Comment by BadHumans
1 year ago
> Media platform X said on Saturday it would close its operations in Brazil "effective immediately" due to what it called "censorship orders" from Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes.
Elon has complied with "censorship orders" from other countries[0][1] so what makes this one so different?
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/05/twitter-musk-censors...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja...
It sounds like Musk didn't like the secrecy and lack of due process around it (not sure how accurate this is, but that's what he says).[0]
[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1824839784852013125
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.
Perhaps but that's just speculation and not supported by evidence.
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They could implement those teams again if they wanted to. It appears they don't want to do that.
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Do you work at X? I'm sure you wouldn't be speaking in such confident terms if you didn't have some inside knowledge. Are you meeting with Elon to discuss these things?
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.
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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.
"Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest" suggests a pretty clear difference in procedure here
(https://x.com/GlobalAffairs/status/1824819053061669244)
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.
> Also, complied censorship requests are applied per country in Twitter’s case.
Except that time a censorship request made by India was enforced worldwide, which I don't think was ever explained.
https://archive.is/BnUhm
Yes, can’t say Twitter has been principled or consistent about it.
This time he was ordered to censor something he likes a lot. He complies when asked to censor things he doesn't like.
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.
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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.
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I think he simply doesn’t care as that area of the world is far from his top 10 list of concerns, but he does always seem to be interested in Europe and the Americas
Musk recently personally donated cybertruck to effin' Kadyrov which was very thankful for it and promptly installed machine gun on it. A confirmed mass murderer and generally firmly in pool of the lowest human scum this planet has ever hosted. Lets be realistic for a while and not assign some stable high morals to mr musk.
Apart from his morality being flexible, his admiration for various murderous oppressors is famous at this point and his very obvious continuous mental issues only allow him to act in several modes. At the end, brilliant broken little boy with severe daddy issues and uber massive ego, stuff which he can never hope to fully tackle and it doesn't seem he is even trying to.
So, trying to map his responses to simple if x then y won't work like with normal balanced folks, he is too unstable and emotional for that.
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Musk is not personally signing off on every take-down request. It's his "pet projects" that he amplifies to his acolytes on Twitter you need to look at.
> Seems pretty obvious that ideological sympathies are not the deciding factor here
It's not about left and right. It's about who's Putin-aligned and who isn't.
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.
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Modi and the BJP are avowed, proud ethnic nationalists, seeking to preserve and enforce their version of traditional religion.
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I assure you, that no Western right-winger likes the Islamist Erdogan.
I wish you were right, but you're not: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-praises-turkish-presiden..., https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/13/politics/donald-trump-rec..., etc
Unless you’re gonna claim Donald Trump to be some kind of centrist, I can think of at least one.
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.
Yeah they do. He fits the idea of the authoritarian which they want to further. They may not agree with what he is doing, but they like the way he’s doing it.
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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.
Erdogan is practically a socialist, government spending and inflation have ballooned under him. Pretty much the opposite of what Elon Musk advocates for.
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).
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Elon Musk, who's companies take plenty of government spending and incentives? Sounds like a socialist to me.
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Elon has said he’s more of a centrist. So it’s always amusing to see the far left brand him as far right because he opposes their radical ideology.
"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.
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"North Korea says it's a democracy. So it's always amusing to see the far left brand it as a dictatorship because it opposes their radical ideology."
he's just a reactionary; he doesn't have any coherent principles beyond self interest and reacting to things
Sure, and the nazis were socialist
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He didn't agree with this one.