There are some wild takes in the comments here that seem to imply it’s all just a whim of some random judge. But that’s not what happened at all, and I recommend that anyone interested in having a more informed opinion on the matter read about it somewhere other than on X (because of the obvious bias).
A somewhat simplified timeline of events (in mt understanding of the events) is:
The judge ordered the temporary ban of a few accounts during the investigation of the riots in the National Congress after the last election.
The accounts were banned, but Musk ordered them to be unbanned.
A fine was then stipulated for each day the accounts remained active.
The fines kept accumulating, and Musk stated that X would neither pay the fees nor ban the accounts.
The judge called the legal representative to give explanations.
The order was again ignored.
The judge threatened the legal representative with arrest.
X closed all offices and dismissed all personnel in Brazil.
The judge warned that having a legal representative in the country is a legal requirement and gave a few days for a new one to be appointed.
No representative was appointed, and X was banned in the country.
The judge argued that X and SpaceX are under the same monetary umbrella and blocked the accounts of SpaceX in Brazil to pay the fines.
A supreme court committee voted and said the judge’s orders on blocking X were legal.
There is still debate about whether SpaceX can be held accountable for X’s fines.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the judicial system in Brazil is very political, much more so than in the US or Europe. The current Brazilian president was found to be leading a large ring of money laundering and embezzlement, stealing millions from the state oil company. Moraes was appointed by his allies and got him off the hook in very corrupt fashion. They even have threatened media companies for reporting on the scandal, as well as opposing politicians they see as a threat. Anyone interested in reading about the past of these guys currently running this censorship operation can see this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/01/brazil-operati...
My recollection is that the accusations of Lula being implicated in the Lava Jato wasn't substantiated, but the accusation was used politically to send him to jail and thus prevent him from running for office against Bolsonaro. In the end all of the major charges against Lula were annulled [1], and the charge that got him sent to jail (bribery based on property being given to him, where no record of any sale or transfer of ownership was ever produced) was a political character assassination job and frame placed on him by a different judge in coordination with political opposition working to prevent him from running in the 2018 election[2].
> the accusations of Lula being implicated in the Lava Jato wasn't substantiated
They were, with an overwhelming amount of evidence of several different wrongdoings.
Just to point, he was tried for 2 different crimes, by 4 different judges each, and found guilty every time.
> In the end all of the major charges against Lula were annulled
By those same political judges the GP is talking about. Based on the trial not following a law that was created 2 years later, with the explicit intent of making trial of politicians harder.
> and the charge that got him sent to jail was a political character assassination job
And that's, to be blunt, absolute bullshit. The charges were never formally decided after the trial was annulled, they are still open, sealed back into secrecy, and pending judgement.
I don't think so? I'm asking for sources that I can read from people who are making claims to, to support their assertions. I've posted material that is more recent than the first post I replied to, and I haven't seen anything more recent from you or the couple of other folks who seem to have formed the opinion that what I've related is either false or incomplete. So please help a brother out here.
The order of the events in your timeline is not fully correct, the "same monetary umbrella and blocked the accounts of SpaceX" part happened on 24 August, the "X was banned in the country" part happened on 30 August (and that 30 August order mentioned and gave the date for the earlier block of the SpaceX accounts).
You conveniently de-emphasized the illegal parts of the despot's decisions (punishing Starlink for X's actions) as "under the same monetary umbrella" and left out entirely the unconstitutional ones (fining Brazilians for using a VPN to access X).
Brazil is a sovereign democracy; it's important in any democracy for people to point out governmental abuse and try to eliminate its causes. Just because he can get away with these decisions given his power and influence, it doesn't mean that we should just roll over and be okay with it.
Elon Musk is no saint, but I respect that he's standing up against this monster.
Nothing wrong with your timeline. You just conveniently forgot the blatantly unconstitutional decisions that led to those events.
> The judge ordered the temporary ban of a few accounts during the investigation of the riots in the National Congress
Unconstitutional political censorship. Unconstitutional orders must not be obeyed. Every event after this one is essentially the brazilian supreme court finding ways to punish X for disobeying a unconstitutional order.
It also happened under the umbrella of the "fake news" inquisition, which is also unconstitutional and a blatant power grab by the supreme court.
There's also the fact that everything is secret. You can literally see this in the published images of the court orders. Even the involved lawyers don't have access to this stuff. Also unconstitutional.
Honestly it's kind of ridiculous to even talk about laws at this point. There are no laws here, only the whims of this judge-god-king.
It's really sad how Hackernews is so chockfull of misinformation, you'd think the average user here would be smarter and less complicit in it, but no, if anything this whole debacle just proves how ignorant the userbase is.
why do X and SpaceX comingle assets and feuds like this? if I were a SpaceX shareholder, I'd be concerned about my CEO's misadventures with a separate company negatively impacting SpaceX's future plans for the South American spacefaring market (whether or not it currently exists).
