X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge’s content orders

Posted on by Vaseline

Brazilian here. If anyone wants a great introduction to the context and the bigger picture, there’s this great article from the NYT in 2022, written by an excellent reporter who lives in Brazil. I highly recommend this article to anyone who hasn’t lived in Brazil for the last 10 years:

“To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?“

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/world/americas/bolsonaro-…

https://archive.is/plQFT

It covers the judge at the center of the current issue: “Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal. And this year, 10 of the court’s 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a livestream.“

Rumble has been blocked in Brazil for over a year, and WhatsApp and Telegram have been briefly blocked multiple times.

From the same article:

> Brazil’s Supreme Court has drastically expanded its power to counter the antidemocratic stances of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.

The title is a leading question. I can come up with different titles for the same article or topic, that could be leading somewhere else:

1. Brazil Top Court’s Actions to Defend Democracy

2. A View On Moraes’ Decisions In Face Of The Crisis Created By Bolsonaro

3. Brazil’s Supreme Court Reaction After The Presidency Went Too Far

—

A legitimate question I have is:

What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

(Not a trick question, an honest one given the crisis)

> What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

I am not familiar with Bolsonaro’s movement, but censoring people under the guise of protecting democracy doesn’t seem very democratic to me? At the very least, you have to admit here that there is a slippery slope where a good intentioned government or justice system could progressively get further away from these good intentions, and start using its power merely for the preservation of it?

It seems to me that censoring ideas that seem dangerous is far more dangerous than trying to correct them, and that a very high level of free speech is one of the most powerful antidotes against this slippery slope.

> there is a slippery slope where a good intentioned government or justice system could progressively get further away from these good intentions, and start using its power merely for the preservation of it?

That wasn’t what happened.

It’s not like we had a left leaning judge favouring a left leaning party, it’s Moraes, a conservative technician fight an extreme right antidemocratic movement.

The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself. Because to expect a democratic government never to act undemocratically is to expect it to be replaced by a fascists regimen given time.

> The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself.

To answer this question you first have to define what democracy is.

A decent definition is probably something like, a system of government in which policy is decided by having a public debate in which anyone can participate and then, after everyone has had a chance to say their piece, policy is chosen through voting.

From this you immediately run into potential problems. For example, suppose the majority is quite fond of the current leadership and wants to put them in power forever and stop holding elections. Is that democratic? It’s the policy people are voting for. And yet, it would be the end of democracy, so the answer has to be no.

From this we discern that in order to have a democracy, there have to be certain things the government is never allowed to do, even if they’re what the majority wants. You can’t cancel elections, censor the opposition, throw people in jail without due process, etc. These types of things are inherently undemocratic, regardless of what the majority wants, because if the government does them you no longer have a democracy.

It should go without saying that the government can never do these things to “save democracy” because they are the very things that destroy it.

It’s not clear what kind of distinction you’re trying to draw or why it would be relevant. Some kind of representative democracy where policy is chosen by something more involved than a majority popular vote would still have to be just as forbidden from engaging in tyrannical activities that influence the public discourse or the mechanisms the populace uses to express their preferences.

The heart of the argument for the person advocating democracy here is centered on the idea that democracy, by its nature, must protect certain fundamental principles, even if those principles are threatened by a majority or by actions claimed to be in defense of democracy itself.

They emphasize (in good faith I might add) that certain actions, such as censoring the opposition, canceling elections, or jailing people without due process, are inherently undemocratic and would destroy democracy if allowed, regardless of the intentions behind them. The argument is that democracy must adhere to its own rules and principles, even in the face of threats, because violating those principles in the name of protecting democracy ultimately leads to its destruction.

You can’t “protect Democracy” by violating its core tenants.

I feel like your arguments are more whataboutism than substantive.

That’s not remotely similar to any of the established definitions.

Those tends to be based on variants of democracy being “institutions that enable a peaceful transfer of power”. This usually includes the so called democratic freedoms, overseeing journalists, and a non-politicized judicial system.

Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty. Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You want a democratic government to have “undemocratic” guardrails, because otherwise you are ok with mob rule. Democracy without rules is pure and simple majority rule. You do not want this. Unless of course you are ok with slavery, going back hangings, etc. If that’s the case, I rest my case.

You want democracy to be prevented from acting out on its passions by a balance of powers.

IN the brazil case, the state powers, and the brazilian voters are not preventing 1 judge from acting out his passion “to protect democracy”. Ergo, this is the problem. The mob is granting him this power, when in fact it should be voters, via congress or even the office of the president which brings this loose cannon of a judge back within the powers given by the constitution of brazil.

In this case, brazil is behaving like a raw democracy. It is true majority rule. Laws apply as the majority sees fit.

Hope you don’t end in the minority.

Nope, you’re spinning it.

The mob rule here is Bolsonaro’s, and in no functioning democracy are multiple Powers (legislative, governmental and judicial) collected into 1 hand.

If a judge goes out of control it’s another judge’s task to regain it, or an independent Judicial court.

The idea that another judge or an independent judicial body should intervene if a judge is overstepping is consistent with how a system of checks and balances should function in a Democracy and I think you are largely correct.

However, whether the judiciary in Brazil is actually overstepping or properly fulfilling its role is a matter of interpretation and context.

The broader and very much core question is whether the actions taken by the judiciary, such as censoring social media or jailing individuals without trial, are justified under the circumstances or if they themselves undermine democratic principles. This is the same basic issue I made my other comment about in your series of replies.

This is a nuanced issue that can be debated from different perspectives and much more of a subjective question, and it’s important to separate the issues.

> The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself.

I would say it should not do that essentially ever? If so, what kinds of undemocractic behavior would be allowed and what isn’t? You probably have a certain kind of behavior in mind that you want to allow when you pose this question. If so, why not legislate that behavior using the democratic process?

It seems to me that the argument that protecting democracy by undemocratic means is okay, is essentially the same argument that a benevolent dictator is superior to democracy. Both arguments give special power to a certain group or individual that others do not have, which can be used to go outside the system if things don’t work out. First order this argument is plausible. But second order effects (there is no such thing as categorically benevolent, and characters change, especially when in power) will always ruin it.

Democracy is messy. And when the world changes, there are challenges that democracy has to overcome. We’re in the middle of a few of those changes right now. But the mess in by design. I believe that if we give up on a very high democratic standard things will turn out for the worse. My one addition here would be that in my view democracy is necessary but not suffient to get to a prosperous society. It needs to go hand in hand with a common value system where there’s fellowship between citizens and genuine respect for individual right and the law. If not, there’s a risk that the majority will only cater to itself.

