To be fair, I think people looked at the folks who were into mermaids as outlandish too. “Been around for a long time” doesn’t mean the same thing as “totally accepted socially”.

That only works if you manage to make it there without hating YOURSELF.

Hardly worth mentioning at this point, but this is illegal.

I didn’t know Macron was MAGA…

What if you’re pirating to avoid agreeing to an EULA that lets a giant corporation murder your family members?

This works. I ran a linux distro in off hours on my work laptop for years this way.

In the sense that it’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time, yes. Exactly the same thing. Opportunities aren’t equal - they disproportionately effect those who happen to be positioned to take advantage of them. If I’m giving away a free car right now to whoever comes by, and you’re not nearby, you’re shit out of luck. If AI didn’t HAPPEN to use massively multi-threaded computing, Nvidia would still be artificial scarcity-ing themselves to price gouging CoD players. The fact you don’t see it for whatever reason doesn’t make it wrong. NOBODY at Nvidia was there 5 years ago saying “Man, when this new technology hits we’re going to be rolling in it.” They stumbled into it by luck. They don’t get credit for forseeing some future use case. They got lucky. That luck got them first mover advantage. Intel had that too. Look how well it’s doing for them. Nvidia’s position over AMD in this space can be due to any number of factors… production capacity, driver flexibility, faster functioning on a particular vector operation, power efficiency… hell, even the relationship between the CEO of THEIR company and OpenAI. Maybe they just had their salespeople call first. Their market dominance likely has absolutely NOTHING to do with their GPU’s having better graphics performance, and to the extent they are, it’s by chance - they did NOT predict generative AI, and their graphics cards just HAPPEN to be better situated for SOME reason.

Go ahead and design a better pickaxe than them, we’ll wait…

Same argument:

“He didn’t earn his wealth. He just won the lottery.”

“If it’s so easy, YOU go ahead and win the lottery then.”

Take my upvote and get out of my sight.

Twitter is an international company that officially operates in multiple countries in multiple languages with large numbers of users in those countries. Truth social is a tiny media network operating in a single country in essentially one language. I don’t believe for a second you don’t understand the difference, and it is such a silly and irrelevant thing to bring into this conversation that I can only conclude you aren’t arguing in good faith at this point, and you’re just trying to waste my time. You have a good one.

First of all, who are “they” in this scenario?

Because I don’t think you mean the Brazilian government, because it’s relatively obvious.

There is no need to ban or censure speech for reasons of inciting violence if it doesn’t have a big enough audience to actually do that.

And secondly, Truth Social’s tiny audience is almost completely US citizens, who generally speaking don’t speak or understand Portuguese, and the network doesn’t officially operate in the country in any capacity.

You are correct.

Brazil is not a totalitarian regime. The resistance to deplatforming in this case isn’t the same as, say, resisting deplatforming democracy activists in Taiwan, which X would likely not do.

The context matters. Brazil is a democratic nation with checks and balances that has defined what it considers illegal speech. X is of course, entitled to disagree with that assessment. And Brazil is free to correctly assess that X is not following its laws and ban it from operating there. That’s all there is to it. If the Brazilian people think the government’s definition of illegal speech is wrong, this government will be booted out in the next election. It’s that simple.

This is the danger. Propaganda is not the issue. Illegal speech is. Speech that incites violence, reveals classified information, or endangers innocent people.

Lemmy is not a company, but if, for example, Lemmy starts posting the names, addresses, and home security details of Brazilian officials, you can rest assured they would block those instances as well.

X being a single corporate entity gives it different responsibilities because it operates as a business, but either way, the platform flouting the law will and should be blocked. Free speech is not a free-for-all and has limitations.

If they flout the law of those countries, they will. And they should.

Social media companies do not get to be above government because they are social media companies. The government’s actions are the actions taken by the representatives chosen by the people in free and fair elections. THAT is where the people’s voice matters. Not on an opaque social media platform. If a car company decides they think a government safety restriction is wrong, they don’t get to NOT implement it. If they do, they get shut down. Social media companies are NO different.