FYI SpaceX and Starlink were not involved in this feud at all until the judge froze Starlink's bank account just for the connection to Elon. In reality the one that decided to involve SpaceX was the judge.
My understanding was SpaceX were operating as an ISP in the country of Brazil, and refusing to comply with the ruling to block X.com within the country of Brazil.
Ideological grounds are a great reason to risk exposure to multiple assets. Musk should use any power at his disposal to resist government censorship. (This is not a statement about Musk's general attitude towards censorship, which is extremely circumstantial)
Musk needs to set expectations around Starlink now regarding censorship and unwarranted, broad-scope data requests. If he doesn't, then one of the most important wins of non-terrestrial, NGO-provided internet will be taken away. The war for a fair and free internet rages on, shareholders be damned.
Overgeneralization does no good here; I specifically shaped the conversation around censorship resistance, which is a net win for humanity. This isn't a conversation about allowing supranational companies free reign to do anything they want.
I am all for both individuals and organizations resisting governmental attempts to restrict freedom beyond what is absolutely necessary for a relatively safe and functioning society. If suddenly that individual or organization acts in an authoritarian or antisocial manner, I no longer support it.
This is the eternal battle. How much should a government control? How much control should people have over their government? What are the limits of collectivized resistance? Etc, etc. Obviously, Starlink has profit motives, but to say the company isn't built on ideology wouldn't paint the full picture; I absolutely want ISPs fighting for net neutrality and censorship resistance.
See, ultimately, it should be such that if the government allows something, it's because the people have allowed it. So in an ideal society, all anti-government behavior would be antisocial behavior as well. Unfortunately, that's not the reality we face. Collectivized resistance against overreaching governments is crucial in order to secure our free future.
That's a rather libertarian point of view. That's fine, I have no issue with that, but it's far from mainstream.
Any business or organization absolutely must work in the confines of a legal system. It's there to protect me and a lawful, ordered society. This whole "censorship is the worst thing ever" view is to me fatally flawed. Human rights are clearly somewhat hierarchical. The right to be protected from genocidal propaganda, for example, sits above absolute freedom of speech, in my books.
Besides, as many people point out, Musk has no issue censoring people himself on his platform. He only takes an issue when it's someone else.
I'm not libertarian, nor is advocating for the balancing of individual and collective rights a libertarian point of view.
> Any business or organization absolutely must work in the confines of a legal system.
Strict adherence to this policy effectively bans any meaningful collectivized resistance to the authoritarian ratchet. It traps large groups of people into adhering to autocratic policy in order to protect their livelihood.
You can see this as international businessmen refusing to call Taiwan a country, or individual workers being unable to enact effective resistance due to corporate policy that only exists a matter of governmental policy; for example, programming backdoors into websites.
> censorship is the worst thing ever
I know you're arguing in good faith, but I want to point out that this is a straw man; I specifically mentioned the importance of balance.
I totally agree that the ability for an organization to blast propaganda into another territory is quite the double-edged sword. I love the idea of sparking revolt among the most locked down authoritarian regimes, but I also don't want authoritarian regimes mind-controlling those around me into making decisions which harm everyone in the long run. What a hard problem to solve.
I think we can agree however that an individual should be able to access whatever information they please, provided it is available somewhere else and does not lead to harm. You can make a case for restricting access to CSAM, snuff, restricted nuclear technology specifications, etc. but it's pretty clear-cut that access to a social media platform is an individual right. It's a net good that Starlink initially attempted to resist this judge, even if there are implied edge cases which need to be considered carefully.
> No less, beaming unstoppable propaganda from space.
That's not a capability of the service, and implementing it in the first place would require interfering in DNS requests, which in practice doesn't work because of the inability to get a CA to sign the certificates of the spoofed sites.
Don't fear monger when there is no risk of something happening.
> Ideological grounds are a great reason to risk exposure to multiple assets. Musk should use any power at his disposal to resist government censorship.
Did you completely gloss over the very next statement wherein I admonished Musk's circumstantial and inconsistent ideology/attitude towards censorship?
The judge froze Starlink's bank account because Elon refused to comply with a legal order given to SpaceX by the Brazilian government to block X. Agree with it or not, it's something that is legally required of ISPs operating inside of Brazil. Elon Musk refused on "free speech" grounds, and they retaliated.
He's now complying and blocking X to Starlink customers in Brazil.
> if I were a SpaceX shareholder, I'd be concerned about my CEO's misadventures
I think the actual answer is that if you invest into Musk companies you do it because of Musk. So you will do and okay whatever makes Musk happy because him being there is what makes the stock do the things the stock does (or anticipation of future stock/IPO performance).