You cannot protect a democracy against anti-democratic forces through purely democratic means. Riots and political violence are an expression of speech and arresting the perpetrators takes away their democratic freedoms. Should an ideal democracy do nothing during such events?

> You cannot protect a democracy against anti-democratic forces through purely democratic means. Riots and political violence are an expression of speech and arresting the perpetrators takes away their democratic freedoms. Should an ideal democracy do nothing during such events?

In a democracy, policy has the ability to arrest perpetrators by force if they break the law. The key thing is that the law the perpetrators are breaking was approved democratically, and that there is due process by an independent judiciary. Democracy does not mean that there never is any violence.

In that case you get to the opposite problem. It is entirely possible to democratically legislate democracy away as long as your group holds power for long enough with a super-majority.

Yes, democracy is subject to a 51% attack, like blockchain stuff. Better than a 1% or 10% attack though. Some countries like the US have a constitution that can only be changed by a majority >> 50%, offering additional but still not full protection. This is why I mentioned it’s also desirable to have a common value system among the citizenry. In the end, a country has to be more than just laws and voting, and at some point people have to actually get along and make it work together.

Definitely agree there, a democracy cannot function without the majority making concessions to the minority. Concessions like not changing the law to keep themselves in power forever.

This is why constitutions exist, and courts to prevent breaches of those constitutions. This is why judges are often appointed, especially top ones, so that a change in government does not mean all checks and bounds are immediately gone. This is also why many countries have multiple legislative houses, so that one election cannot give unlimited power to one legislative house.

Thus it takes longer to slide into an undemocratic state, and checks and bounds are slower to change than a simple election. In essence, laws passed in such democracies becomes the will of the people over decades, not one election.

If a democracy has a will to move towards undemocratic rule, and it takes decades to get there, then really the people have failed themselves.

I live in The Netherlands, we have do not have a constitutional court and we still have a monarchy. A proposal to amend the constitution requires a simple majority in both houses of Parliament after which you have to call a general election. The general election is the only opportunity for someone outside of Parliament to stop it.

After the general election the amendment has to be voted on by both houses of Parliament again and win by a super-majority. Thus it is technically possible to disband Parliament and return all power back to the King within a year without the courts having any power to stop it.

So in case Parliament suddenly decides we should go back to an absolute monarchy, then we’re only one general election away from completely dismantling democracy.

The term speech is very broadly defined in law. A purely physical act can be speech in a certain context. It does not have to literally involve an exchange of words.

Many protests may turn into riots, that does not suddenly mean that the people involved in the violence are no longer expressing an opinion.

The term speech is very broadly defined because there are a lot of ways to convey meaning. Some of them then become ambiguous and you have to resolve those ambiguities and that gets messy. But only the messy cases are messy. Riots characteristically aren’t a messy case, they’re violence in the same way that publishing a newspaper article is speech.

Moreover, if you mess up the messy cases then you should try to do better but society will probably survive, whereas if you censor in the cases that are pure speech or don’t punish the actions that are pure violence, you’re the baddies.

> Riots characteristically aren’t a messy case

Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence. Sometimes there are even saboteurs within the protest that try and lure out violent incidents in an attempt to get the protest to be declared a riot.

Finding the right balance between allowing demonstrations and keeping the peace and order is one of the most challenging aspects of democracy.

> Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

The people intending a purely peaceful display of dissent don’t smash or set fire to anything, even if the people standing next to them do. Now, the court may have some trouble here with evidence because you then have to distinguish these people from one another, but that has become much less of a problem in modern days when everybody has a cellphone camera and police can be issued bodycams.

Either way this is a question of fact rather than a question of law.

> On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence.

Declaring something a riot shouldn’t mean anything. If a specific person is breaking windows and looting they’re breaking the law. If they’re just standing there holding signs they’re not.

It shouldn’t be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

> It shouldn’t be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

Have you ever met a cop before? The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork, and the whole court system is stacked against the arrested unless they can afford non-court-appointed lawyers to pave their way. Guilt-by-association doesn’t magically disappear from the psyche when handing someone power and a gun, rather it gets easier to apply indiscriminately because it’s very hard for people to oppose the one with authority over their freedom and state-sanctioned license to be violent.

I think the point when people start saying “you have to do the reverse of X to preserve X” is the right time for them to look in the mirror and check not wearing clown getup

I don’t know if a well-designed democratic government needs to act undemocratically ever.

For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is able to expand its powers, but it can always be overridden by the legislative branch by design. The executive branch doesn’t even have to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings. And the legislative and executive can be replaced by citizens.

By design, the US Constitution basically has an infinite loop of checks and balances – there is always another institution that can override one institution without breaking any rules.

That said, the buck does stop, but it stops at the people. The problem is that people do need to be well-informed and vigilant to for the this scheme to work out, but to be honest, that is not a problem specifically with democracy — it’s just a general societal problem.

There have been recent Supreme Court rulings that many would say are disagreeable, but we’re not doing anything about it because a lot of citizens either support it or just don’t care. But if citizens did, we could easily undo those decisions using the rules set out by the Constitution. So the problem really lies more with the people than the system.

Now I’m not familiar with the Brazilian political system — who checks the Supreme Court there? I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.

> I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.

A lot of this is more fragile than you want it to be though.

For example, the US Constitution was set out to have a weak federal government and have the state governments handle all the things that didn’t specifically need to be federal, and one of the biggest checks and balances for this was that federal legislation had to pass the Senate and federal Senators were elected by the state legislatures. The Senate was the states’ representation in the federal government, that’s what it was for. Then the 17th amendment took it away, which was immediately followed by a persistent massive expansion of federal power, because the thing that was meant to act as a check on it got deleted.

Sometimes the checks and balances need more checks and balances.

– who checks the Supreme Court there?

In theory, the Senate can check the Supreme Court by impeaching the judges, the problem is that the Supreme Court checks all the senators and congressmen, by being the only one who can prosecute them.

9 out of 11 Supreme Court judges were indicated by the Labor Party (Lula and Dilma) in the last 20 years, some closely related to Lula. They can do anything they want, without worrying about elections. The president of Brazil doesn’t matter anymore, at least for the next couple of presidential elections.

If it’s outside democratic bounds, what is being preserved is not a democracy anymore. Why preserve it then? So it serves autocrats better? “We must become fascists so other fascists don’t take over” is not a very convincing principle.

