How come he is deleting the VPN apps on my phone??? That I need to remote to my overseas job???
How come I I'm now banned from reading what Zelensky, Kasparov, Yann LeCun, and thousands of others world leaders have to say?
How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
Most legal judgements are blunt swords.
Fairness is seldom considered.
I'm not agreeing with the outcomes here. Just pointing out laws get enforced, if they don't they aren't laws.
Brazilian constitution says:
> Any and all censorship of political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited
What he's doing is censorship, plain and simple. And it's unconstitutional.
This is the single most important thing about tech censorship I wish more HN'ers would figure out on their own. It may be narrated as a fight between corporations and judges, but in addition to all of that, it's ordinary individuals' rights on the line. "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
The right of an individual human to read what some individual account on a media platform wrote is a core civil right, and should be inviolate. It stands alone and apart from whatever other wrongs the platform is involved in.
The modern zeitgeist isn't merely burning books; it's burning down magnificent libraries of books in order to spite approximately five of them.
There are other ways besides the USDA, DoE, or FBI to get good food, health, education, and security.
Restricting access to X makes sense: the platform has removed themselves from the country, making it impossible to resolve legal and financial disputes in Brazil, so it makes sense they are not allowed to operate in the country anymore.
Then again, punishing users that access it through other means is baffling.
Google can definitely install/delete apps from your phone remotely using Play Store.
When he couldn't find representatives of X, he went after SpaceX and StarLink, even though no law allows him to do so. The judge is simply on a personal vendetta against Elon Musk solely on the basis of political alignment.
This isn't baffling, this is leftist totalitarianism at work.
Then, Starlink refused to block Twitter, and with that they kind of proved the Supreme Court's point that they operate under the same economic organization and are subject to the same leadership.
I guess they stepped into their own trap there.
Indeed, before the election and subsequent fallout, the right-wing elmu was friendly towards the right-wing Bolsonaro, who these orders support.
A thorough explanation of the applicable law, point by point, that demonstrates that everything that is happening here is outrageous :
BBC has a decent article that estabilishes a critique of the same points you mentioned in your post: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/c4n3wklk255o some of your complaints are quite fair, some don't.
In particular: "The Brazilian constitution specifies that the Supreme Court can only judge those with “privileged jurisdiction" isn't true at all. The Brazilian Constitution states a whole bunch of attributions to the Supreme Court, which you can read (in Portuguese) at:
https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/constitui... (search for "DO SUPREMO TRIBUNAL FEDERAL")
The role you mention, about ruling over "privileged jurisdiction" is one of 20+ attributed roles, a small fraction of their attributions.
> How come my neighbor, who makes a honest living through X-Twitter, has now lost her job?
Because the other party did violate the law. Unfortunately, Twitter got taken over by an international ideologue who likes to pick fights, and you and your neighbor are suffering the consequences of that. He doesn't care about you in the least, and you should be wary about asking your government to pick up the slack for his egotism as it would just position him to further ignore or exploit you and your community.
(The broader VPN ban is admittedly another thing, though.)
Twitter was bought from ideologues by someone who opened it up to other ideologies. While this may have increased the absolute ideological load on the platform it actually decreased the effective ideological charge since opposite sides cancel out each other, pulling the balance towards the centre where it used to tilt heavily towards a single side.
It’s important to curate a culture and agreed set of norms that you can live with when you’re not in control.
The more opposing ideas on a platform, the more ideas are spread, tested, strengthened, weakened, and grown.
An echo chamber is where ideas go to die.
I honestly, wholeheartedly wish that was true.
In reality, however, the ideology of whoever holds more economic power has orders of magnitude more weight than the one of the powerless masses.
