For things like that, I always like to go to the source, and read the original order. It's the PDF at the bottom of this page: https://noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnoticias/stf-determina-susp... (it also has a link to a page with the PDF of the earlier order from two days ago).
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
I feel like if s/Rumble/Apple/g you would be characterizing this brinkmanship as bravery.
A lone judge trying to shut down a website in a different hemisphere is the antithesis to a free and open Internet.
Imagine if the US put a geo-block on all of Germany or something.
And no need to spam your response multiple times in this thread, please.
I'm an avid reader of Glenn Greenwald (of the Snowden mass-surveillance revelations) and he's been talking about the lawsuit they're bringing against the government following this. I really love the type non-partisan journalism that he practices and hope they manage to shut this nonsense down.
I’m not sure about Glenn Greenwald, but this author seems extremely left / socialist. Here’s a tweet where he calls for Silicon Valley to be nationalized. I would take that into account.
IMHO, HN would be much better if any discussion with a hint or politics in them were not allowed, with the focus going back to purely technological discussion. The political climate right now is absolutely toxic right now, right now all it does is drive out any actual discussion of technology.
I think the incentive structures created by adding the concept of voting and flagging posts destroy the possibility of productive conversation long-term. If a user can control the visibility of opinions with less effort than defeating those opinions through debate then that mode of operation will end up dominating. Throw in enough users who have similar beliefs within this incentive structure and you start seeing some narratives promoted through upvotes and others hidden through downvotes and flagging. HN obviously has some magic sauce and wonderful moderators to try and prevent this, but I think they're fighting a losing battle just like every other online forum with similar mechanics.
There is a reason “Most stories about politics […] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon” is the first guideline about what not to post on HN.
Political discussions quickly lead to polarization and abuse of the vote system. Doesn’t help that 90% of comments are simply parroting known opinions and not offering anything of particular interest for most readers.
The mods like to pretend that diverse perspectives are always welcome, flags are only for guidelines. Definitely not true. If your opinion falls too far out of the HN overton window you’re silenced.
Alexandre de Moraes strikes again, with his sweeping anti democratic censorship orders. This man likes to suppress his political opposition - previously that meant banning individual users or deleting content but now it means entire platforms.
If Rumble wants to operate in Brazil all they need to do is…operate in Brazil.
They’re getting blocked because they won’t staff the company there and they’re getting into legal trouble for the content they post.
Twitter went through this and they were able to get legal and they’re fine now. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being persecuted for their right-wing political beliefs and they’re simply dealing with the natural consequences of their actions.
Banning political posts or commentary or users based on the content of the messaging is almost always authoritarian and against every basic liberal principle. It is one thing to have privacy laws or laws around ownership or transparency on algorithms or whatever. It’s another thing to ban thoughts the state doesn’t like.
The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees. And why should they staff anyone there anyway? There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
I think there is a tendency to remember on those we spent the time disagreeing with more, or some similar effect, and then thinking "well gee, before the only thing people seemed to care about was disagreeing with me about <divisive subtopic> instead of <topic>". E.g. picking a random post result from an Algolia search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275600
Top comment: Discussion on Moraes, not Musk
Second comment: References Elon/Elon's past compliance, some replies bash others support the policy
Third comment: About how companies will have to deal with more international events like this
Fourth comment: Mentions X but not Musk, some replies get into Elon back & forth though
Fifth comment: A pretty plain Musk bash
Overall sentiment of Musk certainly wasn't in overwhelming favor of Musk but the top commend and many other threads were focus on Moraes or things other than Musk. Of those that were, most seemed to mention him to bash but certainly not "everyone" bashing him by any measure of the word.
I think you see a lot more "dunk" on posts when it comes to the general political area around "Rumble" or the like. Personally more dunking on than I think is often fair as well, even though that direction is not my personal leaning. Musk himself is actually much less of a downvote trigger, even though he's got a way of getting mentioned way more often than he should in threads (like how the comments on this article have become largely about him when it's about Brazil and Rumble).
Perhaps "everyone" was really just two groups of people all along, one which kept silent in one occasion and the other in the other occasion.
Or perhaps you're right and people really have no moral principles and just say whatever is more convenient at different times. That's a scary thought. I choose to believe in the first alternative. Plenty of people complained about Moraes when he was bashing Musk.
If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"
While I get where you are coming from where do you draw the line? If a country sinkholes an IP range/domain name because it is actively being used to defraud its citizens should the rest of the internet drop their interconnects with that country? How about CP? Where should the line in the sand be drawn or should the internet be a FFA for every piece of content possible?
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?
EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
>So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".
Nah, just require it by law for the press / media / social media to annotate removed information with who is responsible for the decision.
So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:
This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:
List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)
The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)
Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)
How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)
I think you're assuming the leadership of those countries will think this is a bad thing. It wouldn't be. They would get to make the big mean globalists the bad guy and tamp down dissent in their country simultaneously.
