The real question is whether is whether it is right for the judges of a country to block access to a service that the countries depend on.
For instance in the UK the government can stop local media from publishing news that is considered libellous or defamatory, or may unjustly influence court cases, but they can't stop citizens from accessing that information if it is published in a news outlet outside the country.
No one is questioning why the Brazilian judiciary should have that power. It seems rather excessive and an infringement of Brazilians rights, though that is not surprising when we live in a era when governments have taking upon themselves to decide what their citizens rights are, when human rights are supposed to be intrinsic, ie those that all fauna on the planet do.
AFAIK, Twitter/X was shut down in Brazil for refusing to declare a legal representative in the country which is a basic requirement for any company operating in Brazil.
On a side note, the contents an international corporation publishes can violate the law of a country even when they are not posted by citizens of that country. When they do so, and don't take down the content, they will be shut down. It works like that in every country, including the US. It pains me having to point that out since it's so obvious.
And have they been shut down? Blocking access to a service through the regular channels doesn't shut it down.
For instance before the internet a Saudi dissident based in the UK used to send faxes to phones in Saudi Arabia that were critical of the Govt. I don't think the Saudi govt blocked access to phone calls from the UK on account of that.
If Brazilian enterprises are not allowed by law to trade with Twitter that does not amount to shutting it down. All you've done is block the usage of a service by most law abiding citizens which many of them probably rely on for all or a part of their living.
Twitter is operating under US law and Brazilian law only applies to their Brazilian subsidiary. If their Brazilian subsidiary has been has closed down because their parent company is not complying with Brazilian law then Brazilians are free to deal directly with the parent company under US law and jurisdiction.
> Twitter/X was shut down in Brazil for refusing to declare a legal representative in the country which is a basic requirement for any company operating in Brazil.
Which is a pretty stretch from an older law, that was made to companies operating "phisically", opening offices, having workers and etc.
Twitter closed their offices in Brazil, so they don't need to do it anymore.
If we take the interpretation this judge is using with Twitter to everything, 99% of the internet will need to be blocked in Brazil.
It is ilegal to be a criminal and those senators you are talking about? They will go to jail :) together with Bolsonaro. Fighting the legal system is the last strategy of convicted criminals
Yes, it is. There's nothing in our laws that backs the judge ruling. And in Brazil, judges can ONLY DO what the law says, not what they think it's fair or what they want.
Sure, it makes technically harder to block.. But governments don't rely only technical solutions for problems..
China, like Brazil is doing, would order Cloudflare to block Twitter and they would have to choose either comply and help China block it, like they are doing in Brazil, or challenge and not comply and face the consequences and likely a full block..
Having Cloudflare fully blocked in both countries would be terrible for business as they have many other customers so it is economically best to comply and potentially loose one customer then challenge the order and loose the entire market..
It's hard to see why Cloudflare would put themselves in this position if they're planning to back down when the order inevitably comes in. (Perhaps Twitter somehow did this without Cloudflare's cooperation - I wouldn't put that past them trying but I'd be surprised if it were possible.)
Don't see why they would join this fight agains't Brazil.
The money X Corp is paying them cannot be THAT great to justify losing all brazilian costumers and Cloudflare doesn't seem like a very ideology-driven company.
are there technical details on exactly what x.com did?
cloudflare offers a lot of self-service tools, which can and do allow customers that cloudflare doesn't want to service to use it until someone finds out (my favorite example is that, briefly, the foreign ministry of Iran briefly managed to register and activate properties on the service)
registering while only directing brazilian clients to cloudflare would be difficult using the standard method (setting your domain's nameservers to the cloudflare servers), but cloudflare's CNAME setup option only requires a TXT record. it's possible x.com did that by just paying for a business plan and never interacting with cloudflare staff
We really need to avoid a future where censorship is regarded as a virtue and monopolized transit providers are "cancelled" or shamed into being the judge/jury/executioner.
The far better solution is just to ignore stuff you don't agree with, go outside, and move on with life.
lol, no we don't. Hosting providers have always had terms of service, and private enterprise does not need to adhere to government-level definitions of free speech.
The current state of Hacker News, where an audience that should know better advocates for censorship with vague reasons. No, censorship is never good, you are not able to have a free society with it.
Hosting Kiwi Farms wasn't likely to get Cloudflares ASN null-routed by the 7th most populous state on Earth though. There's the potential for serious collateral damage to Cloudflares business here if Brazil calls their bluff.
Well, yes it's always possible that Cloudflare will comply with a demand to block Twitter. GP specifically raised the possibility of null-routing and I'm just pointing out it's probably not a good idea.
Roskomnadzor's 2018 escapade with Telegram under a rather similar situation - their attempts to block it ended up taking out vast sections of the internet (for Russians) that didn't have anything to do with Telegram.
Tying your service to vital internet infrastructure can work. It doesn't even have to be a particularly ironclad solution. In 2018, the powers that be in Russia decided it's cheaper to flood Telegram with their own propaganda, rather than block it.
> Null-routing Cloudflare is also going to do a fair bit of collateral damage to the people of the 7th most populous state on Earth though.
I wish... That sort of massive economic damage is exactly what this country deserves. It's gotten to the point I'm hoping Trump wins and sanctions this place for stealing millions from american companies via arbitrary fines.
Google Ads took Twitter on, too. Google now delivers ads directly into Twitter that /sort of/ look like tweets, but just off enough to tell they’re ads. The “Why this ad” sends you off to Google.
