Comment by mullingitover
4 months ago
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.
Having the company put an office there does not give you anything to choke, unless you did it like Brazil did and threaten lawyers with jail. Even then... that's just a Brazilian lawyer the company hired.
In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.
What does that have to do with anything? Brazilian law is quite clear. Whatever someone thinks the internet "was" or was not is immaterial.
Well if we agree that it's reasonable that a company needs to have staff in a country it operates in, then you'd need to have staff in every country to operate. That seems unreasonable to me.
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Why should an American/Canadian company care what the law is in some third world country?
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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.
>If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there.
Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US. A legitimate legal system does not censor free information, does not jail people without trial, does not empower a court system to launch "investigations" according to the whims of judges, and does not make demand on outside organizations with no operations in the country (lack or jurisdiction). The situation is this: Like other regimes (China, India, etc), the government of Brazil has enacted a hostage-taking law so they can threaten and intimidate foreign companies into getting what they want. Instead of complying with this law, companies would be wise to protect themselves and their employees by ignoring it.
>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.
Brazil has a TFR of ~1.5 and is rapidly aging. It's just a bigger Italy, and another country that will never be wealthy.
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