Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

I remain surprised at how casually people will step over the free speech dead body so they can hate on people the media at large has maligned.

Regardless of what you think of Musk, where's your outrage over this blatant authoritarianism?

Authoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted, having agents routinely shaking down social media companies or acting without any support of the law. What happened here is that bad actors have been taking advantages of the lack of accountability that social media had for the last 20 years. When laws were finally issued a few years ago, those "bad actions" could finally be labelled as crimes. Twitter was given ample time and opportunities to comply with such law, but after failing many times a court order was issued to block it.

What would be much more productive to discuss is if such law that gives accountability to social media is valid and weather the implementation is of good enough quality to catch abuses without impacting freedom of speech. I suspect it is, since we have similar laws mandating accountability to traditional media for 100s of years by now. Afaik any democratic country has such laws, in fact, the usa used to have strong laws around traditional media accountability until a few decades ago when they were weakened.

Is it acceptable for foreign owned entities to not follow the rules of a country? I think, probably not - the choice is to follow the regulations or to not be there, like Meta in China.

Alexandre de Moraes whims are now considered the "rules of the country", how quickly Brazil turned into a dictatorship.

>Regardless of what you think of Musk, where's your outrage over this blatant authoritarianism?

"Billionaire's toy social media network gets banned after blowing off entire country's judicial system" doesn't exactly sounds like "blatant authoritarianism". When I listen carefully, it sounds closer to "rule of law".

A totalitarian leader flagrantly violating his own country's constitution is now "the rules of a country" probably because the guy you dislike is associated with the other side.

Is the US also a dictatorship since nine (or rather, five) unelected people were able to abolish the right to abortion, the Chevron deference and what else at their whim?

There is little authoritarianism in the decision to block access to X. Brazilian law, properly drafted and passed by two independent legislative chambers, dictates several important things:

- foreign companies that operate in Brazil must have a representative there.

- all constitutional rights are to be equally protected, meaning that there are no absolute rights, such as freedom of speech.

- websites have to comply with Brazilian regulations and judicial orders, including removing content that has been deemed illegal by the judiciary.

- the blocking of a non-compliant website is explicitly listed as a penalty under the law.

Right now, Brazil’s Supreme Court is made up of judges appointed by various presidents, and there are tons of members of the opposition in Parliament. Anything that the Court does is subject to these checks and balances, and eventual abuses, such as “banning VPNs”, are quickly overturned in most cases.

At the moment, the only thing that Musk might rightfully challenge in court is the blocking of Starlink’s assets — as there is clear dissent about the legality of this measure. In terms of content moderation and blocking, the letter and spirit of the law are being properly followed.

> Authoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted

I've got you covered then. Before the 2022 elections, this exact same judge did just that.

I witnessed him and his electoral court censor a documentary a priori. Before watching it, before it was even released, they declared it was "fake news" and did not allow it to be published.

To this day that fact shocks me. In my lifetime, I witnessed the exact same a priori censorship that was omnipresent in last century's military dictatorship, the same dictatorship my parents were subjected to and told me stories about.