Sounds like they’re likely also to find themselves in legal trouble
At least one can hope
I thought about that; then I thought what that guy makes in a few minutes’interest on his offshore accounts is probably more than all of Brazil, in a year, and since taxes fund the government and a host of other things, idk
The country of Brazil makes something like 20x Musk’s total net worth, but every year.
Plus net worth != actual money.
Actually Brasil make 20x musk total net worth per trimester
Good. May they do what is necessary.
People like musk don’t make money, they make credit.
Trevor Noah said it best.
Leveraged buyouts specifically should be outlawed.
EDIT: And billionaires should be taxed on the money they receive as loans.
The “buy borrow die” tax strategy should either be completely outlawed or the government should be able to get portions of those loan payments back as tax money.
That’s not how money works
Or Brazil. That’s the eight largest economy in the world. They headline BRICS for a reason. Sure, China is the true headliner there, but the fact is that Brazil is included in those 5 countries for a reason (multiple actually). There’s absolutely no way for a single individual to eclipse the value of the world’s 8th largest economy. Pick a country with a lower GDP than Hungary and then we’ll talk
On one hand, fuck Musk. On the other hand, internet from space that can’t be blocked by governments is a net positive in my book.
Don’t forget that Musk is also the one who intentionally blocked paid service from Ukraine during a critical moment in the early days of Russia’s current genocide, because Musk sucks up to Putin. Dude needs to answer for his actions.
Yep, fuck Musk
Fuck Musk
Sounds like a French parfum.
Watch out they might actually launch it
that depends on who controls the space internet
Secret cabal of space lizard people.
Watch out for the Jewish space lasers.
Are the Jewish space lasers more dangerous than the Hibernian and Caledonia Rods of god. Im asking incase we need to up our tonnage to match the Jews. I know for a fact we are lagging behind Suomen Helios lance.
That is the catch. Ideally they wouldn’t automatically cooperate with the dictators on the ground, but that hasn’t been the case.
Not blockable by any government would be a positive in my book if it didn’t imply bloclable by a single billionaire with huge mood swing. Don’t forget how musk switched off starlink in Crimea at Putin’s request when the Russian realized starlink guided missile were heading towards their ships (Source
That’s not exactly what happened. Starlink was already disabled in Crimea when the attack was launched and Musk refused to enable it specifically for the attack. Then the initial reports got a bit tangled up.
But yes, none of this should be up to Musk.
How about internet that can be blocked at the whims of a billionaire? At least government is supposed to answer to the people.
*Their lobbying shareholders and maybe the people that elected them
Dictatorships don’t answer to the people. It’s absolutely a problem that billionaires are controlling the flow of information, but it’s much worse for a dictator to do it.
Oh honey, do you really ignore that a huge chunk of dictatorships do it for the money and most are already billionaires? Why exactly do you think Musk supports the orange cheeto?
Because the orange Cheeto wants to cut his taxes so he gets more money. Dictators want power, not money. That’s why they are famous for blowing it on such exorbitant things. It’s just a means to an end. To billionaires the money is the end.
That’s an extremely naïve view of the world. If Musk could sit the chair, he would. What do you think the accumulation of unhinged amounts of wealth is about but increased power? What do you think those opulent displays of wealth from dictators is about but to flaunt that they have all the wealth and power?
I don’t see a difference tbh.
Dictators do things like build and use rape rooms or throw people they don’t like out of helicopters.
You think that billionaires don’t do that? Have you heard of Harvey Epstein? Who do you think the biggest customers of child trafficking and sex slaves are?
I think you’ve conflated Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. Incidentally there is a Harvey Weinstein, but he is a progressive NY State legislator, not whatever either of those two fucks are.
So as long as this one specific billionaire hasn’t had someone killed (that we know of) that makes it okay for that one individual to have complete control over what people have access to?
This is about Brazil, which is not a Dictatorship.
How is a billionaire manchild in charge any better, at least a government is accountable to the people.
In theory, but how many governments can actually be held accountable? The power imbalance is often too great for the people to hold anyone accountable. In many countries, the system is rigged.
Replace government with billionaire and your statement is made even more true.
The question was how is it better. Sure there is a question of how much accountability there is with the government…but there is zero with a billionaire.
Controlled by governments or controlled by corpos and the super rich? I say there’s hardly an improvement.
Yeah, cables or radio waves, it’s the same thing in the end.
What we need (IMO) is another layer on top if the classic internet with encryption and hookers.
Like i2p or TOR?
Or Tenfingers (my network protocol for decentralised web pages and data) ofc 😌
This is what IPSec OE was created to solve, but nobody uses it – instead using things like TLS, which also provides protocol aware non-repudiation.
No, but through the existence of both options, you can get more plurality than by using one individual option.
If we’re talking about corporations I can only assume you mean options in how to get fucked.
Government can throw you in jail.
Corporate throws you on the street to starve.
Have you heard about this corporation called the church of Latter Day Saints?
Oh? What about internet controlled by a billionaire who makes sure his toxic website featuring his version of “free speech” is always available to protect his profits and spread his bullshit while undermining the policies of a sovereign state?
