The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said he hopes the crisis surrounding the social network X in Brazil might teach the world that “it isn’t obliged to put up with [Elon] Musk’s far-right free-for-all just because he is rich”.
Lula’s comments to the network CNN Brasil came after the supreme court voted unanimously on Monday to uphold the ban on X, which is now largely inaccessible in one of its biggest global markets.
The suspension was first ordered on Friday as a result of the company’s refusal to obey court orders requiring the removal of profiles accused of spreading disinformation and for the social network to name a local legal representative.
Lula is so fucking great. He’s literally just backing up the courts that are applying the law fairly and as-written, which is more than I can say for most leaders.
Don’t get me wrong, Lula is correct on this. But he’s still a scummy politician who has a questionable past
Raising 20 million Brazilians out of poverty, while making his country the 8th largest economy in the world? I’m sure he’s as corrupt as any Brazilian politician, but none of them have anything that comes even close to that to show for it.
It’s politics. You could have some shoplifting charge from 40 years ago and people will yell about how you’re the worst and attempt to invalid everything you do because of it.
He also got arrested for one of the largest corruption scandals in the history of Brazil. It’s a complex person. We can criticize his vices and praise his virtues at the same time.
Oh arrested? Wow, only guilty people are arrested by states led by their fascist political rivals. If he’s arrested, he must be guilty. That’s how justice works.
You could’ve said “convicted”, but that was annulled and a UN human rights committee found that:
The committee concluded that prosecutors and the lead judge in the investigation, Sergio Moro, showed bias in Lula’s case, violating his right to be presumed innocent.
I’m not a fan of politicians in general, but I’d take these charges more seriously if the people prosecuting them weren’t so flagrantly politically motivated and breaking the rules. Presumably the reason he was tried in the wrong court was because the state was shopping for a judge that wouldn’t give him a fair trial. If he’s that guilty, they’ve muddied the waters by not actually caring about his guilt, and it’s going to be way harder to get anything to stick anymore. Like they were in charge of the whole fucking country, how were they this bad at persecuting him?
What I do know is that when a fascist like Bolsonaro is that mad at you, you might actually be doing something right.
To be fair, you don’t have to be doing anything for fascisti to hate you. That’s kinda their schtick.
Cooking up charges and rigging a court case specifically to take you down is a different level of hate though.
What’s the questionable past?
Fucking thank you. It’s nice to see at least some heads of state actually have the stones to tell Phony Stark to fuck off.
I would tune in to watch Low-T Stark test out a robotic rocket suit live.
And it doesn’t mean Musk has any valid and useful intelligence. He got handed money early in life, got lucky with PayPal, and now thinks because of all of that, his views on the world matter. They don’t. He’s a piece of shit and the world should reject him among many others.
And still salty enough to rename twitter to the company that merged with PayPal since PayPal was such a better name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank)
Also ask Musk fanboys who Greg Kouri is and they have no idea
Over the past year Musk has removed all masks and clearly believes he can operate beyond the law. His motives are clearly to watch the world burn. He is an extremely dangerous, unpredictable and powerful man, threatening democracy across the globe.
Our governments need to protect us from him. Brazil’s being brave here, I hope they’re just the first.
No. You’re giving him too much credit and actually making it seem like mr. Musk is in any sense of the word capable of self-reflection. He is a burned out, incompetent tech-junkie and nothing but a hypeman for expensive toys someone else develops. He might be allegedly blackmailed by Russian kompromat or just plainly stupid enough to believe the propagandistic image of strong Putin/Russia. The only scary thing about him is, he never takes a fall for his numerous blunders. Yet, before first-worlders become the ones paying for his mistakes he will rest comfortably upon his dollar throne.
Be that as it may, the man has influence and it would be incredibly foolish to discount this because he’s a fucking moron. Sadly, the world is full of extremely incompetent billionaires, and they hold a shocking amount of influence over the world, whether it’s through collusion on layoffs, enforcing RTO in tandem, cutting green initiatives within a month of each other, etc.
Money is basically a vehicle for power and this a ketamine junkie in a garbage truck speeding through every intersection in the world and daring anyone to try and stop him. At least Brazil is trying.
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Some call him Phony Stark, or Lex Loser.
His motives are clearly to watch the world burn.
His motives are money and power. He is indifferent to if the world burns in the process.
He’s already got all the money and most of the power. Now his hobby is far right extremism and anarchy.