They absolutely wouldn't make the globalists the bad guys.
They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".
Brazilian here. This guy is the most power crook in power, and he's definetely has been abusing it, many similar cases. The guys from Rumble are lucky they are not in Brazil, otherwise they would be fucked, extortion for sure (pay or go to jail / get fucked).
Also, google him, he looks exactly like a evil movie villain, and he has this nasty villan look all the time.
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
Yeah, why mention his appearance at all? It's crass and his actions should speak for themselves. Someone can be born with "villainesque" features and live a noble life, it's unfair to disadvantage them by perpetuating negative stereotypes.
It's a relevant factor. There's a lot of statistically significant information about someone's personality that can be inferred from their face: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65358-6 . It may be politically incorrect to do so but that doesn't mean it's not useful.
Because blocking a website that values hosting misinformation, conspiracy theories, ideological fascism and hateful bigoted content really makes you a bad guy. Do you free-speech absolutists ever take a look in the mirror?
For things like that, I always like to go to the source, and read the original order. It's the PDF at the bottom of this page: https://noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnoticias/stf-determina-susp... (it also has a link to a page with the PDF of the earlier order from two days ago).
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
I feel like if s/Rumble/Apple/g you would be characterizing this brinkmanship as bravery.
A lone judge trying to shut down a website in a different hemisphere is the antithesis to a free and open Internet. Imagine if the US put a geo-block on all of Germany or something.
And no need to spam your response multiple times in this thread, please.
7 replies →
Moraes issues about ~10 domains bans per week, every week.
It's nothing new.
However we (English speakers) hear only about high profile sites.
I'm an avid reader of Glenn Greenwald (of the Snowden mass-surveillance revelations) and he's been talking about the lawsuit they're bringing against the government following this. I really love the type non-partisan journalism that he practices and hope they manage to shut this nonsense down.
Glenn Greenwald together with Snowden reposts Russian misinformation verbatim.
Glenn Greenwald has not been "non-partisan" for years.
https://www.powells.com/book/owned-9781645030461
It's funny how the left turned on Greenwald the minute he deviated from their ideological line
I find he is consistent on his ideology, but I don't follow him closely to confirm my speculation
I’m not sure about Glenn Greenwald, but this author seems extremely left / socialist. Here’s a tweet where he calls for Silicon Valley to be nationalized. I would take that into account.
https://x.com/eoinhiggins_/status/1891267740247237109?s=46
What's with all the flagged and dead comments?
Reading them, they mostly seem acceptably divergent political opinion, nothing that worrisome imo.
IMHO, HN would be much better if any discussion with a hint or politics in them were not allowed, with the focus going back to purely technological discussion. The political climate right now is absolutely toxic right now, right now all it does is drive out any actual discussion of technology.
Avoiding or banning politics is itself a political position: in favor of status quo.
(If political discussions quickly become uncivil, that is a separate issue solved like with any other uncivil discussion.)
I think the incentive structures created by adding the concept of voting and flagging posts destroy the possibility of productive conversation long-term. If a user can control the visibility of opinions with less effort than defeating those opinions through debate then that mode of operation will end up dominating. Throw in enough users who have similar beliefs within this incentive structure and you start seeing some narratives promoted through upvotes and others hidden through downvotes and flagging. HN obviously has some magic sauce and wonderful moderators to try and prevent this, but I think they're fighting a losing battle just like every other online forum with similar mechanics.
There is a reason “Most stories about politics […] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon” is the first guideline about what not to post on HN.
Political discussions quickly lead to polarization and abuse of the vote system. Doesn’t help that 90% of comments are simply parroting known opinions and not offering anything of particular interest for most readers.
1 reply →
welcome to the wonderful experience of political discussions on hacker news
The mods like to pretend that diverse perspectives are always welcome, flags are only for guidelines. Definitely not true. If your opinion falls too far out of the HN overton window you’re silenced.
2 replies →
It's atonishing that political discussion is even allowed in _Hacker_ News. What is the rationale?
I've been feeling kinda edgy today, might have made some people more trigger happy than usually.
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People have very differing and fluid definitions of fascism.
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People who make violent threats to their political opponents in a democracy should be dealt with violently by the state.
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So should communists.
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The Supreme Court Justice is banning people, not the platform owners...
2 replies →
Apples and oranges. This isn't a platform banning individual users; this is a government banning an entire platform.
Alexandre de Moraes strikes again, with his sweeping anti democratic censorship orders. This man likes to suppress his political opposition - previously that meant banning individual users or deleting content but now it means entire platforms.
Many journalists and nonprofits have called him a threat to Brazilian democracy for good reason (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...). Also see this comparison of the Brazilian constitution and example censorship orders from de Moraes (https://x.com/alexandrefiles/status/1829979981130416479/phot...).
If Rumble wants to operate in Brazil all they need to do is…operate in Brazil.