In this case it sounds like Moraes threatened to arrest Brazilian X employees if the company didn’t comply with its requests.

That is wildly outside democratic norms IMO. Not just the arrest of individual employers, but the threat of which coming directly from a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

> It’s not like we had a left leaning judge favouring a left leaning party

Why does this matter?

> The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself.

Democracy is not an being. When you act democratically, that’s democracy. When you act undemocratically, that’s against democracy. Acting democratically is when the justification for your rule comes from the desires of the people ruled. When you believe it’s fine to silence (or officially harass, imprison or kill) people whose desires don’t conform with yours, you are actively working against democracy.

The biggest scam of the centrist blob is convincing some (comfortable, middle-class) people that they’re insiders who own democracy, so all of their anti-democratic behavior becomes democratic by definition.

> It’s not like we had a left leaning judge favouring a left leaning party, it’s Moraes, a conservative technician fight an extreme right antidemocratic movement.

… Uhuh.

These are supreme court judges who openly and publicly showboat about being the ones personally responsible for defeating Bolsonaro. They literally said things like “mission given, mission accomplished” after the election was over. I saw news where one of them said he was proud to be partidarian. They’ve also said that Lula being elected was due to decisions of the supreme court.

And you would have us believe they did not favor Lula in any way whatsoever.

It seems that way to me too, but we have examples of high-censorship, high-freedom societies like Germany, and high-censorship, low-freedom societies like Singapore, and both report high levels of happiness.

The devil really is in the details.

>high-censorship, high-freedom societies like Germany

When the police storms your home (the wrong one at first, too) because you called a minister a dick on Twitter, that’s not “high-freedom”.

> Singapore is not a high censorship/low freedom society

Singapore constrains freedom quite substantially.

Singapore’s parliamentary political system has been dominated by the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the family of current prime minister Lee Hsien Loong since 1959. The electoral and legal framework that the PAP has constructed allows for some political pluralism, but it constrains the growth of opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.

Deeper Analysis of Political Rights and Civil Liberties:

https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202…

I guess “high censorship” is subjective, but you can’t protest without a police permit, media organizations are licensed by the government, certain foreign media have been effectively banned when when they made statements the government didn’t like, you can’t put on a play without script approval by the government, all movies are presented by the government, and libel laws have been used to bankrupt political opponents, forcing them out of government.

Seems pretty “high” censorship to me.

Well your question leads straight to the “Paradox of Intolerance”.

It’s indeed tricky, but the sorting criteria is: once in power, would these people club me to death, or let go of power if they lost a free election?

Censoring isn’t the same as investigating the use of bots and fake news to spread rumors and lies for polítics gain and literal profit. The right tries to confuse people by mixing their crimes with free speech.

Investigating with the intent to suppress information you find objectionable is literally the definition of censorship. The reuters article makes it clear they intended to follow through legality be damned.

The justice just demanded information about the people behind a few accounts. That’s more than fair of a justice system to ask and if a network thinks they are above a country’s law they should definitely leave. The printscreens of the orders are nothing burgers.

This is why I like the United States. The first rule is freedom of speech. I hate Trump and I hate the right, I think Trump should be jailed for at least a decade for his attempts to destroy American democracy (fake elector scheme, inaction on Jan 6, pressuring of legislators during Jan 6), but I’d be out there protesting with everyone else if Trump could be jailed simply for spreading falsehoods in general.

I think freedom of speech is kind of a bullshit concept at a philosophical level – I’ve become very blackpilled in that department – but at a legalistic level it’s beyond the pale to me that someone could be imprisoned just for words barring very special circumstances.

The government should not be throwing people in prison for allegedly “spreading lies for personal or political gain” unless it already clearly falls under an existing crime (like fraud – getting someone to give you money under explicit false pretenses) or tort (like defamation – knowingly telling damaging falsehoods about someone else to harm them). Incitement to likely, imminent lawless action is also already covered.

The US is a very odd choice to pick for free speech rights. It has had a terrible track record regarding free speech, especially throughout most of the 20th century.

Try advocating for communism from the 20s-80s or for the rights of black people in the 50s/60s/into-70s.

Or say the wrong criticism in the early 2000s after 9/11. At best you get surveillance, at worst you’re dealing with FISA.

We have not had any changes to the constitution to further protect speech, either.

None of those things landed people in jail. The US, from a law standpoint, has had the strongest free speech protections of almost any country in history.

The US has certainly had its problems, like widespread racism and the red scare, sure, but this is all relative to how other countries respond to speech with legal action.

> The government should not be throwing people in prison for allegedly “spreading lies for personal or political gain”

Many people don’t know that the Soviet constitution guaranteed freedom of speech(1) (Article 125(1)), provided it was “in conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system”

Same goes for other socialist governments: the People’s Republic of China (Article 35(2)), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (Article 67(3)), the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany, Article 9(4)), and so on.

Of course, the reality was and is lengthy imprisonment for “free speech” against the government or ruling class.

“Free speech, except for (exceptions that are nearly infinite in scope)” is a key feature of socialist governments, as is justifying the imprisonment of dissidents and undesirables as “fighting anti-democratic forces” and “preventing the spread of misinformation”.

Moreover, socialist governments are very clear that they are democracies; it’s often in the name (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), and also frequently appears in speeches, official documents, etc.

Their commitment to “democracy” isn’t just words-on-paper, either! Voting is usually either mandatory or “strongly encouraged”, although you can only vote for a Party-approved candidate, and the outcome of elections is basically pre-determined.

(1) https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons04….

(2) http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/2007-11/…

(3) https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Peoples_Repub…

(4) https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/1999/1/1/33cc8de2-3c…

> Censoring isn’t the same as investigating the use of bots and fake news to spread rumors and lies for polítics gain and literal profit.

I don’t understand this post. Censoring is when a government official issues orders to publishers requiring them not so publish things. Whatever else you’re talking about here you’re simply using as a rationalization for censorship.

You have to know that you’re being dishonest when the subject is a judge ordering publishers to unpublish and silence people, and you immediately equivocate between that and “investigating,” then accuse “the right” of trying to confuse “their crimes” and “free speech.” You’re literally doing that right now. You are somehow explaining away literal and explicit censorship orders (that no one is claiming don’t exist) as “investigation” of “their crimes.”

Someone making a profit publishing links that are fake but get lots of clicks or youtube lives isn’t using their freedom of speech, they are criminals committing crimes for profit.