At some point accumulating more money is no longer about added utility and more like a kind of cynical game score. And musky boy is clearly chasing that high score.
That’s been said, and perhaps it has been true. But when you’re the richest man in the world by a significant margin, you have literally won at money and to remain competitive you need to move onto other things. Like the power of politics, and working to destabilise multiple countries at once.
He doesn’t have all the money. I have some money, Brazilians have money. It’s not enough to have most of the money and power if there’s more he can get.
He has more than anyone else in the history of the world. By any scale, he’s won at money.
And yet he still wants more. It’s not enough to have most of the money, he needs to have all the money.
I’m an anarchist, and Musk’s behaviour is the farthest possible thing from anarchy. Anarchism is all about working together to build a better world where everyone has all of their needs met, not being a selfish, caustic, aggressive asshole. Elon would have no chance of getting consensus to join any commune anywhere in the world. Unless there’s some insane libertarian commune somewhere.
Anarchism is all about working together to build a better world where everyone has all of their needs met,
Hmm, I was working with the classic disctionary definition which is “a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems.”
But you’re right, anarchism does have that other meaning, so perhaps a better word would be “chaos”.
His actions in supporting Trump in the US, promoting hate and extermist views on X globally, and encouraging civil war in the UK do all fit a chaos agenda. That’s not about money - at least, not that I can see.
He is one of the world’s most dangerous people, however, and I don’t say that lightly. Not least because of his history of being unpredictable.
More governments should follow Brazil’s example and push back.
In fairness, it isn’t like banning one social media website (and a purveyor of misinformation and disinformation at that) will have either national security concern or threatening fundamental freedoms in Brazil. It could be why Brazil had been so bold.
This is why it’s important to have decentralized social media. We cannot have anyone unilaterally deciding what gets talked about and what doesn’t.
Ordinarily, I might agree. However, this suspension is because musk refused to appoint a legal representative for the company in Brazil, IAW Brazilian law. That’s a reasonable ask for a company that’s actively doing business in the country. If a billionaire* crybaby refuses to follow the law, then he gets to deal with the consequences. FA meet FO.
That’s not what the article says, the article says it’s because X refused to ban users and because of that. Not just because of that
You should read up on the whole ordeal. The article is failing to summarize the lengthy legal battle that’s been happening between them for years since Musk’s takeover.
Well, from what I understand when X appoints a legal representative they will then be held responsible for refusing to ban. Is that wrong?
Can you provide a quick summary?
Your right to free speech ends when it turns into terrorism, racism or a call for a coup.
There are some things that should be banned, such as the twitter accounts that promoted the attempt at a coup in Brazil in Jan 8 2023.
These are the accounts that the judge asked to be banned. After Twitter didn’t comply they started sending fines and eventually outright banning it.
Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything. It means the government cannot punish you for your political views. But they can, and must punish racism and anti-democracy speech.
Also, it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all
it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all
Could someone expand upon this? I’m don’t know much about tech, but the idea that FOSS decentralized platforms can’t be banned does seem to make sense right? Ban one, another one will pop up, etc. What am I not getting here?
I’ll admit I don’t know how Lemmy works in communicating to each other. However, Internet traffic is labeled in some manner. It has to be to ensure data traverses the web of routers we call the Internet. Lemmy instances have to identify each other to share their information to each other.
Just ban whatever traffic Lemmy instances are looking for.
Also, it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all
Yes, if banning protocols is acceptable for you.
You mean possible right?
If it’s acceptable, then a wildcard ban of undetected protocols and the “bad” ones from among the detected is possible. China-style.
That is, everything is possible.
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If what these accounts said was so dangerous then why didn’t the government go after the operators of the accounts and arrest them? Instead they tried to silence them by banning them from Twitter. That would only bring more validity to what these accounts were saying if the government has to tell foreign companies to silence them instead of challenging their speech.
If yelling “fire” in a movie theatre is so dangerous why not allow people to do it and don’t ban it and instead just arrest them after the stampede?
That’s a bad comparison. Yelling “fire” in a crowd to induce a panic is illegal and can lead to arrest. But that happens after you actually yell “fire” not before you might yell “fire”. In your example you say ban yelling “fire” when inducing a panic is already banned. Do you want people banned because of pre-crime?
So I agree with you about the whole “arresting people after they yell fire and not before” thing, but we’re talking about people who attempted a coup here, these aren’t hypothetical pre-crimes.