They’re getting blocked because they won’t staff the company there and they’re getting into legal trouble for the content they post.
Twitter went through this and they were able to get legal and they’re fine now. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being persecuted for their right-wing political beliefs and they’re simply dealing with the natural consequences of their actions.
This kind of law (if there's actually a law in the first place) is called a hostage-taking law for obvious reasons:
https://restofworld.org/2021/social-media-laws-twitter-faceb...
https://restofworld.org/2022/twitters-censorship-india/
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Staff the company there? Is this really how the internet has EVER worked?
16 replies →
Banning political posts or commentary or users based on the content of the messaging is almost always authoritarian and against every basic liberal principle. It is one thing to have privacy laws or laws around ownership or transparency on algorithms or whatever. It’s another thing to ban thoughts the state doesn’t like.
The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees. And why should they staff anyone there anyway? There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
4 replies →
Funny when he had a spat with X and Musk, everyone was using it to bash Musk. Now suddenly it is actually Moraes who is the bad guy.
I think there is a tendency to remember on those we spent the time disagreeing with more, or some similar effect, and then thinking "well gee, before the only thing people seemed to care about was disagreeing with me about <divisive subtopic> instead of <topic>". E.g. picking a random post result from an Algolia search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275600
Top comment: Discussion on Moraes, not Musk
Second comment: References Elon/Elon's past compliance, some replies bash others support the policy
Third comment: About how companies will have to deal with more international events like this
Fourth comment: Mentions X but not Musk, some replies get into Elon back & forth though
Fifth comment: A pretty plain Musk bash
Overall sentiment of Musk certainly wasn't in overwhelming favor of Musk but the top commend and many other threads were focus on Moraes or things other than Musk. Of those that were, most seemed to mention him to bash but certainly not "everyone" bashing him by any measure of the word.
I think you see a lot more "dunk" on posts when it comes to the general political area around "Rumble" or the like. Personally more dunking on than I think is often fair as well, even though that direction is not my personal leaning. Musk himself is actually much less of a downvote trigger, even though he's got a way of getting mentioned way more often than he should in threads (like how the comments on this article have become largely about him when it's about Brazil and Rumble).
Perhaps "everyone" was really just two groups of people all along, one which kept silent in one occasion and the other in the other occasion.
Or perhaps you're right and people really have no moral principles and just say whatever is more convenient at different times. That's a scary thought. I choose to believe in the first alternative. Plenty of people complained about Moraes when he was bashing Musk.
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Honestly we need a NATO of internet.
If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"
While I get where you are coming from where do you draw the line? If a country sinkholes an IP range/domain name because it is actively being used to defraud its citizens should the rest of the internet drop their interconnects with that country? How about CP? Where should the line in the sand be drawn or should the internet be a FFA for every piece of content possible?
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?
EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
People seem to forget every country has its own laws, if you don’t like them don’t move there.
>So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".
1 reply →
We're gonna end up with literally every country losing access to the Internet.
And when they want it back, they'll drop the bans!
2 replies →
Nah, just require it by law for the press / media / social media to annotate removed information with who is responsible for the decision.
So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:
This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:
List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)
The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)
Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)
How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)
I think you're assuming the leadership of those countries will think this is a bad thing. It wouldn't be. They would get to make the big mean globalists the bad guy and tamp down dissent in their country simultaneously.
They absolutely wouldn't make the globalists the bad guys.
They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".
Brazilian here. This guy is the most power crook in power, and he's definetely has been abusing it, many similar cases. The guys from Rumble are lucky they are not in Brazil, otherwise they would be fucked, extortion for sure (pay or go to jail / get fucked). Also, google him, he looks exactly like a evil movie villain, and he has this nasty villan look all the time.
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
>Also, google him, he looks exactly like a evil movie villain, and he has this nasty villan look all the time.
So the way somebody looks is half of your argument?
Yeah, why mention his appearance at all? It's crass and his actions should speak for themselves. Someone can be born with "villainesque" features and live a noble life, it's unfair to disadvantage them by perpetuating negative stereotypes.
1 reply →
It's a relevant factor. There's a lot of statistically significant information about someone's personality that can be inferred from their face: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65358-6 . It may be politically incorrect to do so but that doesn't mean it's not useful.
2 replies →
This is HN, not twitter. Can you provide some more context or links to support your take on this?
Even if true, this comment isn't really conducive of a constructive or interesting conversation.
Because blocking a website that values hosting misinformation, conspiracy theories, ideological fascism and hateful bigoted content really makes you a bad guy. Do you free-speech absolutists ever take a look in the mirror?
Meh, I like his look a lot.
But the guy has definitively decided on turning his country into a dictatorial hell hole.
Brazil had already more than enough problems nobody was doing anything about, it really didn't deserve someone with a beyblade as a moral compass.
Let's hope he'll get a "Am I the baddie?" realization and doesn't enjoy it.