No company with no accountability to anyone but its shareholders should EVER be above a government of the people. Do you want a dystopia? Because that’s how you get a dystopia.

…which is a dangerous violation of the freedom of privacy and has resulted in the imprisonment of government critics in many countries like Saudi Arabia, where X has happily given user identifying information on request.

Also, nobody’s voice is taken away. The government isn’t making people stop talking. The originally requested deplatformed users were more than welcome to go to another platform. And the shutting down of X in general? They’ve shut down a platform that was blatantly and flagrantly violating the law. There are hundreds of others platforms to choose from. Heck, you can still go outside, go to the park, and yell. Always could. Do not conflate freedom of speech with the entitlement to a particular audience.

Sure, it’s not as neat and clean as that and I acknowledge that, but at the end of the day, a tautological approach to either free speech or censorship is detrimental in either direction. Worries about censorship going too far ARE justified, but there ARE situations where it is necessary, and more exacting and precise public discussions about and decisions on what is fair game for censorship and what isn’t is the solution, not the understandably visceral reaction to censorship in general.

Well, you are forgetting another category, which is incitement to violence. That falls under the same blanket speech as the aforementioned “yelling fire in a crowded theater”, and in 2024, the law is far, far behind the danger that this poses in most countries, limiting most governments in many cases to trying to stop each individual act inspired by the source rather than being able to go after the source directly. Someone does not have to directly commit violence to be responsible for it, and while I COMPLETELY agree with you that this IS a slippery slope that COULD be abused, in this case, the entire process is transparent and public with multiple exhausted avenues for appeal, and in the end, it doesn’t even SILENCE the users in question OR request they change their speech or ideas, it simply denies them access to a particular platform. As to the banning of X, even if you disagree with the particular banning of these 7 accounts, the removal from the country isn’t so much about free speech element as the idea that X has made it clear and public that they have no intention of obeying the law in Brazil, and it’s unquestioned that there ARE times when it is absolutely clear that a government SHOULD have the right to shut down information. What if X had a post next week giving Lula’s location, itinerary, security details, and clear lines of sight at a rally, and the government demanded legally that it be taken down? X has shown that if it disagrees with the legal judgement that this information should be taken down, they may refuse. It is totally reasonable for the Brazilian government NOT to accommodate the platform given its stance.

Democratic doesn’t mean libertarian. Democratic means that everyone gets a voice in deciding the direction things go. The people made their choice at the ballot box, and that was Lula, and Lula seems to be on board with the court’s decision and isn’t inclined to push legislation or executive action to change it. If people decide they don’t like the decision that’s been made, their government will adjust or it will be replaced by another at the ballot box. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

The government absolutely has the right to cut people off of certain information. If you disagree, try to share some classified secrets, or some child porn and see how well it goes down. The disagreement here is on where the line is drawn on what information falls under that umbrella, and as a sovereign democratic nation, that is Brazil’s call to make, not musk’s or yours. You might have an argument if this was a dictatorship/one party state, but it is not. Still, I’m sure you were equally vocal when Musk was censoring for those.

You make it seem like this is an epidemic of silencing.

First of all, this was 7 users. Secondly, it was such a controversial request that it had to be escalated all the way to the country’s Supreme Court. Thirdly, the request and its consequences were then reevaluated, and all 5 members of the Supreme Court review unanimously upheld the decision.

There’s obviously no such thing as a perfect system, but that is about as close to a fair review process as one can get, and I would argue it’s better than the alternatives of “the whims of the platform owner” or “completely unmoderated anarchy”.

Furthermore, they’re NOT silenced. This is deplatforming. Absolutely NOTHING is stopping these 7 people from setting up their own Mastodon instances and writing whatever they want. That’s not an option for the jailed dissidents X turned over.

Lastly, Brazil is a sovereign democratic nation within its rights to enforce its laws as it sees fit within its borders, and if the people find it that egregious they can change their leaders. X is an unaccountable cudgel of a single man who is taking it upon himself to conduct his own judicial review of the laws of a sovereign nation and act with impunity. If he were a nation, this would be an act of war. The sheer gall of it is utterly appalling.