law” (but that is not the argument that is being made, as far as I can tell). If the judge is justifying his orders based on an inconstitutional law, then you should challenge the law itself, not the judicial order (if you can’t really challenge the judicial order, which seems to be the case).

> Maybe appointing people who behave like schoolchildren to the supreme court is not the best idea then?

You do know that there is a law regulating so-called “deepfakes” in Brazil, right? (https://legis.senado.leg.br/sdleg-getter/documento?dm=929278…)

For someone who claims to be concerned about Brazilian law, Musk sure seems willing to ignore Brazilian laws, whenever it suits him.

Also, maybe it’s not just the judge that is acting like a schoolchild, in this context. What do you think is going to happen if you talk back and threaten a judge with being arrested, even in a US court of law? Usually not fun things.

Initially, consequences were not that bad (take down of some illegal posts), then they went to removal of recurring offender profiles.X ignored those Supreme Court Justice orders – their only legal course of action being to comply and file an appeal to the Supreme Court as a whole. That led to further escalation against their legal representation in Brazil and their executives (which is according to Brazilian law), which led to Musk shutting down the local representation rather than following the local law. Which put X in a non-compliance state and led to the order for its blocking.

If you understand the initial order to take down posts of defamation and illegal speech as censorship, you comply and appeal. Ignoring a court order is not a legal option.

In Brazil you can go to jail for a slur against a queer person. That is not the case in the U.S.

The question is not about Freedom of Speech, it is about changing the laws on what is protected and illegal speech. I do not like Musk as a person, but what he is doing is an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is the active, and professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government.

I am wary of the tightening fence around what is protected speech. I am a historian, and the censors never end up being the good guys.

False, there was no due process. Twitter/X’s appeals were not even heard by the Supreme Court, which is probably in part because of the inherent conflict of interest given that the illegal secret censorship orders come from a Supreme Court justice. And also, why are you saying “Musk” did not comply – he’s not CEO of Twitter/X, just someone criticizing Alexandre de Moraes and the state of censorship and democracy in Brazil.

> It’s not, in the slightest, censorship at all.

Now that some of the secret orders have been published, we see that it is indeed literal censorship as claimed by Twitter/X. De Moraes unilaterally decided that accounts belonging to current elected officials should be deleted in secret. That is literally, completely, censorship.

> The continuous disregard of Brazilian laws meant that Musk, which in addition do not paid the fines, also removed his legal representatives from the country, which is not permitted by our legislation.

Stop being dishonest about the situation. You know full well that Twitter/X removed their legal representative because Alexandre de Moraes threatened them personally, with fines, jail time, and even froze their personal financial assets. That is an incredibly authoritarian action. Twitter/X had to close their office to avoid having their staff similarly persecuted. It is a giant embarrassment to Brazil in the world’s eye but also a gross violation of civil liberties.

If there are “election rules” that regulate what can be posted online, that’s censorship. Even if people are inciting violence or formenting revolution, banning them is censorship.

Most governments participate in censorship, and most people are OK with some level of censorship. But Brazil’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech without censorship, so their courts have no business issuing orders to censor social media.

This is a bad litmus test. Courts order fraudsters to stop doing fraud all the time. It’s censorship. But it’s acceptable censorship, even in America where we have a uniquely-potent First Amendment.

That can’t work in reality though. So at best it can only be a theoretical ideal, merely a guideline for practical legislation. Same way French constitution has equal rights for all citizen baked into its constitution for more than a century.

Each day the popular vocabulary shrinks more and more, until we’re back at cave man levels. Tower of Babylon.

Said “freedom of expression” in Brazil is constrained by the following paragraphs, that for example explicitly:

IV – requires anything considered “free speech” to be explicitly non-anonymous.

V – anything considered “free speech” must pay compensation to harmed third parties.

X – “free speech” can’t violate the personal privacy and honor of third parties.

XVII – “free speech” doesn’t apply to you if you’re trying to assemble a paramilitary force.

It is not “free speech” in the “I speak what I want” sense at all. Violation of those rules isn’t considered “censorship” because you didn’t have the rights (to be anonymous, to harm others, and to assemble juntas) to start with.

You cited term X which says people’s intimacy, private life, honor and image are inviolable. Looks like you didn’t finish reading it though. Right after those words is written the following:

> the right to be indemnified for the material or moral damage secondary to their violation is guaranteed

It basically says you’re entitled to a payday if someone damages your privacy or reputation.

Nowhere does it say that censorship is warranted. The constitution goes out of its way to explicitly mention that censorship is prohibited multiple times and in multiple places.

> The expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific and communication activity is free, independently of censorship or license

> Any and all censorship of political, ideological or artistic nature is prohibited

I know nothing about Brazilian law. But in general, we always create exceptions to free speech when balancing harms. Spam filtering. Fraud. Et cetera.

