On one hand, fuck Musk. On the other hand, internet from space that can’t be blocked by governments is a net positive in my book.
That’s an arbitrary metric. What about internet across oceans, or across forests? Blocking content is a question of why and what. Shouldn’t we be able to block child exploitation websites? That is to say, of course we can, and it’s very easy. The only question is whether you want that kind of censorship to be up to your service provider or your government.
Governments tend to block things like facts about genocides they have committed and opposing political opinions. I would hope things like child exploitation could be managed at the host level.
Do you have any idea how eagerly AT&T and Comcast would block half the internet if they had the tiniest profit motive to do so? I wonder how long left wing websites would remain online if it weren’t illegal for multinational corporations to block them.
How is a billionaire manchild in charge any better, at least a government is accountable to the people.
In theory, but how many governments can actually be held accountable? The power imbalance is often too great for the people to hold anyone accountable. In many countries, the system is rigged.
Don’t forget that Musk is also the one who intentionally blocked paid service from Ukraine during a critical moment in the early days of Russia’s current genocide, because Musk sucks up to Putin. Dude needs to answer for his actions.
Oh? What about internet controlled by a billionaire who makes sure his toxic website featuring his version of “free speech” is always available to protect his profits and spread his bullshit while undermining the policies of a sovereign state?
So much better than the evil government.
Let everyone incarcerated go and see how that works out for you. Not saying everyone deserves to be in there, but go on. Give it a try.
You also forget that billionaires are wealth, and so is any dictator. They both seek to protect that wealth, so it doesn’t matter in the end. A billionaire buys his politicians and you get the same result. You start threatening their money and power and they’ll come after you, whether you want equal rights or sometimes just clean water.
That’s better than a dictator who only wants to protect his own power. At least a billionaire can be bought.
A billionaire can’t be bought, they got billions. It’s the dictator that can be bought.
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What the heck do you think a dictator is? A billionaire running a country.
Is Musk doing anything to help people living in dictatorships access information? Or is this just happening in Brazil?
Can’t calculate the net yet, since we don’t know the gross. He has the capability to cause massive damage with the power he wields. It’s already clear that he’s incapable of providing an unbiased platform. It needs to belong to the people or it can never be trusted
It needs to belong to the people or it can never be trusted
Damn commies!
The ability to recognize sarcasm doesn’t seem to be particularly developed on Lemmy.
And if fucking hate the /s.
How about internet that can be blocked at the whims of a billionaire? At least government is supposed to answer to the people.
Dictatorships don’t answer to the people. It’s absolutely a problem that billionaires are controlling the flow of information, but it’s much worse for a dictator to do it.
Oh honey, do you really ignore that a huge chunk of dictatorships do it for the money and most are already billionaires? Why exactly do you think Musk supports the orange cheeto?
Not blockable by any government would be a positive in my book if it didn’t imply bloclable by a single billionaire with huge mood swing. Don’t forget how musk switched off starlink in Crimea at Putin’s request when the Russian realized starlink guided missile were heading towards their ships (Source
Controlled by governments or controlled by corpos and the super rich? I say there’s hardly an improvement.
No, but through the existence of both options, you can get more plurality than by using one individual option.
Yeah, cables or radio waves, it’s the same thing in the end.
What we need (IMO) is another layer on top if the classic internet with encryption and hookers.
He is in a unique position, theoretically he can make everything go through the country his servers are in assuming they pay over their own satellite internet, illegal… mmm almost certainly but so is keeping Ex Twitter on in Brazil so he probably doesn’t care about that, and it’s essentially exactly what a VPN does sooo, oh yeah they could also just use a VPN I guess.
Bruh, VPN for what? If Brazil bans payments to Starlink, essentially sanctioning it, how is end user going to circumvent that?
I mean they can jump through hoops to convert currencies etc but most people would just give up and move on.