To your earlier point about going after the people who actually did the coup:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-64299892
According to this BBC article, 39 people were indicted within about a week of the attack
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_attack
According to Wikipedia, 86 people have been convicted and sentenced to jail time.
I’m sure there are better numbers but I don’t speak Portuguese so I’m not going to find them.
Also, while this conflict did begin with Brazil wanting them to ban accounts who helped organize the coup attempt, x was banned because they refuse to appoint a Brazilian legal representative.
but we’re talking about people who attempted a coup here, these aren’t hypothetical pre-crimes
We’re talking about the entire country of Brazil — 200 million people — being cut off from using X.
Yes, because the company refused to appoint a Brazilian legal representative.
We’re talking about the entire country of Brazil — 200 million people — being cut off from using X.
Companies that don’t follow the laws of a country don’t get to operate in that country. The entire country of the United States - 300 million people - are cut off from enjoying Kinder Surprise. Are you equally outraged about that?
When a company says “Lol, we’re not going to have a way for you to hold us accountable” then a country is obviously going to shut them down. They’re not going to let a company ignore their sovereignty like that.
Thankfully.
Yeah, it’s too bad it’s only 200 million, and only “X”. All the billionaire-controlled, black-box content algorithm social media sites are a cancer on humanity. Nobody’s freedom is being impinged upon by banning them; they’re the private fiefdoms of oligarchs, who blatantly wield them in service of their own agendas. Banning them is the sensible thing to do, and I can only hope that other governments follow suit.
Like if exactly 200 million people could afford eletronics (saying from experience) or caring about Twitter at all.
people are banned from doing things because they did things. e.g. if you DUI you get banned from future driving not just punished for the past. Hackers get banned from the internet etc
If what these accounts said was so dangerous then why didn’t the government go after the operators of the accounts and arrest them?
Oh, is X willing to help them find the operators of the accounts? Or are you suggesting they do something impossible instead of something actionable?
If the owners of the accounts aren’t operating in Brazil (likely) then there is little Brazil can do to go after them. X is operating in Brazil, so Brazil has the authority to go after X if they refuse to do anything about it.
Given the state of Xitter, I would argue that his control of Starlink is significantly more dangerous.
More like Far-right-free fall
More like fart-fight free-ball
More like “Cartwright! Your table is ready. Cartwright!”
His wealth also doesn’t mean we need to accept his wealth as valid.
It’s just make believe numbers.
Just like your paycheck
Except they do work for their paycheck, unlike musk with the number he has amassed.
Based Lula.
You’re the only person who used this expression correctly, ever.
That’s so Weird how Next Week the US will Find Oil in Brazil and oust Lula!
Don’t ask why the disgraced former judge Sergio Moro, who jailed Lula in 2018, causing the rise of Ballswallower, was invited by the US State Department in the oughts to do their “anti-terrorism” training.
“Ballswallower”…?
I even searched for it thinking maybe that was some real name, so now that’s in my search history
You know, the racist piece of shit who caught covid 15 times and used to be president
How did jailing Lula lead to that, and how did he rise to power AFTER becoming president
They’re talking about Bolsonaro. But yeah when you use the same insults against all the people you disagree with it makes it hard to tell them apart
That makes way more sense, duh. Thanks.
Why would I call anyone else Ballswallower
Lula was not only set to win, but set to win without a runoff vote.
“We will coup whoever we want!”
We already well past that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrobras
In so many movies that revolves around what would happen if a multi billionaire… Turned EVIL
Well now we know
You don’t get to a billion dollars by being ethical in the first place. At the very least, they are all willing to exploit the labour of hundreds or thousands or more.
I hope that my country’s goverment makes the other countries realise how dangerous this man is.
brazilian futurism was not what I expected for 2024 but I’m pleasantly surprised
Better than Brazilian dystopianism
Based af Frfr ❌ 🧢
You’re the second person to use this expression correctly, ever.
Elon is the tech version of Murdoch and is more dangerous because of his worldwide access through Twitter. Unfortunately the extremists will have more of a voice and propaganda will overwhelm the media. Since the media is controlled by billionaires they have no interest in exposing them
Elon is more dangerous because he’s a US government contractor which means his incessent law breaking and bullshittery will mean the US government will go to bat for him in a conflict
Wouldn’t want those military secrets getting out
We should preemptively offer to extradite
he ate that
why the downvotes im on the presidents side
Why the downvotes?