You certainly can, but it usually takes the form of defying the order and appealing to a higher court for a stay pending trial and then hopefully and eventually a reversal of the order when hopefully it is indeed found to be unconstitutional or otherwise illegal.

Unconstitutional in which country? And if you disagree with that in Brazil you can make your case to the Supreme Court.

Musk was playing chicken with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who called his bluff. He obviously lost, because the latter has immediate legal power and X doesn’t.

The way I see this: the Supreme Court asked X to remove content and accounts that main purpose were to promote hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions; X didn’t comply; fines were issued; fines were never paid by X; the justice started using all available legal tools to fulfill the previous mandates (content removal and/or pecuniary penalties).

If you are going to post here, you need to engage in good faith. A five second search could have brought you to numerous articles quoting Lula where he supports Alexandre de Moraes’s actions and criticizes Musk. So yes, the executive and the judiciary are mixed because one is lending support publicly to the other. Those are the FACTS.

> The way I see this: the Supreme Court asked X to remove content and accounts that main purpose were to promote hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions

It doesn’t matter if accounts promote “hate and aggression towards the electoral system and institutions” (which just sounds like hyperbole for criticizing political processes) – that isn’t sufficient grounds for state enforced censorship in any free and democratic society. If you want to admit that Brazil has turned authoritarian, that’s one thing. But these convoluted narratives are wildly inaccurate and unconvincing.

You’re guessing wrong.

> It is unconstitutional in Brazil, because Article 5 explicitly says there is a right for anyone in the country – citizens and visitors – to freedom of expression without censorship. It actually says the part about censorship, emphasizing its place in the constitution.

I’m familiar with Article 5 and the rest of the Brazilian Constitution. Yes, freedom of expression but not unlimited freedom. There is no shortage of examples of limits to this right. Here’s one arguably lengthy but compelling opinion piece dated from 2021, so prior to this situation and therefore unbiased, which argues that Brazilian Law draws the line at “inciting violence” whether against people or institutions: https://direito.usp.br/noticia/4bdc11296800-os-limites-a-lib…

Importantly the author supports that challenging the government in the form of speech is fine, but not in the form of inciting violence.

> The justice in question here, Alexandre de Moraes, sits on the Supreme Court equivalent in Brazil. He’s the one issuing secret orders. He has support of the sitting president, Lula, since these actions are against Lula’s political opposition. The other justices are not free to speak against this practice because the aggressiveness of the current regime creates fear of speaking against them. Also, keep in mind there isn’t a due process to challenge these orders both because they are from a justice in the highest court and because they are done in secret, outside the public’s visibility, as it would normally be in due process. Separate from the free speech concerns, this part is also unconstitutional as you cannot have courts or tribunals outside the normal due process.

I mean, this is ultimately just a biased political take and does not hold actually hold water under any reasonable interpretation of due process in Brazil. Supreme court judges need not consult with the populace to make legal decisions. Here’s the whole decision laying out the facts: https://www.conjur.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PET-124…

> Musk is his own person. Twitter/X is not run by Musk, but a different CEO, Linda Yaccarino. The company made these decisions to refuse the secret orders, because Twitter/X’s legal team determined they are illegal under Brazilian law. It’s not about calling anyone’s bluff but appealing to the public as a last means to fight authoritarianism.

Musk owns Twitter and ultimately decides what it does. The CEO doesn’t truly have final say, the owner ultimately does. The CEO is an employee of the company. The “fight authoritarianism” saber rattling is tiring and inaccurate. There is no “secret” decision. It’s all a matter of public record, as I’ve linked you to.

As in Brazil constitution? They don’t have free speech, but freedom of expression. Read article 5 of the Brazilian constitution.

I – a soberania;

II – a cidadania;

******III – a dignidade da pessoa humana;**** (The dignity of human being being assured)

Then it comes the Art 5:

  Art. 5º Todos são iguais perante a lei, sem distinção de qualquer natureza, garantindo-se aos brasileiros e aos estrangeiros residentes no País a inviolabilidade do direito à vida, ''''''à liberdade'''''' (freedom, not only speech), à igualdade, à segurança e à propriedade, nos termos seguintes:

(…)

IV – é livre a manifestação do pensamento, sendo vedado o anonimato.
V – é assegurado o direito de resposta, proporcional ao agravo, além da indenização por dano material, moral ou à imagem; (…)

In none of art 5 parts it says the freedom of thought and of expression is Absolute, on contrary, i let here for you guys translate yourselves the paragraph V… It’s not censorship when you comit a crime, you lose your freedom when you comit a crime (depend on the aggravation of course, its penalty dosimetry)

> “IX. expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free, independent of any censorship or license”

And note that the introductory text that precedes this reads:

> “Everyone is equal before the law, with no distinction whatsoever, guaranteeing to Brazilians and foreigners residing in the Country the inviolability of the rights to life, liberty, equality, security and property, on the following terms:”

In other words, “communication activity” (which posting on Twitter obviously constitutes) is protected without censorship.

