It wasn’t like a law banning X. They were Court ordered to do something and they didn’t do it.
Could that happen in other countries? I mean sure but not the way you’re implying.
The UK government has already accused them of stirring up riots.
We ban piracy sites on the largest ISPs, and could easily add X to that list.
I’m genuinely surprised why the UK haven’t already
Under what law?
UK currently holds the people that post things liable for their own words. X, the platform, just relays what is said. Same as Lemmy. Same as Mastodon.
If you ban X I don’t see why those other platforms wouldn’t be next.
Now should people/organisations/companies leave X? Absolutely! Evacuate like it’s a house of fire. Should it be shut down by legal means? No.
An argument being made in another social media case (involving TikTok) is that algorithmic feeds of other users’ content are effectively new content, created by the platform. So if Twitter does anything other than a chronological sorting, it could be considered to be making its own, deliberately-produced content, since they’re now in control of what you see and when you see it. Depending on how the TikTok argument gets interpreted in the courts, it could possibly affect how Twitter can operate in the future.
It’s certainly arguable that the algorithm constitutes an editorial process and so that opens them up to libel laws and to liability.
Fair point.
That argument is being made in the USA, not the UK.
Let’s say this goes through, how is a company going to prove it is not using an “algorithmic feed” unless they open source their code and/or provide some public interface to test and validate feed content?
Plus, even without an “algorithmic feed”, couldn’t some third party using bots control a simple chronological or upvote/like-based feed? And then those third parties, via contracts and agreements, would manipulate the content rather than the social media owner itself.
unless they open source their code and/or provide some public interface to test and validate feed content
This honestly seems like a good idea. I think one of the ways to mitigate the harm of algorithmically driven content feeds is openness and transparency.
Well for the end users and any regulators it’s a great idea. But the companies aren’t going to go along with this.
Then they must be held liable for what they allow to spread on their platforms
Twitter (or rather musk) chooses what it “relays” or boosts. Unlike lemmy, unlike Mastodon.
The Australian Government issued a bunch of take down notices to Twitter and Musk said no
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-23/what-can-the-government-do-about-x/103752600
Musk decided to block them in Australian only which didn’t satisfy the Australian Government
He took them to court and the court sided with Twitter, (x)
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/australian-court-elon-musk-x-freedom-of-speech-row-1236000561/
The complexity and contradictions were illustrated by Tim Begbie, the lawyer representing the eSafety Commissioner in court. He said that in other cases X had chosen of its own accord to remove content, but that it resisted the order from the Australian government.
“X says […] global removal is reasonable when X does it because X wants to do it, but it becomes unreasonable when it is told to do it by the laws of Australia,” Begbie told the court.
Here’s the thing about nation state governments. They can pass laws. It’s kind of the main thing they do.
They retain authority by having some air of legitimacy. They can’t just change laws, there has to be a due process just changing laws without a process is literally a dictatorship.
I agree. It would set a terrible precedent, even if it’s terribly tempting. I’d say it’s better to ask people to leave instead.
I’m sure they would like to but they don’t really have the authority.
unfortunately i still have to side against national firewalls even when i think they’re extremely funny
I initially agreed with you but this is a bit different. Actually haven’t banned anything it’s just a court order so it wasn’t done because some politician decided it should happen it was done because of things that Twitter chose to do, or not do as the case may be.
Presumably this won’t be permanent provided the capitulate.
I think they don’t have a literal national firewall, rather they demanded every single ISP in the country to block the domain.
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i’m pretty sure that’s how most national firewalls work. it’s still government censorship of internet resources on a national level
I’m all for adopting Wayland but some compatibility should be preserved. An outright ban seems a bit extreme.
😂👌🏻
Yes, they should.
Twitter already bans and takes down posts for most other nations, Musk even posted about how they have to to operate.
This is quite literally no different. If you want to operate in a country, love or hate it, you have to agree to their laws for their users. If the EU laws say posting revenge porn, you can’t ignore them and say nuh uh we’re a US company free speech. If Japan has a law saying posting bomb instructions is an instaban, you have follow suit. And in Brazil, 7 accounts, seven were identified by a court as needing to be taken down for spreading misinformation. You can object, but then stop doing it for the other countries as well, because Twitter absolutely must cooperate with the US and EU on these requests or they get massive fines as well. And they do.
Its a stupid act of grandstanding and Elon thought they would blink first, or the fallout wouldn’t be so obvious and massive.
I hope so.
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I think any country would ban a business whose CEO ignores requests by its judges and even proceeds to taunt them. An international business that decides which laws it does or does not follow is pretty dystopian, all X had to do was what Google has done for ages, comply with the law regionally.
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If X did that, then there wouldn’t be this thread. It isn’t just Google, it’s every international corporation that has to deal with issues across the border. I’m sorry, bud, but outside of the Musk personality cult chamber, the guy is just incompetent, he just made and inherited a few risky bets that worked out for him and he’s still riding their fading glory.
Musk complied with India, why isn’t he complying with Brazil?
Because our current government is center left and the accounts were supporters of the right. That’s all there is to it, he even reinstated Monark’s account, a podcaster from here that fled to the USA after arguing that Nazis should be free to have their own political party, and after arriving there said that we shouldn’t criminalize the consumption of CSAM, just production.
Yes
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Plenty of good reasons to ban things, even if they’re useful. Asbestos. In fact, banning asbestos didn’t harm anyone, as your comment would imply. It actually helped people.
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So by virtue of social media existing, it can’t be flawed? It can’t be broken? It can’t be harmful? It can’t be pushing racist and fascist ideology?