There’s also a slippery slope where good intentions of protecting “free speech” at all costs enable an anti-democratic authoritarian takeover or worse.

Not to say I know which this is, or a better way to balance things, but free speech absolutism over all other considerations is not always the right answer to protect free speech and democracy.

If you have to censor your opposition it’s an admission they’ve made points you can’t refute.

The solution is to bring some smarter people into your movement with better counterarguments. Often those counterarguments are going to have to include some minor concessions and soul searching. Maybe your side has gotten complacent and drifted in its beliefs away from the sensible. Maybe you’re become equal but opposite to those you call awful.

I.e. produce new ideas that resonate better than theirs and they’ll disappear like a fart in the wind.

There’s always a new excuse to take away peoples right or aggressively censor things. “This time is different” “It’s just an exceptional situation” etc they say every time until the next time.

They’re taking your human rights away from you for your own good, my friend. They guide rails. Just don’t act out or say or think anything they don’t like and they won’t beat you because they love you.

Indeed, but no one is doing that.

In Brazil there’s what we call “preventive custody”. If you’re caught committing a crime, and if there is a risk that you could jeopardize the investigations (by eliminating evidence, threatening or influencing witnesses, etc.), then you are held in custody until the investigation is concluded.

I don’t believe you would find something very different going on in any other democratic country.

In this scenario, are you actually charged with a crime? If not, that’s the literal definition of being jailed without trial.

Many (most?) democratic countries impose strict limits on how long you can be held without being charged. In the US, for example, you can only be held for 72 hours — at which point the police must either charge you or release you.

Sure, you’re actually charged with a crime. And the kind of limitations you talk about do apply.

Even in situations where you could be held in jail, there’s a tendency to let you go unless it is impossible to prevent you from jeopardizing the investigations by any other means. For instance, if the only real worry is that you flee to another country, you might have your passport confiscated rather than being held in jail. Likewise, if the worry is that you can use your influence to make others do stuff for you (stuff that jeopardizes the ongoing investigations, I mean), then you might remain at home, under surveillance, and so on.

> where it’s possible to hold someone in jail before trial

Honestly, what did you expect? “Pretty please turn up for the trial and not kill anyone else while we’re waiting?” Every country allows this if the crime was severe enough or the person is likely to be dangerous to others in the meantime. Usually there’s a threshold to do that, but it’s going to happen.

The threshold, at least in the countries whose laws I’m familiar with, isn’t just “will they turn up for trial”, but also “are they a risk to other people or are they likely to continue breaking the law”. And, to be honest, that makes sense.

What if the people being jailed are urgently trying to take away people’s rights?

Also, what’s supposed to happen to criminals before they are on trial? Normally they get jailed.

> What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

I find the notion of fighting extremism with more extremism dubious. The legitimacy of the government derives from the consent of the people. If the people voted for Bolsonaro and are not opposing his actions, the judiciary will not be able to stop the slide, their extreme actions only give him fuel.

In theory, Bolsonaro’s actions should have gotten him impeached a long time ago. However, congress was more than happy to keep a “weak” president in power, because it allowed them to grab more power from the executive branch. It’s no surprise that the percentage of the budget allocated to “earmarks” ballooned during the Bolsonaro administration.

Justice persecutors, that sit on the fence between the Judiciary and the Executive (but are nominally in the Judiciary) should be the ones starting those actions. The federal police should be the ones feeding information for them to act on.

On the case where Alexandre de Moraes is the victim, it should have been judged by a normal regional court, first by a judge and then by a panel of 3. In case it ever reaches his court, he should have sent it to somebody else (decided by a draw).

In no situation a court should be commanding a police investigation.

What we’re facing here is a distinction between US and BR law (actually, US is the exception world wide, for Brazil law is closer to what you would find in Europe on this matter).

In Brazil, it’s not a crime to say what you think. But it is a crime to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime. This is especially serious if you are influential on social media and your statement, even if false, is likely to generate dangerous reactions from your followers.

Im not speaking to the legality, but the morality of censorship. The times believes censorship is wrong, so they titled an article about censorship in a way that calls out the censors.

Most Brazilians agree that censorship is wrong. The problem is that “censorship” is a vague word.

We lived in an actual military dictatorship until 1985. A dictatorship that engaged in real hard prior-censorship. Music, news, and pieces of art were all subject to a military collegiate body that would decide what could and could not be published.

What’s going on now is very, very different. Brazil, like most European countries, thinks that if you commit a crime through what you say, you can and must be held accountable. No one is being prevented from expressing their opinion.

> We lived in an actual military dictatorship until 1985. A dictatorship that engaged in real hard prior-censorship.

> What’s going on now is very, very different.

In the months leading up to the elections, the judges censored a documentary about Bolsonaro before it was published. A priori censorship.

We are living in the exact same kind of authoritharian regime our parents lived through. The difference is our parents knew they were being oppressed.

> (If) you commit a crime through what you say, you can and must be held accountable. No one is being prevented from expressing their opinion.

Freedom from speech isn’t the “right” of the people to express opinions. Freedom of Speech is a an explicit restriction on what the government is allowed to do after you speak, and more precisely, in response to unpopular speech.

Seems logically equivalent. If you have the right to express your opinions (no qualifier here, so they can be popular or not), that means no one can do anything to you (unless you commit a crime, of course). Perhaps one could argue that “speech” encompasses more than “opinion”, but then the issue would become terminological.

Anyway, Brazil has freedom of speech in the very sense you’ve mentioned here. Unpopular speech is not a crime.

This is a catch 22, because Bolsonaro team was using social media and fake news to move dumb masses towards their objective, pretty similar to Trump in the US.
The judge in question, with his despotic tendencies, was in an open war against Bolsonaro (started by Bolsonaro) and stretched the powers of the judiciary to bring Bolsonaro down.
Now, we have 2 wrongs here. But how one should react to all of this?

> What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

To start, the fallacy here, is to assume there was indeed an “extremist anti-democratic movement led by Bolsonaro”.

> What other institutions (or democratic tools) should have acted to halt the extremist anti-democratic movement lead by Bolsonaro?

None.

There is no “anti-democratic” movement here. To be against democracy, you need to actually be living within a democracy. Unfortunately, Brazil is not a democracy. Brazil is a judiciary dictatorship.

These unelected judge-kings run this nation. They have been running it for years. They’re basically gods here. Untouchable. Their powers have been expanding continuously. In the months leading up to the elections, it got to the point they started disregarding the brazilian constitution and engaging in blatant political censorship. And their power keeps expanding.