Do people here not generally dislike government censorship? The root of this seems to be x refusing the country’s government’s demands to ban certain people
We don’t dislike government censorship of CSAM. it’s all a spectrum based on the legitimacy of the government order and the legitimacy of the tech billionaire’s refusal to abide.
Honestly, while I think CSAM is disgusting, I am kind of against government censorship of it. Some go so far as to ban anything resembling CSAM, including imagery that looks like it, but doesn’t actually involve a real child. The problem is the abuse required to create it, but if that abuse didn’t happen, there is no crime, and it should therefore be completely legal.
The same goes with free speech more broadly. The speech itself should never be illegal, but it should be usable as evidence of another crime. A threat of violence is the crime, and that should be prosecuted, but that shouldn’t mean the government should force the host to censor the speech, that should be at the host’s discretion. What the government can do is subpoena information relevant to the investigation, but IMO it shouldn’t compel any entity to remove content.
That said, Brazilian law isn’t the same as US law, and X and Space X should respect the laws of all of the countries in which they operate.
That’s…actually a pretty reasonable take. Fuck Musk, but you’ve convinced me that government censorship is just a bad thing in general and that should apply to Musk as much as anyone else.
I do think there’s a counter argument to be made that the resources involved in setting up fake accounts to spread bullshit are trivial compared to the resources required to track down and prosecute account owners for crimes, so in a practical sense banning accounts is possibly the only thing one can do (especially if the account owners are foreign). If you give lies the same freedom as truth, you tend to end up with 10 lies for every truth.
I’m willing to bet the people that government wanted were not infact posting CSAM, I’m pretty sure even x would ban them of its own volition pretty quickly if they were doing that
They weren’t, it was just the example at the furthest end of the spectrum. But your framing of “if it was REALLY bad, Twitter would ban it” can not be the solution. We have legitimate governments tasked with governing based on the will of the people, it’s not better to just let Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg decide the law.
X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.
Absolutely not trying to take the side of musk here, dude’s a shitter. Fact of the matter remains the government in this case is using its power to remove people from the public eye, I would dislike that regardless of what platform or who was refusing to do it
the government in this case is using its power to remove people from the public eye
These aren’t people, they’re accounts. And the accounts in question appear to have been coordinating the attack on the Brazilian congressional office in 2023. This is comparable to, say, the traffic on Parlor shortly before the J6 riot in the US.
Organized violence would not be tolerated as “free speech” in Brazil or the US. No government or civilian authority considers active insurrection a protected category of speech. These accounts were effectively coordinating a military coup. They weren’t just trash talking the new President and his party.
Blocking traffic from an enemy military force is a military response to a rival military operation. And Musk’s refusal to shut the accounts down amounts to taking a side in a military campaign.
It is well established that the right to free speech is NOT unlimited, and the “fire in a crowded theater” people tend to be the loudest complainers. Brazil is a sovereign nation entitled to its own interpretation of how to handle free speech protections, and X has repeatedly made the claim they obey the laws of the countries in which it operates.
Also, it’s disingenuous of anybody to take X’s side on this over free speech when the past two years they have complied with basically every single request from every government for personal identifying information for any user. People are serving multi-decade prison sentences for their speech because X has refused to stand up to, for example, the government of Saudi Arabia when demanding the identities of state critics.
So it’s okay to kowtow to governments when they want to violate the right to privacy, but not when they want to shut down speech which is outside a sovereign nation’s definition of free speech? And let’s be clear - we were talking about 7 users.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s reasonable for a company to violate ONE right for a government under absolutely unethical circumstances and not another under SLIGHTLY debatable circumstances and expect anybody to take your position seriously. X is not a freedom fighter, and it’s not an actor for justice. It’s a partisan cesspool run by a man who is stacking the deck for the side he wants when it serves his interests.
I’m by no means defending musk or X. I think they shouldn’t have banned those users and also think they shouldn’t have revealed info about users who are not actively threatening to hurt someone
My statement was that in general it concerns me that governments are able to silence anybody in this way, which is where federation comes in handy
You make it seem like this is an epidemic of silencing.