There’s a mountain of evidence showing the harms social media does, and you’re just acting like all that research doesn’t exist.
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I hope not. Ban = authoritarianism
They were banned for refusing to follow Brazilian laws, specially laws about disinformation. Twitter was banned in Brazil because its actively working as a propaganda outlet.
Propaganda = authoritarianism
I think they were banned because they didn’t have a representative in the country that they could serve those allegations to.
No, that’s an oversimplification. The judge has been asking the representatives in Brazil to block some accounts that have been spreading disinformation. The representatives replied to the judge saying they’re just representatives and X/Twitter wouldn’t comply with that request. In Brazil, if you’re the representative of a company, you have to have the power to comply with Brazil’s laws. As they were not complying, the judge gave them extra time to comply and mentioned if they didn’t comply, the local president/director/representative would go to jail. That’s when X/Twitter closed the representation in Brazil.
After that, the only action left available for the judge was to block X/Twitter.
The judge also blocked all bank accounts for Starlink, a different company.
While I think the ban is justified, the power the judge has is definitely fishy too.
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authoritarianism is when no twitter
Yes, I do have the authority to ban you from my house. That isn’t authoritarianism, it’s just not wanting you in my house.
I don’t want to go to your house
Let’s hope so. Destroy all a-social media platforms!
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Judge tells the company to take down profiles that have been known to be used solely for spreading political lies. Company complies. Manbaby buys company, pedals back on previous compliance. Judge tells company to comply again. Company ignores it. Judge makes it a legal order. Company removes its legal representative from the country, so the company no longer “answers to the country’s laws”. Company’s IP addresses gets country wide block. That is censorship because…? Freeze peach?
Not that the judge in question, Alexandre de Moraes, is any sort of role model, what with him imposing a R$50,000 fine to anyone using a VPN to bypass the block, which is a clear overstepping of the order and hitting end users because “fuck them”, this is likely to be overruled later today. He also ordered to freeze Starlink’s assets (because they didn’t comply with the order to block xitter).
The Brazilian Internet Law (Marco Civil da Internet) says that the content to be removed via judicial intervention must be specified. It does not allow the blocking of entire accounts from a social media platform. In fact, Brazilian Constitution forbids this kind of censorship (Censura Prévia). The decision to block X nationwide is based on a series of decisions that blatantly violate Brazilian Law.
By the way, the dictator-judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Starlink’s asset freeze before Starlink wouldn’t comply with X blocking.
The part of the law that talks about content removal (Section 3, articles 18 to 21) does not say that only content can be removed nor that accounts can’t be touched. Before Moraes, judges have ordered people to be locked out of certain social media, so there is precedent.
It’s also important to note that freedom of speech ends the moment it becomes a crime. Whether said xitter accounts have been committing crimes, and which crimes, is a different discussion
Fighting crime is desirable, but within the limits of the law:
Brazilian Internet Civil Rights Framework
Art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, the internet application provider may only be held civilly liable for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after a specific court order, it fails to take steps to, within the scope and technical limits of its service and within the specified timeframe, make the content identified as infringing unavailable, except for legal provisions to the contrary.
§ 1º The court order referred to in the caput must contain, under penalty of nullity, clear and specific identification of the content identified as infringing, which allows the unequivocal location of the material.
Note that the legislator took the trouble to say right at the beginning that the intention is to prevent censorship. Few laws are written in such detail as to reinforce their guiding principles in the middle of the provisions. If the legislator went to this trouble, it is because the intention of avoiding censorship is fundamental to this law. If judges are ignoring the law, they’re ignoring the will of the people.
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No. The difference is we have democracy instead of despotism so you can vote for someone else if you are unhappy with your government. Also free press. And no, Europe ain’t perfect, but equating it to Russia is laughable.
Here in Brazil we have a judge that concentrates the powers of: judge, prosecutor, victim, legislator, chief of Federal Police. And he wasn’t elected by the people. Are we still really a democracy? Are we so different from countries like Russia?
Judges in the STF (supreme court) are not directly elected by the people (because that would be disastrous in real life, people would vote for fun or ‘against the system’ in absurd candidates like reality show and football stars, or people would just not know what makes a good STF judge candidate). BUT they ARE indirectly elected by the people, by the process of: 1. Elected president chooses a list of candidates, three in order of preference. 2. Elected parliament approves the chosen candidate (or vetoes them all, and step 1 is repeated until approval). The institution is democratic, just not direct democracy. If people want 11 fachos in the STF, they can just consistently vote for a majority in parliament and win the presidency, over time they will nominate all the judges they wanted. (and no, that is not comparable to elected politicians because STF judges actually need to have very specialized knowledge intrinsically tied to their function, i.e. uphold the legal order from the constitution and interpret law in general).
It’s also good to remind people that separation of powers in Brazil has THREE powers, not 2 or 1. STF Judges, like the congress and the president, can and should weight in all the political topics if it is inside their sphere of functions (keep the integrity of the constitutional laws and regulations). Like interfering in fraudulent cases, ordering the police around if the police are doing something absurd and the congress and presidency are being neglectful until they stop contradicting the constitution and fundamental rights, ordering prisons to receive maintenance works if the police and congress and administration are neglecting their constitutional duties, etc and etc.
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I think you need to cancel your citizenship (and your family members’ citizenships) and move to russia or PRC.
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You don’t understand the terms “censorship” or “free speech”. It’s a mere internet polemic for you, something to act out about .
You have no clue what you are talking about.
They go low, we go high.
They give Twitter requests which it compiles with, but Twitter doesn’t compile with ours.
Hungarian democracy fell partly due to free speech absolutism.