What’s more anti-democratic than a bunch of unelected judges doing whatever they want? This is the real coup.

If Bolsonaro intended to do anything, it was in reaction to this sorry state of affairs, and I don’t blame him for trying at all. I blame him for failing.

Your affected adjective laden, leading language makes it apparent that you are in the wrong. “A legitimate question I have is” is exactly the kind of primitive nonsense that authoritarians use to cover their vile nature. You are not the dictator here. People can decide whether your question is legitimate or not, and you know very well that they will determine that it is in fact not a legitimate question and you are not a legitimate person with your deceptive, manipulative, and abusive tactics.

Well it’s not quite sentencing people to death for blasphemy, but you’ve got to walk before you run I guess.

Perhaps “failed state” just takes a while to bake.

They do. Literal hard power. These guys have the pens which make federal police do their thing. I call them the judge-kings.

You know what’s worse? Deep down, every brazilian knows it. Everyone here has always known this truth. Even before all this began. There’s an old saying here: “doctors think they’re gods, judges know it”. Judges making arbitrary and monocratic decisions is a completely normalized thing here. We’re witnessing in real time just how far their godlike powers stretch. We now know for a fact that judges have enough power to violate the brazilian constitution and get away with it.

Talking to actual brazilian lawyers is a surreal experience. Sometimes they’d sound confused while explaining a supreme court decision to me. They would say: “the supreme court was supposed to apply the constitution but they decided to legislate instead”. Yeah, an actual lawyer told me that once. I was his student and I never forgot that lesson. The judges legislate in this country. If the judge-king doesn’t like the law, he just doesn’t apply it. If the law says the guy is innocent but the judge-king feels like punishing him, he gets punished.

“Judicial activism”, they call it. Oh it’s nothing, just a harmless euphemism for a silent coup that installed a dictatorship of the unelected judiciary. And even on HN my fellow brazilians will come and flag my posts to oblivion while insisting that I’m actually living in a democracy.

> When he (the president) uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

this is a quote from the dissenting opinion of Judge Sotomayor.

the rest did not find that interpretation of the case true in their opinions.

And Sotomayor correctly pointed out that it’s trivially easy to assert that any given action was an official duty, thereby gaining the benefit of presumptive immunity pending a court’s detailed determination.

They pretty much decide about anything they want to decide, it’s that simple. It’s not like “oh, we only judge constitutional matters”, as it happens in serious countries. I really mean ANYTHING.

There is run of the mill lawsuits involving defamation that the court decided to judge out of the bat. The accuser is a mainstream journalist (mainstream media as a whole have been – essentially – acting as public relations of the court – similar to how they acted as public relations for Biden during the 2020 elections btw), the accused part being another brazilian journalist living abroad, called Allan dos Santos (Moraes personally hates the guy and failed to extradite him from the US countless times – USA authorities essentially answering “it’s only words, this is covered by our first amendment”).

And instead of this lawsuit following the normal procedure as any other defamation lawsuit in Brazil. Moraes decided to elevate this case to automatically judge it in the highest instance of the country. His excuse? “Oh, Dos Santos is investigated in other procedures here, so I think they are related”. And this has been essentially their trick to investigate/trial anything they want.

They say it’s related. Hell, the Brazilian Supreme Court decide to investigate Ellon Musk himself.

Sources:

https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/moraes-abre-inquerito-cont…

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2024/03/eua-negam-extrad…

https://www.poder360.com.br/poder-justica/justica/moraes-abr…

The judiciary system in Brazil is a little different than the US one. It does not make Brazil a dictatorship as many of Bolsonaro’s supporters claim, nor does an article in NYTimes.

How can that be so? The article says this:

> In Brazil, the 11 justices and the attorneys who work for them issued 505,000 rulings over the past five years.

Can that really be right? That’s an average of 276 rulings per day, or one ruling every five minutes around the clock 24/7/365 for five years straight.

If that claim is true then it’s clear that the Brazilian Supreme Court is not like supreme courts anywhere else in the world. It must be normally issuing rulings written by people who aren’t the justices themselves. And, it must be a truly massive organization to create so many rulings on so many topics. Seeing as it appears to answer to nobody, nor follow any normal judicial procedure (being both accuser and judge in one body), it would seem fair to describe that as a parallel government acting as a dictatorship. How else could you describe it? What checks on their power do they recognize?

65173 rulings in 230 days by 11 people. That’s 25.76 rulings per person per day if we ignore holidays and weekends.

They can’t possibly read the cases, is this a kangaroo court?

Yes.

For example, one time the federal police arrested a corrupt banker (Daniel Dantas). Somehow the Supreme Court was in session literally 4:00 am to immediately make a ruling that the banker should be released…

Some of the current judges were literally lawyers of the current ruling party, there was even cases where they judged cases where they were themselves the lawyer in that case.

I could mention more things but that is an invitation to get arrested.

> It must be normally issuing rulings written by people who aren’t the justices themselves.

It’s right there in the text:

> the 11 justices and the attorneys who work for them issued 505,000 rulings

> it appears to answer to nobody, nor follow any normal judicial procedure (being both accuser and judge in one body)

That’s not the case. The STF never accuses, they only judge. Accusations come from other institutions. The Supreme Court then orders investigations and act as judges.

> What checks on their power do they recognize?

Mostly the Parliament and the Senate, who can at any time pass new laws, including amendments to the Constitution.

> That’s not the case. The STF never accuses, they only judge. Accusations come from other institutions. The Supreme Court then orders investigations and act as judges.

That’s not true for some of the cases referred here though. For matters that the court deems related to attacks on the Supreme Court or democracy, Moraes can act essentially as both prosecutor and judge.

I’m not arguing if this is good or bad. Some people argue this is good, some that it is bad, but it is a fact.

That’s right, but that’s because every judicial decision can go to Supreme Court. A random person got arrested because it stole a chicken? You can appeal up to Supreme Court.

Btw, there’s “assistant judges” to help each of the 11 Justices here. The Justice is able to pick 3 of his choice.

If they said it over a megaphone during an incipient riot, and it would have led to an arrest warrant and charges laid, it would probably have happened as well. A good thing too.

Social media isn’t a consequence free zone.

Regarding takedown demands, Twitter used to publish transparency reports on who was making them, but they stopped after Musk took over.