First of all, this was 7 users. Secondly, it was such a controversial request that it had to be escalated all the way to the country’s Supreme Court. Thirdly, the request and its consequences were then reevaluated, and all 5 members of the Supreme Court review unanimously upheld the decision.
There’s obviously no such thing as a perfect system, but that is about as close to a fair review process as one can get, and I would argue it’s better than the alternatives of “the whims of the platform owner” or “completely unmoderated anarchy”.
Furthermore, they’re NOT silenced. This is deplatforming. Absolutely NOTHING is stopping these 7 people from setting up their own Mastodon instances and writing whatever they want. That’s not an option for the jailed dissidents X turned over.
Lastly, Brazil is a sovereign democratic nation within its rights to enforce its laws as it sees fit within its borders, and if the people find it that egregious they can change their leaders. X is an unaccountable cudgel of a single man who is taking it upon himself to conduct his own judicial review of the laws of a sovereign nation and act with impunity. If he were a nation, this would be an act of war. The sheer gall of it is utterly appalling.
So Nazi’s eh? I hate Nazi’s. Let’s unravel this knotted beast a bit. If the Brazilian citizens are posting illegal content, arrest them. Forcefully cut off their internet, -snip snip- done, seize their bank accounts, works on Russia. It should never be the job of a privately owned corporation to enforce the law when the law is perfectly capable of neutralizing the offending entities and enforcing the rules it’s own damn self, are they going to make it illegal for Walmart to sell them a cell phone? Couldn’t they just create a new account with a new email over VPN? Wouldn’t it be easier if the citizens are breaking the law to arrest them rather than take away their Twitter account? I am not a fan of that fat musky sum bitch, but there is literally no reason that judge has to go after X(I really hate that name), other than he’s swinging his dick around and doesn’t like to be told to put some damn underwear on. Arrest the citizens if they are breaking the law, if they aren’t breaking the law then what gives anyone the right to silence them? Just an egomaniac judge with no actual laws backing him and a tiny shvance facing off against a megalomaniac with a tiny shvance that consistently protects only the free speech he agrees with. There. Unknotted. If the people of Brazil want Nazi propaganda to end in a prison sentence, it should be law, and then all Twitter has to do is the same thing it does with other illegal content, turn over the user to the authorities and wash their hands of the mess. Not some judge unilaterally making free speech decisions(even in Brazil)
It’s perfectly valid to seize or forbid account that break the law. And if a company facilitates others to break the law you ask them to stop. In this case the company refused to… so now they are in trouble too.
If Brazil had a law that requires cars to be limited to 100km/h then they need to modify their cars to meet the law. And with ota updates do this in that country. If someone imports a car and it’s not updated even though the manufacturer knows it is in that country, they also breech the law.
I mean, you’re being facetious, but no, the law being “your company must have a legal representative to be within our borders”
X was told about it, given a deadline, they missed the deadline, they can’t be in Brazil
Actions have consequences
Brazil has an extradition agreement with the United States. Would love to see that shit get put to use.
That’s not how extradition works. You have to give people up to the US criminal system. They don’t reciprocate. They just promise not to coup your government.
Why would the US strain their relationship with Brazil over Musk? Politically, it makes sense to extradite him.
Also imma need a citation on how extradition works, I searched the wiki and couldn’t find anything.
Why would the US strain their relationship with Brazil over Musk?
He’s in deep with the US financial sector and the MAGA GOP base.
Politically I don’t think it makes sense to extradite him because politics is just money nowadays. If money weren’t in bed so thoroughly with politics I would agree but unfortunately here in america, bribery is legal and not looked down upon because we just decided to call it lobbying instead of bribing.
Extradition treaties are almost always reciprocal and this particular treaty is publicly available. No public treaty is going to include a promise not to coup another government because of the obvious political consequences of admitting you might to everyone else.