So much better than the evil government.
That’s better than a dictator who only wants to protect his own power. At least a billionaire can be bought.
.
What the heck do you think a dictator is? A billionaire running a country.
I think there is a difference in mentality between people who chase power and people who chase money. Bull Gates certainly chases money, but he’s not trying to take over a country somewhere.
That may be so, but nonetheless they overlap often enough.
A billionaire can’t be bought, they got billions. It’s the dictator that can be bought.
A billionaire chases what gets them the most money. The public can manipulate them by making them lose money. A dictator wants power, which really can only be countered with mass violence.
Musk has lost a tremendous amount of money between X and his negative effect on Tesla sales. Do you feel this has “manipulated” him into being a better person? 🤣
Is Musk doing anything to help people living in dictatorships access information? Or is this just happening in Brazil?
How many people is the billionaire incarcerating?
Good question. He definitely seems like the type that would have a dungeon with captives.
He got his wealth because his parents owned a slave-powered diamond mine.
Also, as he hides his money and doesn’t pay taxes the US government is overburdened and one of their tools is relying on prisons for free labor.
Soooo actually quite a lot.
Let everyone incarcerated go and see how that works out for you. Not saying everyone deserves to be in there, but go on. Give it a try.
You also forget that billionaires are wealth, and so is any dictator. They both seek to protect that wealth, so it doesn’t matter in the end. A billionaire buys his politicians and you get the same result. You start threatening their money and power and they’ll come after you, whether you want equal rights or sometimes just clean water.
Can’t calculate the net yet, since we don’t know the gross. He has the capability to cause massive damage with the power he wields. It’s already clear that he’s incapable of providing an unbiased platform. It needs to belong to the people or it can never be trusted
It needs to belong to the people or it can never be trusted
Damn commies!
The ability to recognize sarcasm doesn’t seem to be particularly developed on Lemmy.
And if fucking hate the /s.
I get that simple text doesn’t convey as much as images or speech, but, …i find myself having to add the /s (but it’s easier to ignore the downvotes).
The ability to recognize sarcasm doesn’t seem to be particularly developed on
Lemmythe internet.FTFY
That’s an arbitrary metric. What about internet across oceans, or across forests? Blocking content is a question of why and what. I mean, shouldn’t we be able to block child exploitation websites? That is to say, of course we can, and it’s very easy. The only question is whether you want that kind of censorship to be up to your service provider or your government.
Governments tend to block things like facts about genocides they have committed and opposing political opinions. I would hope things like child exploitation could be managed at the host level.
Do you have any idea how eagerly AT&T and Comcast would block half the internet if they had the tiniest profit motive to do so? I wonder how long left wing websites would remain online if it weren’t illegal for multinational corporations to block them.
That’s the thing, they is no profit motive to block wide swaths of public viewpoint because that will cost them customers. They will quickly lose business to a competitor who doesn’t do that. (Local monopolies aside, which is an entirely different problem).
I wish you were right, but you’re not. Internet providers have monopolies because the cost of laying fiber or launching satellites is so high. That’s precisely what the argument over net neutrality has been about.
They have monopolies because we let them. I say nationalize all communication infrastructure.
What if payments to Starlink are blocked by Brazilian government?
Starlink is free in Brazil right now.
Is it? Didn’t realise Elon was running a charity.
It’s literally in the article you’re responding to.
He is in a unique position, theoretically he can make everything go through the country his servers are in assuming they pay over their own satellite internet, illegal… mmm almost certainly but so is keeping Ex Twitter on in Brazil so he probably doesn’t care about that, and it’s essentially exactly what a VPN does sooo, oh yeah they could also just use a VPN I guess.
Bruh, VPN for what? If Brazil bans payments to Starlink, essentially sanctioning it, how is end user going to circumvent that?
I mean they can jump through hoops to convert currencies etc but most people would just give up and move on.
Paying with Bitcoin is less of a hoop to jump through than it used to be.
But still far to much of a hassle for the general public. Hell, half the people I know refuse to figure out a regular e-transfer/cash app. There’s no way they’ll even consider bitcoin; or really any other currency.
PayPal venmo WhatsApp
it’s already been blocked in ukraine by musk at the request of putin
You can block or disrupt communications with LEO.
But you’d need the blessing of the country’s government to pump out that much interference continuously.it can be (and has been) blocked by musk on occasion though.
Logically, now they have to ban Starlink too.
Seems like it’s on the table
Tensions between Brazil and Elon Musk’s business empire ratcheted up further as the country’s telecoms regulator threatened to sanction his satellite broadband company Starlink hours after its top court stood behind a controversial decision to ban social network X from the country.
A senior official at telecommunications regulator Anatel said sanctions against Starlink for noncompliance could include the revocation of its license to operate in Brazil.
the world needs to ban starlink
deleted by creator
Starlink backed down and blocked Twitter as requested.
I’m curious: what would that mean, within Brazil’s borders? Would they be able to prevent Starlink from being used? Broadcast a Starlink jamming signal over the whole country? Or turn it into a diplomatic issue, with the US State Department getting involved?