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/removal-requests

In the final report 97% of all takedowns were made by Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and India (from most to least). They also broke down the number of takedowns against verified journalists and news outlets, which was led by India (114 takedowns), Turkey (78), Russia (55), and Pakistan (48), and Brazil was down the list with 8. It would be nice to have a more recent version of this report to see which way the tides have shifted.

This might be misleading. If old Twitter was preemptively taking down posts that certain American or European organizations wanted taken down, this wouldn’t show in the transparency reports at all. If you used the platform before and now, it’s very obvious that that was the case.

>If you used the platform before and now, it’s very obvious that that was the case.

Does this mean that the source for this information is “dude, trust me”?

And the thousands of documents that the Democrats, their administration, and US intelligence deemed “nothingburger” until they even became annoyed at repeating it over and over again nonsensically. What’s the Brazilian government’s term for “nothingburger?” Are they using the same terms that fascist Brazil (aided by successive Democratic administrations and US intelligence) used about disappearances and torture?

Do they post aggregate stats about takedowns there? It seems like they just post ad-hoc information, which leaves a lot of room for editorialization. For example going into great detail about the Brazil situation, while on the other hand posting this extremely vague statement in response to Pakistan blocking X and then never following up with any further context about what’s going on there.

https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1780676243538452680

Have they ramped up censorship in Pakistan to appease the government? Who knows, they’re not telling.

Having hate speech laws doesn’t equate to the state giving takedown notices. More likely the individual will be prosecuted as has happened in the past few weeks of social unrest.

But that is my argument! In UK takedown notices are given by some non-profit organization (not state), or are covered by TOS violation. But it is just censorship!

> in the past few weeks of social unrest.

Compare how social media handled recent UK protests, and “summer of love” riots in 2020!

One figure refers to recorded “crimes”, the other to actual imprisonments.

Do you understand that the two are simply not comparable, and that there’s obviously no analogy here? Even the alleged offenses aren’t even comparable.

This isn’t just one extremely basic logical fallacy you’re making, but two.

> UK has hate speech laws, and number of people imprisoned or punished is far greater than Russia or other countries.

I call counter-bullshit. Provide some source with numbers.

At a quick glance the answer is yes. The power to silence speech the government speech the government deems fake is the power to silence speech the government doesn’t agree with.
The answer to fake news are outlets that allow free speech against the fake news like we have in the united states. Unless billionaires buy them all up and prevent the actual facts from coming out of course.

> Rumble has been blocked in Brazil for over a year, and WhatsApp and Telegram have been briefly blocked multiple times.

It’s a near certainty those who are still operating are obeying censorship / takedown requests by the Brazilian government.

Elon Musk said the EU Commission tried to attack X: “It’d be too bad if you were to get big fines uh!? So take down any content we ask you to take down and in exchange we’ll make sure you don’t get those fines”.

These are mafia tactics and it makes me ashamed to be an EU citizen.

This has nothing to do with democracy: it’s its opposite. Dictatorship.

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech…”

People, worldwide, are beginning to understand the importance of the first amendment. I do genuinely fear that very soon people in several countries (including mine) may learn the hard way what the lack of the second amendment leads to.

I don’t think there’s a lot of democracy in having some gazillionaire buy a social media platform and then interfere in the politics of other sovereign nations/continents.

As a EU citizen I hope we get rid of Twitter at some point and build a sovereign communications infrastructure and domestic firms abiding by our local laws, because that is what a democracy is about.

But that’s happening everywhere on every social platform isn’t it? The very act of going along with censorship requests interferes with the politics of a nation by silencing opposition.

Not any more, most social media platforms nowadays seem to be capable of enforcing local laws. The act of following lawful takedown requests isn’t political, it’s literally just enforcing the law of the land, the bare minimum any foreign company has to do if it wants to do business anywhere.

There’s obviously also no reason to assume this has anything to do with any opposition, Twitter can’t even make sure anything that’s posted on that site is even posted by people, let alone citizens of their respective jurisdictions.

Having Elon Musk on the one side and bots from a basement in Moscow on the other set your country’s conversation is many things but certainly not democratic.

You seem to envision a world in which one would have to physically travel outside the borders of your nation in order to hear what people outside the nation think. Do you also propose that foreign printed media be banned in your nation? What if a foreigner writes a letter to a citizen in your nation and attaches a clipping of a magazine article that criticizes your government? Should the letter be confiscated? Should all mail be opened and censored by your government? How would that be any different than life was in Soviet Russia and East Germany? Do you really propose regressing to that, now in the 21st century, after all the oppressive atrocities perpetrated in the 20th?

“Interfere in the politics of other sovereign nations/continents”?

Europeans are choosing to use X. Nobody is forcing them.

And it seem odd to blame someone in another country for voicing their opinion.

It certainly isn’t Musks statement that causing social unrest. It just threw a twig on an already burning fire cause by government policy.

So you’re upset that people read Elon’s tweets?

“Fanning the flames”? You mean sharing his opinion?

Would it be ok if he wasn’t rich?

I don’t understand your point

that’s what most europeans and even americans said about the inbound UK army redcoats facing a few farmers rising in armed rebellion against the King.

The farmers stood no chance against the world’s eminent superpower at the time, people said.

Yet here we are.

There already was a civil war in the US, and that’s not how it happened. What’s strange is that anyone thinks that a second one would be a matter of the US Army vs. the People, irrelevant to the States. It’s a non-sequitur. Anyway, let us pray that it never comes to that, as much as our enemies would like it to. Imagine how giddy the CCP would be.

You get sent to X jail for criticism of Musk on X. It happens on X itself.

In general, I agree with pulling out of a country that doesn’t exercise freedom of speech (as in criticism, not threats). But the hypocrisy is somewhat funny.

There’s probably better (for society) ways such as providing higher anonymity for criticism (not threats). But that seems like a nightmare overall.

Personally, I agree with you.

But there’s also a possibility that users are getting banned for other activity/content, not the public criticism. Perhaps that what the parent could be highlighting by weighing in with an anecdata.

Similarly, something recently happened with Richard Dawkins on FB, IIRC. His account was banned following unusual activity, but Dawkins publicly announced that he was banned for his stupid (and factually wrong) ideas about the sex/gender of one of the female Olympic boxers. It turns out his account was either directly phished or the account of a moderator was phished and his FB Page (not his account) was banned (pending account recovery and cleanup).

> But there’s also a possibility that users are getting banned for other activity/content, not the public criticism.

Guess what? That’s the same case for the criminals that twitter is defending.