Right, maybe we should all just take your word for it and believe you know Brazil's constitution better than the majority of Brazilian Supreme Court judges.
These judge-kings are only humans. They are no doubt prone to corruption, to incompetence, to power trips. These are supposedly impartial judges... Who go to lunches with the ruling party and make fun of the people protesting them.
Normal judges in Brazil are selected by competition. Lawyers compete with each other for the position by taking standardized tests. The smartest ones are supposed to become judges.
These supreme court judges have not been so selected. They were all put there by political appointment. One of them is literally the lawyer who defended the current president against corruption claims. Another is a communist who the president appointed to the supreme court precisely because he needed somebody to advance his socialist agenda.
So whenever you read "brazilian supreme court", remember that they aren't really authorities. It's entirely possible that these "lesser" judges have a better understanding of brazilian law than these supreme court judges. It's even possible that "mere" lawyers, and even ordinary citizens have better understanding of the law than they do. The only reason they are there is political appointment.
Even normal people, who still have their sanities intact, are capable of recognizing this absurd situation. They even have a popular saying for it: "here in Brazil, the utility pole pees on the dog". Everything's backwards here. The less qualified judges are above the more qualified judges.
These judges are after Bolsonaro and his supporters for the political speech they engaged in. All this Twitter business happened because the judges wanted account of his supporters censored for "fake news".
Blatant political censorship. Which is unconstitutional.
The constitution literally contains the words:
> Any and all censorship of political and artistic nature is prohibited
It's not that hard to understand. Any citizen can understand this. It's just that it doesn't matter what the law says. Because there's no court above them, the law becomes whatever they say it is. These unelected judges make the laws, and their pens send police to our homes. This is a judiciary dictatorship. Our elected repesentatives do not matter.
Forget the idea that they are "authorities" and start looking at what they are doing, why they are doing it and the arguments they use. You'll see there's plenty wrong with all of it.
It all began in 2019 when a brazilian magazine ran some kind of article on one of these judges. They created a "fake news" inquisition and appointed this Alexandre de Moraes guy the head of it. An inquisition where the supreme court is the victim and simultaneously investigates, prosecutes, judges and sentences crimes against itself. First thing he did is censor the magazine. The "fake news" nonsense is still active to this day, and it's because of it that Twitter was banned in our country. A completely illegal and unconstitutional investigation whose result was an expansion of the supreme court's powers to the point I believe this country is no longer a democracy but a dictatorship of the judiciary.
You don't even have to take my word for it. Other HN users have written about their abuses before:
I'm terribly sorry but nothing in your lengthy reply convinces me that you know more about Brazilian constitutional law than the Brazilian Supreme Court judges. You seem to have some kind of political agenda, the topic is clearly moving you personally, and this is all very fine, but all you present in terms of knowledge of Brazilian constitutional law are other HN comments and unsupported claims that I'm supposed to take for granted.
Unsupported? We literally cited the words from the constitution...
Your comment is further proof that this country doesn't have actual laws. Whatever this judge decides is law. Because he's the ultimate dictator, the ultimate authority. Doesn't matter how much I write, doesn't matter what references I cite, it won't convince you because I'm not a judge. Doesn't matter what the literal words written onto the constitution say, he gets to "selectively and creatively" interpret them and nobody questions it because he's a judge.
I'll cite the judges themselves then. Just yesterday one of then made news when he spoke of "recivilizing the country" and "ending the fake news inquiry headed by Moraes" which led to Twitter's ban. This is the same supposedly impartial judge who went to public events to showboat about having personally defeated an entire political party.
Interesting choice of words. The judge thinks this country is not civilized. Just like me.
The problem is that civilizing it requires their resignation and the passage of laws severely limiting their powers. That's the most peaceful path to civilization. We can't go back to the way things were: citizens blissfully unaware of the fact that the judiciary could instantly usurp all power in a second if they wanted to.
A Supreme Court is a political organ that delivers the final legally binding interpretation of a country's constitution. It's an integral part of the power division needed to keep a democracy working. Just disagreeing with a Supreme Court ruling is pretty much meaningless, people disagree with court rulings all the time. There is no problem with that at all.
People sometimes erroneously believe that Supreme Courts primarily have a legal function. That's not true, that's the purpose of the highest instances of ordinary courts. A Supreme Court is called when there are doubts if the highest legal instance has judged according to the constitution. That's why they are political organs and Supreme Court judges are appointed by a political process.
I’m fascinated by folks that, upon seeing something mundane like “fuck nazis”, are compelled to post “Ho ho! You must mean me then!”
Like, no? People online don’t know who you are or why you would feel targeted. Unless you know and care about the person making a point like that the post is literally just noise.
It's funny how nazis here in Brazil go straight to jail, while communists and socialists are allowed to walk this soil completely unpunished. Hell, they get to openly form parties. They don't even need to employ any subterfuge to do it, we have so many parties with "socialist" and "communist" literally in their names. They even get to be elected. Our current president is a socialist, and he put a communist judge in the supreme court.
This is despite the fact that socialism and communism are demonstrably worse than nazism in literally every way. If we were to be ruled by literal nazis, there's actually a chance we might prosper and become a real country. Socialists? I don't think so.
So why is it that you call for censorship of nazism? Only to immediately afterwards defend this socialist communist judiciary dictatorship nonsense? What a sick joke.
This isn't even about "nazis" to begin with. These judges are after Bolsonaro and his supporters for the political speech they engaged in. Blatant political censorship. Which is unconstitutional.
https://noticias.uol.com.br/colunas/andreza-matais/2024/09/1...