My understanding of the issue from afar, and watching 5 min from a Musk interview:
Musk/X is for free speech, but also for following the local laws.
In Brazil apparently the law against free speech was not clear enough.
But now after 3 weeks I guess the Brazil law/stance has become more clear, no reason for Musk/X to fight for free speech if Brazil does not want it.
It's not "critical". If Whatsapp vanished tomorrow it would get replaced by the next one so fast it would make your head spin. Not saying I can guess which one it would be, but one would win and people would carrying on with their lives just fine.
> In Brazil apparently the law against free speech was not clear enough.
Our constitution is ABSOLUTELY clear on this matter.
> Any and all censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden
1. The accounts that this judge is after were engaging in political speech.
2. A government official ordering these political accounts blocked and their political posts deleted matches the "any and all censorship of political nature" clause.
3. The order is therefore unconstitutional.
As you can see, it's a very simple argument. There should have never have been an order for Musk to defy to begin with.
The problem is that the constitution doesn't matter. He's a judge of the supreme court. There's no court above him to countermand him. So he does whatever he wants. It doesn't matter what the law says because the truth is whatever he writes on a piece of paper becomes law.
Absolutely, free speech [within the confines of the law] :) Principals are based in legality, I see. /s I'm just being difficult, find it kind of funny posturing
Are we still pretending Musk fights for free speech? He had no problems abiding by India's or Turkey's censoring laws.
Brazil made it pretty clear what they wanted, but Musk had some petty beef with the Brazilian judge in charge of the operation (cue the ai image he posted of that judge behind bars), and so refused to comply.
How dare the Brazilians enforce their sovereignty. That clearly isn't free speech! /s
I suspect the lack of full throated public support from Brazilians for Musk is telling. They may not fully agree with the ruling but they also don't think Musk is playing altruistically.
It's really interesting how the _only_ free speech being cared about in this context is specifically the freedom to spread blatantly false information. It's not even stuff that can hide behind plausible deniability, really.
And the specific freedom to defend and spread nazi speak. Which, in Brazil, in paper is a crime.
It's never freedom of speech with a goal other than actively desiring and justifying to hurt others, of belittling and bullying others.
> Musk/X is for free speech, but also for following the local laws.
I find it very hard to entertain the idea that there are people out there in this day and age who still believe that the likes of Elon Musk supports free speech, even remotely.
He has a track record of arbitrarily banning users from Twitter for asking him inconvenient answers, and he supported authoritarian governments banning opposition parties from national elections with bullshit excuses like either all posts or some posts would be "throttled" (aka censored) in countries like Turkey, and given the choice he prefered to censor some posts/users instead of all posts/users.
But when a country with a leftist government asked Twitter to appoint a legal representative to process lawful requests regarding people planning a right-wing coup, Elon Musk went to the extreme of even pulling all corporate presence from the country to avoid complying.
People often rather live in a world they believe in versus the one that really exists. Think the term is Cognitive Distortions.
Reality, Musk's X-Twitter free speech policy is about his personal tastes.[1] [2]
My personal taste, I cannot support anyone that willfully pushes miss-information nor narratives that detract words and statements from their actual meanings. Miss-information, tell a lie long enough people will believe it. This how conversion therapy works and the movie "But I'm a Cheerleader" highlights this farce.
Riddle of free speech? Doesn't a Venn diagram of free speech include information and miss-information? I never said free speech does not include miss-information.
What is Information and what is Miss-information?
Example: "Vaccines make people autistic." Is that information or miss-information? If vaccines did make people autistic then anyone who was given a vaccine would be autistic. This means all US military personal are autistic because they must be vaccinated to remain in service. Yet 100% of them are not autistic, nor are all the individuals that received a cold, flu, and COVID vaccines.
What about a politician making the statement, "I know more about the Middle East than anyone else.". Wouldn't know nuances about cultural slang and difference in regional dialects be a requirement to make that statement true? Wouldn't that persona also need to know Arabic and Hebrew with the ability to pick truthful declarations over sarcasm? With more context, that statement was made by a US politician.
Let's re-phrase that statement, "I know more about computers than anyone else.", which defines no one in the world! Even the smartest people that know a lot about computers cannot possibly know everything.
How would you decided if "Vaccines make people autistic.", that a politician is truthful when saying "I know more about the Middle East than anyone else.", and the person next to you saying "I know more about computers than anyone else." are information or miss-information?
To re-phrase my personal statement, I do not respect those that push miss-information.
The ruling was reviewed and upheld by an entire panel.
The law is very clear, and X was very clearly violating it. Multiple laws, even, as it's also legally required to have a representative in the company.
Turns out that 10 million Brazilians flocking into BlueSky is an argument much more solid than any "free speech" bullshit that Elon posts.
In case anyone believes this is about "free speech": the jurisprudence for the Brazilian Supreme Court decision is American, in fact. It is a doctrine known as "clear and present danger" and was established by the SCOTUS in 1919, by Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr in "Schenk vs. United States"[1]. The U.S. Supreme Court already applied it a couple of times.
> It is a doctrine known as "clear and present danger" and was established by the SCOTUS in 1919, by Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr in "Schenk vs. United States"[1]. The U.S. Supreme Court already applied it a couple of times.
Probably worth noting that US free speech jurisprudence has changed since then. Schenck v. US was overturned in 1969 by Brandenburg v. Ohio [0].
That was "2 days ago", the NYT article is about newer developments:
>Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.