This is not a moralistic position. Brazil always has been a big market for Twitter and there were always significant resources invested by the company for legal compliance. This included dedicated cross functional teams. These teams no longer exist, since the owner thinks 90% of the people in the company were useless. Now they simply don’t have the ability to stay compliant and therefore run into the risk of being fined. They’re minimizing that risk.

I know that they’re closing down their Brazil operations, that’s literally the title of the article. The speculation I was referring to was your claim that they’re really closing down because of financial considerations rather than their stated reason (e.g. unwillingness to comply with the judge’s orders).

In TFA it says X told the court that they had failed to follow its orders previously because of operational deficiencies. GP is not really going out on a limb here.

It doesn’t sound like Musk did anything of value here. He just complies with dictators and fights democracies because dictators let him run wild while democratic countries will soon put him in jail for market manipulation, money laundering, fraud, labor law violations, environment pollution, and the rest.

You people really need to broaden your views about this guy.

He complied with other censorship orders like this from the same source in Brazil too.

In my impression, the relevant detail is that this one comes with monetary fines, that are expected to increase if he fails to comply again.

Also, complied censorship requests can be applied per country in Twitter’s case. So, an account would seem closed in a country but visible to anyone outside. That applies to censored tweets the same way. I wonder what prevents that here.

Guessing the difference is that Brazil is currently controlled by a left-wing government and these censorship demands have a left-leaning bent to them, whereas India and Turkey have right-leaning governments and the censorship orders were to strengthen the right wing?

Musk has been increasingly open about using his ownership of Twitter as simply a tool to champion his own political ideals, and those ideals seem to skew pretty far right.

As for the Indian government, I would argue that it is still largely socialist (high direct and indirect taxes that translate to strong social spending in poorer parts of the society, and rural areas(1)), and is still considerably more to the left than much of the west.

I would concede that on social matters the government does lean conservative, and is not as liberal as one would expect, but in many ways, that is an indictment of current society, and a part of life, that I don’t see changing in the near term (25 years or so).

The social fabric of a nation is intrinsic to it’s continued stable existence. Mass upheaval in a short duration is dangerous for the continued improvement of welfare of the people. So, it can be argued that preventing mass change demographics is a part of the duties of the government. (2)

(1) See central government schemes like Jal Shakti, LPG subsidy, Urea Subsidy etc

(2) This is a subjective opinion, but imo mass immigration is dangerous, and recent examples in Europe do demonstrate the dangers of sudden changes in demographics. At the same time, diversity is important, and so is immigration by _skilled_ professionals, with the eventual transfer of skills (and technology) to native (for whatever value of native) people.

Really, it’s that Musk likes authoritarians and nationalists and Modi’s government meets that test quite well. After all, Musk has no problem with high government spending if it’s spent on him.

Left and right are not the real dimensions here. It’s pro-Putin and against Putin. Russia has long made a mockery of ideologies, and indirectly of those who would be easily manipulated to do its bidding under one pretext or another.

The poster your are responding to said nothing about their own stance, only conjecturing about Musk’s stance and the current zeitgeist.

Ad hominem is the second last refuge of the incompetent; or in other words, argue the point not the person.

“Watch what they do, not what they say” is a useful principle, here. There’s no reason to take his attempt to self-label as a centrist at face value, but there’s mountains of evidence that he seeks to amplify the right.

The previous regime of twitter censored accounts that are to the right, so when that’s your idea of a normal, any change that allows all sides to share a platform could be interpreted to “amplify the right”.

This assertion is commonly made but never backed up with data, because it’s fiction. Elon Musk even gave full access to various people to try to find something to back that up and they found no evidence of anything like the alleged censorship campaign. Even Matt Taibi was reduced to tricks like pointing to the Biden campaign reporting tweets and hoping his readers were credulous enough not to see that those tweets were non-consensual nudity.

This rhetorical tactic:

“We don’t like what the left is doing, but we don’t want to be on the right.”

“Oh no, you are on the right. You are so on the right! You are definitely, 100% on the right. You should definitely drop all leftist interests and identify with the right.”

I do not understand why any leftist thinks this is ever a good idea.

If Elon wants to be a centrist, great! Welcome to the center. As another centrist-with-some-left-leaning-interests-but-woke-skeptic, I hope the center gets big and strong and lots of people that people like you currently like to call right-wing end up in it and not on the fascist right. “My way or the highway” is just such a poor choice if the highway leads to conservative authoritarianism.

I do not understand in what context your comment is a response to mine.

I also don’t know who you’re quoting. Probably the straw leftist you think you’re arguing with?

Spending is not socialism.

Spending also ballooned under Trump and Trump is most definitely not a socialist (aside from socializing losses) (spending increased *before* the pandemic).

“take plenty of government spending” is a funny way to say has plenty of contracts with the government to provide services…

And yeah, when incentives are available, why wouldnt he take them? It’s the same way people who advocate for higher tax don’t choose to donate more money to the government.

Tesla has received over $2B in subsidies since 09, accepted $750M from New York for a SolarCity plant in Buffalo, SolarCity also received $500M in federal grants.

I could keep going but you get the idea. To be clear, I have no problem with him or any company accepting the money but this isn’t “contracts with the government to provide services.”

So you are telling me, Musk is a fan of the Islamist regime in Turkey and its persecution of non-Islamists..

Somehow, I don’t believe that.

Especially given that X also censors for India’s anti-Islamic government..

Seems pretty obvious that ideological sympathies are not the deciding factor here, but the question wether an unwillingness to comply would lead to X being banned in the country in question.

> So you are telling me, Musk is a fan of the Islamist regime in Turkey and its persecution of non-Islamists..

The former, absolutely. Your refusal to believe this seems to come from the idea that Musk has clear principles that he adheres to. He does not. His only concerns are money and power.

It’s not about islamism, it’s about power. Musk has met Erdogan in person multiple times, and took his son to meet him when he came to the States. How many other heads of state did Musk take his son to meet?

Musk’s whole schtick is quid pro quo and thin-skinism. He complains about Chinese EVs, then dashes on a jet to fly to China to meet Xi and scores a deal for Tesla — no more whining about China. He publicly entertains Jewish conspiracy theories, claims he’s pro peace in general, then gets on a jet to meet Netanyahu and the next thing you know he’s clapping Netanyahu’s speech in Congress.

His whole transition to his current persona can be traced to when is son announced their own transition and disowned him. His bumbling political outbursts are all self-serving garbage all the way down.