I invest in Tesla because I think it's a great product with a positive vision of the future. I do wish Musk was more measured but my opinion of him doesn't affect my opinion that electric cars are good, Tesla makes the best and has proven their ability to scale.
Leading up to the votes for the move out of Delaware it became pretty clear how significant parts of the non institutional investors are rallying behind Musk. I don't think I have ever seen such a frenzy getting people to go for a proxy vote. That is not happening because Tesla is great, that's happening because there was a real worry about what Musk would do.
I don't know for sure, but if I were to guess I would say a not insignificant part of Tesla's market prices is Musk himself.
I actually think Musk could go away and if you had a similarly driven CEO, with the same vision as him but without any public political opinions, the stock would actually go up.
Alternatively, nobody competent would take the job because the valuation is so far out of line that anyone who does not have a cult following who seem to believe FSD will work by the end of this year, for sure, and that the robot is not a joke, will end up being blamed for TSLA being valued in line with similar sized car companies instead of having a P/E ratio 10X that of Toyota. It's not exactly Enron but it rhymes.
Honestly, agreed. The most interesting and valuable parts of Tesla are the parts that Musk is uninvolved and uninterested in. Take the supercharger network for example. That could have been a gateway to complete market domination by Tesla, and Musk threw the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity away because it wasn’t shiny and chrome enough for him.
> why do X and SpaceX comingle assets and feuds like this?
My understanding of the case, from reading the original orders from the judge, is not that their assets are comingled, but rather that both are under direct control of Elon Musk (him being the majority owner of both SpaceX and Twitter), and therefore form a single "economic group". AFAIK, there are some situations in which the law allows going for assets of other companies in the same economic group, and that seems to be what happened here: Twitter did not have enough assets to pay the fines, so assets from the rest of the economic group have been frozen to ensure the fines will be paid.
"O grupo econômico de fato liderado por ELON MUSK, com atuação em território nacional, engloba entre outras empresas a X BRASIL INTERNET LTDA, a STARLINK BRAZIL SERVIÇOS DE INTERNET e a STARLINK BRAZIL HOLDING LTDA, diretamente ligadas à SPACE EXPLORATION HOLDINGS, LLC, cujo controle acionário é de ELON MUSK, que detém 50,5% de suas ações, sendo que 78,7% das ações com direito a voto lhe pertencem, conforme demonstrado no comunicado da Federals Comunications Comission, obtido no endereço eletrônico [...]"
Though it's possible that the judge and you are looking at different companies; you might be looking at the USA company, while the judge might be looking at a separate holding company which is the parent of the Brazilian companies.
> Elon Musk's satellite broadband firm, Starlink, on Tuesday said that it is complying with Brazil's top court order to block access to social media platform X in the country, a day after informing the country's regulator it would not obey the order.
TFA is paywalled so I can't read it, but from what I understand SpaceX got pulled in because they wouldn't block X for Starlink customers in Brazil, not because of commingling of assets. The judge then penalized SpaceX and the snowball rolled from there.
Doesn't seem surprising, the judge froze the bank accounts of X's legal rep after she stopped working for X because of threats of arrest. X had to fire all their Brazil employees to protect them. Starlink assets got frozen so Starlink employees are fair game.
The takedown request asked for IP addresses, does anyone know if non-Brazil IP addresses are also fair game? Feels weird that whatever country can just get US/EU person IP addresses as they wish from BlueSky, Threads etc.
The thing to learn about Brazil if following news from the outside is that you need to wait 10-15 years to have any idea of what happened. Their current president was in jail for money laundering and other stuff for more than a year before. The law in Brazil is just another tool and its a wild west. I mean, like anywhere, but in Brazil they are more obvious about it compared to other places.
Well they did chase out Twitter's legal representation by threatening to arrest them. So it doesn't exactly seem like a legitimate ruling. More like rubber stamping their bosses' excesses.
Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion? This Brazilian judge has banned X in Brazil, barred Brazilians from accessing X using a VPN (with a $9k fine for violation), frozen the bank accounts of X's legal representative and threatened her with arrest. All without any discernible due process.
The VPN part hasn't. I'm pretty sure that mods are hiding the VPN-ban news from /r/news and /r/worldnews, because it would damage the ongoing anti-Musk two-minute hates.
The biggest violation is of the freedom of expressions rights, which are in Article 5 Section 9:
> [introduction] Everyone is equal before the law, with no distinction whatsoever, guaranteeing to Brazilians and foreigners residing in the Country the inviolability of the rights to life, liberty, equality, security and property, on the following terms:
> expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific, and communication activity is free, independent of any censorship or license
Posting on Twitter is a communication activity and it is therefore permitted without any censorship, explicitly.
