Comment by blackeyeblitzar
4 months ago
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...).
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.
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.
Well it is often one side dominating the debate and the other gets down voted to oblivion and called names when it comes to topics involving Musk.
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).
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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/
Calling it hostage-taking is just a coping mechanism. Every country has sovereignty over speech within its own borders. Otherwise, in the US for example, we could have Russian propaganda blasting us non-stop through social media and engaging in electioneering here, and we'd be powerless to do anything about it.
Staff the company there? Is this really how the internet has EVER worked?
Government wants a throat to choke that is subject to their jurisdiction.
If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.
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What does that have to do with anything? Brazilian law is quite clear. Whatever someone thinks the internet "was" or was not is immaterial.
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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?
> The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees.
If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there. Brazil would be wise to lock them out like they would any would-be criminal organization.
> There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
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