Source: https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Brazil_2014?l…

Which means Freedom (including of Speech) in its very conception is more bounded that the US notion of Free Speech (which, even though also limited, is less restrictive).

However, Free Speech based on the First Amendment only applies to the individual’s relations with the State. A private employer in the US can fire an employee for saying something that doesn’t reflect the values of the company, even if that speech was lawful. In France (and I assume most Freedom of Speech countries), the constitutional protection applies even with private entities and an employee cannot be fired for a lawful speech. .

But the whole point of freedom of speech is for situations where it does “harm others”. If nobody has a problem with your speech, then you don’t need laws to protect it. The protection is only useful if speech comes into conflict with someone.

Freedom of speech doesn’t stop where somebody else’s rights begin, it starts there. There is no need for freedom of speech before that.

Broadly speaking, freedom of speech can mean two roughly orthogonal things:

1. Lack of government censorship.

2. Freedom of speech as an outcome: a society where people can speak their minds without excessive consequences.

Sense 2 is inherently vague and can’t be regulated, as people won’t agree on when the consequences are excessive. But it’s usually what people want when they care about the freedom of speech.

The two senses are sometimes opposed. If you say something other people find unpleasant and a million people decide to ruin your life, it’s clearly against freedom of speech in sense 2. But if you have laws against such mob justice, they can easily violate freedom of speech in sense 1.

Freedom of speech in sense 2 is more about culture than government regulations. If you have a highly polarized society, you can’t have freedom of speech in that sense.

Who decides if someone is harmed? Did I really harm someone if I called them a homophobic slur? Can I say that someone harmed me if the mispronounce my name?

Shouting “fire” in a crowded theater; prior restraint, as is the case for e.g. restricted data under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954; copyright…

Their shareholders don’t want controversies screwing up their investment, so the management acted accordingly in the company’s best interest.

If the order is illegal you show that in court. U.S. district courts constantly issue illegal orders. There is a massive difference between appealing for an emergency stay and just blowing off the court. (Musk is a brilliant entrepreneur. He has given zero shits about the rule of law across his career, domestically or abroad.)

At the end of the day, both sides in this case are posturing. The judge gets to act like he’s standing up to us American imperialists. Musk gets affirmation from his anti-work censorship crowd. The fact that X f/k/a Twitter has zero employees in Brazil should tell you how much that market really matters to him.

> Ultimately these decisions are made by Linda Yaccarino

This is nonsense. I have a lot of respect for senior people on the X team as well as many of their shareholders. Yaccarino is an obvious puppet.

Oh, I totally agree with you. But they’re not worth negative money. This was a cheap stunt for both sides to pull off. But it’s still a stunt. X’s TAM has been cut. Brazil’s reputation harmed. But both men have personal interests that make those costs worth it, and there isn’t anyone in their respective domains who can check them.

He’s obviously known for his hands off “I just allocate capital” attitude towards his businesses.

There are various ways to resolve a conflict; to comply to your opponent’s demands just because he happens to hold a high enough office is but one of these ways. Complying to unlawful orders so as to preserve profits is often seen as corruption. Sometimes the best way to resolve a conflict correctly is to take a stand.

Anyways, Alexandre de Moraes – the Supreme Court justice in this situation – is acting unconstitutionally in multiple ways. Issuing orders to censor, ban, or arrest in secret is depriving the victims of due process and the public of accountability. He also said himself that he is not getting his powers from law but from what the other court he sits on gave him as a new power, which is just a made up legal invention on his part. How can a court make up legal powers, when that is meant to come from the constitution and legislation?

> And Musk didn’t fight as hard in India or Turkey for accounts of people that did far less.

You are one among many attempting the whataboutism of bringing up Turkey and India, even though it has no bearing on what is happening in Brazil. I don’t agree with censorship in any of these cases. However, Twitter/X has publicly stated that their policy is to comply with local laws in each country. The difference is in the legality of orders per that country’s own laws. In Brazil, there is a right to freedom of expression without censorship, per article 5 of the constitution. Also another difference is that the censorship orders here were done in secret – like with gag orders that make it invisible to the public – and this is both highly unethical but also makes this judge unaccountable and difficult to challenge.

Unless you were already part in an attempt than it’s more likely you aren’t just express your opinion but coordinate your next attempt over social media.

Free speech has limit. Just look at Charles Manson, he didn’t kill anybody but he talked others into.

You wouldn’t call Russian orders through Telegram free speech, would you?

The same entity behaves differently on the same issue but from different requester.

By your logic every complain about racism is whataboutism.

“Why got the black man jailed for drug possession but white man got probation?

“Whataboutism!!!”