The future of this is that international companies need to pick a single jurisdiction, keep their servers and employees there, fight extradition requests, and leave it up to other countries to try to block their own citizens from access.

I always thought Gibson’s concept of “data havens” was kind of silly; data doesn’t care where it lives, why would it matter where it’s physically located? But apparently he was a bit more prescient than I originally gave him credit for.

That philosophy will often fail if you need to handle payments or advertising or sale, etc. once you reach a certain scale.

Because consumers and advertising partners want to pay in the local currency, using local means of payment, which are often only available with a business bank account available only to locally registered businesses.

And then things like salespeople on the ground who can visit advertisers’ offices, go to conventions, etc.

If you want to actually be a viable business in a particular country at a large scale, it often becomes impossible to avoid having to incorporate there and hire people locally, even if your actual product is entirely digital.

Yeah, so that means, China is doing it right with Weibo and Douyin. It’s Twitter and Instagram respectively but built top to bottom for full Chinese ideological, legal, and financial conformance. I used to think that’s weird, but it could be where we’re headed.

Countries can do more than just try to block network traffic. No legal presence in our jurisdiction, no business in our country.

It’s much easier to block local advertisers’ money going to such companies.

I was thinking exactly at this. I think a block of ads would hurt even more X than a total-block of X.

If you block X, you block obviously ads, but you also block local traffic to the website.

If you just block ads, and the traffic continues, you are actually losing even more money.

Sure, Musk could just implement crypto on X, but I think it would still be very effective.

But that only applies to companies that the EU has any kind of control over.

If you’re in a hypothetical country that the EU has no relevant treaties with, the EU has no power over you. They might claim that EU laws are extraterritorial and affect everybody who dares to appear on the internet without blocking EU citizens, but that claim can’t be enforced in such a country.

At what scale do I need to worry about this? If I make an app and don’t want to comply but I live in the US, do I open myself up to extradition if I have users in the EU?

The EU doesn’t even have a continent-wide DNS-blocking system.

Most countries have their own, but they’re mostly for copyright infringement, not GDPR violations.

Even that isn’t universal, Poland’s system only affects unregistered gambling websites for example, and I’ve seen quite a few ISPs that don’t even bother enforcing it, even though they’re legally supposed to do so.

There’s nothing (except talking to your government) that the EU could realistically do at this time to block a website, and I genuinely don’t know how receptive the US would be to these arguments.

The largest “hook” the EU has is that most companies that provide services to you, whether that’d be payment processors, hosting services or ad networks, (still) want to maintain good relations with them and don’t want to burn bridges, and I don’t believe it’s beneath the European commission to put pressure on those to make your life difficult.

As far as I know, they do. That’s part of their consumer data protection act (didn’t remember the exact name).

Do you have any source for that ? it would n’a quite helpful, honestly.

The EU GDPR has requirements for processing (including storage) of personal data (much larger scope than US PII, but still nowhere near all data) in jurisdictions with legal adequacy for data protection.

It’s not quite data sovereignty like India’s regulations around payment transaction data but it does theoretically limit where you can store EU personal data.

You can find the current GDPR adequacy list at the EU’s EDPB site. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i…

It would blocked in the EU.

Also the company could be asked to forbid EU customer to access the product. Wouldn’t be a big threat but it would prevent the company to do any futur business in Europe.

Tech savvy customer could still access the product but that is not a market as big as every EU potential customer.

What draconian laws does EU apply to foreign companies? Try to come up with examples of companies that don’t have offices and legal and commercial presence in the EU.

BTW remind me what’s your take on the US banning Huawei in the US?

Ah yes. Because who can forget the genius of USA’s “American companies must provide any and all information on foreign citizens even if they never stepped foot on foreign soil if the US government so wishes it”.

You need to lodge a complaint. It’s time consuming so almost nobody do it.

And generally, it came with a slap of the wrist, and the company put up the banner.

For a site to be blocked, it need repeatable, multiple and not correctibles infractions.

This. Each country have an administrative entity (in France, that’s CNIL, Commission National sur l’Informatique et les Libertés – National Commission on computer and liberties, roughly) in charge of this kind oh things. You can lodge a complaint to them and they will investigate and eventually, if needed (don’t think it was ever needed, they can bring the problem to a judge.

I’m not sure about Chinese law, or any other law, but GDPR for sure does not require that. The fact that the US is not an option doesn’t mean you cannot store data in any other country, just that the safe harbour and then the privacy shield were considered inadequate. For example, storing personal data in the UK is just fine.

And that’s the way it *should* be.

When Steven Harper unilaterally attempted to empower private data to be offshored, it would have been an absolute nightmare.

North American security is bad enough as it is. Imagine handing all your health, credit card, government information over to a Nigerian prince just for free.

I don’t disagree with keeping staff within safe regions. There are some issues surrounding that, as some regions require local representation.

Modern services, including Twitter, have the ability to geofence content/compliance policy to specific regions. Search, Social Media, Maps and News are examples of typical services which engage such techniques. So there’s not a lot of reason why Twitter couldn’t comply here, since they already have already demonstrated this capability.

Twitter’s non-compliance will likely just end up with a ban.

This, I am quite certain, is not the longterm endgame. For small countries with mostly-similar regulatory regimes, sure. For large countries with authoritarian leadership like China, they’re not going to tolerate companies publishing “nation of Taiwan” stories anywhere.

The future could be the opposite of the opposite also. Governments which want to operate in the physical realm as well as the web realm, could pay fees to the private company, so as the government of said country and it’s citizens not be banned from the platform. The fees could be rephrased as taxes.

That’s fine until you want to conduct business, such as accepting advertising, hiring employees, or even taking direct to consumer subscription payments, in a country.

Initially the internet was a chaotic place where anything was accepted. This stopped around the early to mid 90s. Then the pendulum swinged the other way and governments started imposing more and more restrictions – from copyright, to actual information filters and now trying to dictate international companies what their citizen are allowed to see. Like any pendulum, it will likely swing the other direction soon.

I’m not sure it’s a pendulum. Some (many? most?) things don’t swing back. Many changes are effectively irreversible.

It’s not like fat–>skinny–>fat–>skinny ties, where there’s zero friction for the pendulum.

The only way the net is going back to the old ways is if the governments of the world stop caring (good luck with that) or if end-user decentralization tools make a quantum leap in adoption, but even then I think you’re more likely to see governments cracking down on that rather than just not caring.

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