Look at Section 37:
> there shall be no exceptional courts or tribunals
In this case, the exceptional court is what Moraes implemented in 2022, basically as a secret court of one. He served on the Supreme Court but also as president of the electoral court. The proposal to give him unilateral censorship powers was proposed by him and approved by the electoral court, with the power being granted to him in the other court. It is a very convoluted legal maneuver to basically give himself powers that no executive or legislative authority gave him. Note that no laws are passed to perform this maneuver. And by issuing these orders in secret, as a Supreme Court justice, it makes the path to appeal difficult or impossible.
It was shortly after this move that the New York Times (and many others) called Moraes a threat to democracy:
> no one shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law
This one is obvious - a single judge issuing censorship orders with gag orders to prevent public visibility or challenge is a serious violation of due process.
Or section 57:
> no one shall be considered guilty until his criminal conviction has become final and non-appealable
The reason I mentioned this section is some are saying that the censorship orders will eventually be reviewed by the full court bench (rather than being issued in secret by one justice), and that the orders are valid until then. But that’s equivalent to considering someone guilty without criminal conviction.
There’s more than just these, if you look through the rest of it carefully. X’s official AlexandreFiles account (https://x.com/AlexandreFiles) is also posting the secret censorship orders they received along with side by side comparisons against Brazilian law.
Sticking to principles is "winning" for some people, not making more money or getting power. Zuckerberg would've folded long ago and did whatever the govt asked him to do in order to make more money.
Doesn‘t even have to be about money. Would be perfectly rational to comply to minimize uncertainty, public outcry, getting into the cross-hair of other countries‘ regulators and distractions from operating the core product/service. In short: for most people it wouldn‘t be worth the headache to stand up against a state like this.
You linked to Elon’s alt account, not exactly an unbiased source. Fact of the matter remains that operating in places with less free speech means that you have to submit to their less free speech. Old Twitter knew this, and so do other social media companies. Running a successful business means you can’t be an ideologue all the time.
This is not Elon’s “alt account” but rather X’s official account. It isn’t even a secret, since it is literally marked as an official account of X (see the golden checkmark). So I am not sure what you’re alleging. Even if it was an alt account, why would it matter - there is no bias in sharing the literal secret orders given or sharing excerpts from Brazilian law.
A lot of people are so ready to hate on Musk, that they associate anything that X does as Musk’s decision, even though the company has its own CEO. This account is an official account of X, and is marked as such explicitly (see golden checkmark). It’s not some subversive alt account like the GP claimed.
My understanding is X followed Brazilian law by deleting the 7 offending posts, but the judge is now acting outside of the law and is demanding things of which there is no legal basis. And apparently this judge has a history of doing things like this in unrelated cases.
If you do business in a country without a strong tradition of the rule of law, you have to accept that the law is not the supreme authority. Sometimes the authorities do what they want, and you have to deal with it if you want to continue doing business.
As long as the order is upheld on appeal, you have to obey it. That's how courts work in the US too. It's the judge who decides. Judicial appointments matter.
Maybe they just assume everyone's reading this on an iPhone. I'm not, but if I wanted to I could access it via my phone which has Apple News which is how I access WSJ.
Is Brazil's supreme court very different from the US or is this judge overstepping his authority? I can't imagine some US judge unilaterally waging war against a collection of loosely affiliated businesses like this. Whether you think those Brazilians (some of whom are elected politicians in the opposing party) deserved to be banned from the internet or not the judge's tactics seem very frantic and shoot-from-the-hip.
This judge got appointed the censorship czar without checks or balances. One of the first things he did after getting appointed was wrongly censor a Brazilian magazine's story about the guy that appointed him by calling it fake news.
After other press found the story was true, he was forced to rescind that order. The damage was done.
He also got the cops to raid some businessmen' homes at 6am because they were in a group chat where someone else joked about a coup.
The openly and proudly partisan supreme court? Made up of judges who openly support him in his censorship of the political opposition? Judges who go to public events and showboat about being the ones who defeated the brazilian right? Judges who proudly admit to being communists?
It would have been strange if they hadn't upheld it.
The supreme court has been violating the brazilian law and constitution since 2019. And they get away with it because there's no higher court above them.
Long story short: one brazilian magazine ran a damning article on one of the supreme court judges, so they created a "fake news" inquisition and "randomly" appointed this Moraes guy as the head of it. First thing he did was censor the magazine as "fake news".
And it only got worse from there. The "fake news" campaign is still ongoing. Supreme court is literally the highest power in this country right now. Our representatives only exist to create the illusion of democracy.
There are many differences, starting with the public image. As far as I know, in the US, the Supreme Court is seen as people with ethics and known legal knowledge. In Brazil, they are political appointees. Furthermore, for many, they go beyond the limits and sometimes legislate.
A somewhat simplified timeline of events (in mt understanding of the events) is:
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