from Hacker News

X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders

by hexage1814 on 8/17/24, 4:20 PM with 615 comments

  • by virgulino on 8/17/24, 5:13 PM

    Brazilian here. If anyone wants a great introduction to the context and the bigger picture, there's this great article from the NYT in 2022, written by an excellent reporter who lives in Brazil. I highly recommend this article to anyone who hasn't lived in Brazil for the last 10 years:

    "To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?"

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/world/americas/bolsonaro-...

    https://archive.is/plQFT

    It covers the judge at the center of the current issue: "Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal. And this year, 10 of the court’s 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a livestream."

    Rumble has been blocked in Brazil for over a year, and WhatsApp and Telegram have been briefly blocked multiple times.

  • by BadHumans on 8/17/24, 5:01 PM

    > 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...

  • by stickfigure on 8/17/24, 5:08 PM

    The future of this is that international companies need to pick a single jurisdiction, keep their servers and employees there, fight extradition requests, and leave it up to other countries to try to block their own citizens from access.

    I always thought Gibson's concept of "data havens" was kind of silly; data doesn't care where it lives, why would it matter where it's physically located? But apparently he was a bit more prescient than I originally gave him credit for.

  • by taway2024081712 on 8/17/24, 4:53 PM

    X was being fined for not taking down certain account linked with allegedly criminal (as in anti-democratic) content.

    While seemingly noble, some of these accounts were from people not living in Brazil, and supposedly being read by people also not living there. So there's the question of if an American corporation should censor the (one-way?) communication between, say, two US residents at the request of a foreign government.

    The court should have issued a more reasonable request of restricting those accounts to be reached by accounts based in Brazil, which should restrict the judge's decision to his jurisdiction.

  • by dhosek on 8/18/24, 12:38 AM

    It’s only some government censorship that Twitter objects to.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/08/india-twitte...

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65609123

    Musk is not a free speech absolutist: he puts his thumb on the scales to promote the speech he likes while cheerfully suppressing that which he does not.

  • by bottlepalm on 8/17/24, 5:29 PM

    I'm glad X was taken private so they can do stuff like this without worrying about the effects on the public market. It's been too easy to push through censorship on social media platforms, I'm glad at least one has the strength to push back.

  • by olalonde on 8/17/24, 5:13 PM

  • by Teocali on 8/17/24, 4:53 PM

    When reading the article, you see that the threat seems to come after X failed to comply with legal order to block some accounts.

  • by neverrroot on 8/17/24, 4:47 PM

    When there’s nothing left to do, one does what’s needed, especially to protect the Brazilian employees from being caught in the middle.

  • by chairmansteve on 8/17/24, 5:44 PM

    He huffs and puffs about democracies blocking single accounts, but is quite content when Xi blocks twitter in it's entirety.

  • by dudus on 8/17/24, 4:41 PM

    Xitter is full of spam and fake news.

    Elon decided to take the company in this direction where everything is fair game. Things just got worse.

    If Xitter isn't going to up their game the legal system has to jump in and do it for them. It's not going to be pretty.

    Now Elon is taking their ball home. Closing the offices, firing hundreds, burning bridges.

    It's a power move where everyone loses but his ego.

  • by h_tbob on 8/18/24, 4:14 AM

    All right, I have a suggestion.

    In the modern day, nobody should be able to be put in jail without a jury.

    The amount of times people go to jail based on somebody just literally, waking up on the wrong side of the bed is a lot higher than you’d think.

    For example studies show that the time of day your sentencing occurs is a factor on your punishment.

    The problem with letting judges throw people in jail for any reason is simple:

    I watched a sniper movie. The young junior sniper who had never killed asked the older experienced guy what it feels like.

    He said at first he felt awful. But as he killed more, he said “what’s even worse is I don’t even feel anything at all”

    When you have people who are allowed to imprison humans and they do it regularly, they will inevitably lose the same feeling that a regular citizen goes thru. You should feel something very deeply because you are about to do something very big.

    So I recommend reform such that only a jury who doesn’t have experience imprisoning people have the ability to do it.

  • by worewood on 8/19/24, 5:13 AM

    Be aware that the brazilian tech-literate tend to have far-right opinions, and as such like to think that there is a dictatorship because they're not able to voice opinions defending violence or discrimination openly.

  • by vouaobrasil on 8/17/24, 11:41 PM

    Not surprising. Shit happens in Brazil, and it's a lot different than it is in North America. I wouldn't have believed it myself (as a Canadian) if I had not lived here for almost two years. It's like a labrynthine system filled with corruption and the unwritten rules that make anything very difficult down here unless you are a master of those rules, or the jeitinho brasileiro...

    Basically, even in daily life, anything that you KNOW is easy in North America is a real pain in the ass down here.

  • by hexage1814 on 8/17/24, 4:25 PM

    Brazil is essentially living under a judicial dictatorship for the last 5 years or so. The media and press have been looking the other way (as well as actively helping in the persecution) because they didn't like the people being persecuted, so they were fine with the whole thing.

  • by jrflowers on 8/17/24, 10:09 PM

    This is neither here nor there but does anyone know what content/account(s) was ordered “censored”?

  • by cynicalpeace on 8/18/24, 12:06 PM

    Strong first amendment-like system solves all these questions. Not complicated

  • by arp242 on 8/17/24, 5:12 PM

    I don't really use X, but I still have an account because it's just more convenient to view stuff with an account, and for better or worse, sometimes I want to view what people are saying. Typically I don't really bother flagging stuff, but recently I flagged two posts which seemed very obviously beyond the pale to me:

    "Zelensky is an expert on false flags (he is jewish, obviously) like Bucha" [1]

    "Still think it's because they are "Muslim"? Wake up. Same story in every continent on global Earth. Southern equatorial dark skins have a higher demographic percentage of low IQ and low impulse control future criminals. It's not worth mixing. https://t.co/D0lQuEUV8L" [2] (context here is the competitive racism riots in Britain last week, which makes it even worse IMO)

    Both flags were denied.

    Now, I don't really know about this specific disagreement or if blocking those accounts is reasonable or not, the story doesn't really have enough specifics on that. "Spreading fake news and hate messages" from governments can be used over-zealously or even in bad faith, but if the platform also doesn't do anything about naked unambiguous racism and antisemitism, then we clearly can't trust X on this either.

    [1]: https://x.com/WWIII_Affairs/status/1810377249126035535

    [2]: https://x.com/TruthForgeX/status/1820184515190665543

  • by mmooss on 8/18/24, 3:09 AM

    It's interesting that Musk is willing to throw away money: The ~$40B he spent on Twitter (though he did try to back out), the destruction he's wrought on Twitter/X's revenue by trolling and by censoring (journalists, etc., including by blocking, reducing their reach, and suing them), by pushing his far right social agenda (including by allowing hate and violence on Twitter/X), by suing major business partners, and now by abandoning a major market.

    Does any other businessperson behave this way? And the things he advocates are absurd; they have no value to Twitter/X or to society.

  • by csouzaf on 8/17/24, 5:30 PM

    Brazilian here. I find it very bad when someone from another country criticizes our Supreme Court, especially when it seems driven by ideological motivations. As others have pointed out, similar situations occur in other countries without bring Elon's comments

    Brazil doesn't have an equivalent to the U.S. First Amendment, and that's not necessarily a problem. Our legal framework reflects our historical and cultural context. Why he feel the need to impose his vision of what's best for Brazil, without fully taking account our legal and social nuances?

  • by paul7986 on 8/17/24, 5:43 PM

    X is now 4chan to faces of death as i just was scrolling through and saw CTV security footage a guy suckering punch a guy .. the victim got up.. hurried out the door then turned around a point blank shot his assailant and it was gruesome. Ive never something like that and was fine with not seeing such before. Yet X is a trainwreck I am drawn ever more to especially with Grok 2 images.

  • by Overtonwindow on 8/18/24, 5:44 AM

    Any expansion of government power is wrong.

  • by gverrilla on 8/18/24, 1:46 AM

    X for Xandão

  • by Yeul on 8/17/24, 11:39 PM

    Lucky bastards.

  • by stonethrowaway on 8/18/24, 2:05 AM

    > X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, claims Moraes secretly threatened one of the company's legal representatives in the South American country with arrest if it did not comply with legal orders to take down some content from its platform.

    I agree with this decision. If it was my staff a judge was bullying and threatening, I’d close up shop too. It paints a very bad picture for the ethics of the country. Brazil should be ashamed to have a person like this presiding over matters of law.

  • by henriquenunez on 8/17/24, 5:11 PM

    BORA BRASIL!!!!

  • by meiraleal on 8/17/24, 5:09 PM

    As a Brazilian, I must say, great day!

  • by thih9 on 8/17/24, 8:49 PM

    > "To protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately," X said.

    Would they also fire said staff because they have now ceased operations in Brazil?

    Hopefully not. Still, I’d like to see a follow up, confirming that this action indeed benefited the employees, as they claim.

  • by 0xcb0 on 8/17/24, 11:12 PM

    Tbh, sometime I wish the same would happen in whole europe. This platform is out of control. It's threatening democracy if it keeps on publishing fake news en mass with no control whatsoever. Let the platform die, it was a good time. But it's time for sth. new that keeps society intact.