Usually Gwen Shotwell, SpaceX COO, is good at keeping Elon in check and not screwing up SpaceX business. I wonder what happened this time.
This is the intersection of Xitter and SpaceX and it looks like Xitter takes priority.
If you can only access Xitter through SpaceX, can we call the combination “SpaceXitter”?
His ego is above all else
What i love about musk is that he is the best bad example. Maybe someday he’ll start a war with some country and then people will start to understand that no single person or group should hold this much power. Because there are also a handful of other people and groups with the same resources who choose to hide in the background.
The Corporate Wars. 🥲
just pull their business licence and any government grants then and let the world follow suit.
how are people supposed to pay starlink if their accounts are frozen? is starlink offering free internet?
As the article says, yes.
W
Supposedly Starlink is maintaining service for existing accounts, even if they can’t bill them ATM.
Somehow I don’t think that’ll last all that long.
Brazil has an extradition agreement with the United States. Would love to see that shit get put to use.
That’s not how extradition works. You have to give people up to the US criminal system. They don’t reciprocate. They just promise not to coup your government.
Why would the US strain their relationship with Brazil over Musk? Politically, it makes sense to extradite him.
Also imma need a citation on how extradition works, I searched the wiki and couldn’t find anything.
They should kick his shit out of the country
Can’t really do that when his shit is quite literally in space floating above your country in orbit.
They can easily make it illegal for them to operate there.
Welcome to the world where money has more power than laws and governments. It’ll all work out fine, I’m sure.
Yeah the Brazilian space police is gonna shoot down them satellites.
And then they will clean up the fueltas.
I love fairytales about competence in Brazil.
Yeah they still rely on base stations to transmit/receive the signals.
Like growing drugs? Good luck bro
His shit is also on the ground. Do you think the satellites beam an internet connection directly into a laptop or something? That said, finding and seizing the individual receivers seems unlikely. They’ve already instituted a hefty fine (equivalent to more a year’s average salary) for even using a VPN to little effect.
Beyond that, they’ve also threatened to seize all local assets/offices and emplacements if Starlink doesn’t comply. There’s several dozen as I recall.
Bunch of space junk fucking up he world’s view of the stars.
Roundhouse kick then
If Starlink follows through on its reported vow to ignore the X ban, it is likely to face similar sanctions itself for ignoring a supreme court order.
That could have a big impact in the Brazilian Amazon, where Starlink antennae have spread rapidly since being made available in September 2022, bringing high-speed internet connection to far-flung regions. By the end of 2023 Starlink antennae were being used in more than 90% of the Amazon’s municipalities, according to BBC Brasil.
I mean are those people really going to be using Twitter anyway?
Remember that time Musk expressed that he was in favor of free speech? Then he censored content on his platform for the Turkish government?
Yes, then he got a bunch of backlash and now he’s doing the reverse. And people are losing their shit even more
It bothers me that he is trying to protect nazis.
Weird how his free speech absolutism only applies to Nazis, huh?
This statement was later retracted. The Engadget article was redacted accordingly.
As of 2024-09-03T22:10:25.545Z, Starlink is now complying with Brazil’s X ban [1].
References
- “Starlink says it will block X in Brazil”. Emma Roth. The Verge. Published: 2024-09-03T22:10:25.545Z. Accessed: 2024-09-04T04:17Z. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24235204/starlink-block-x-brazil-comply-elon-musk.
“We immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets,” Starlink says in a post on X. “Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil.”
- “Starlink says it will block X in Brazil”. Emma Roth. The Verge. Published: 2024-09-03T22:10:25.545Z. Accessed: 2024-09-04T04:17Z. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/3/24235204/starlink-block-x-brazil-comply-elon-musk.
Do people here not generally dislike government censorship? The root of this seems to be x refusing the country’s government’s demands to ban certain people
Try typing the word “cisgender” into Twitter.
Don’t have or plan to get twitter, care to enlighten me?
Well, they called it a slur. That’s good enough a reason.
That’s why I don’t like the idea of censoring slurs. Anything can be one.
If some chap at X, determining which word is considered a slur, says, “I watched a YouTube video with <public personality> telling someone else not to call them ‘cisgender’.”, that’s probably good enough to add it to the list, while most of them not actually matching the dictionary definition for “slur”.The point comes as to where to draw the line and the company gets to choose.
The thing is, I dislike censorship in general. Corporate or government. Yes it’s the corp’s prerogative, but we’re allowed to criticize corporate censorship and hypocrisy regarding censorship.
I don’t get why people defend censorship by powerful/monopolistic companies run by billionaires while criticizing censorship by the government. They’re not that different.
My personal opinion is that for “edge cases” like cisgender, I should be the one who decides what “slurs” I see or don’t see on the feed, rather than some shmuck twitter mod who watched a YouTube video or whatever.
X doesn’t seem to have any issue censoring accounts for Musk’s autocratic buddies like Erdogan, so let’s not try and pretend that he’s above caving in to government censorship. He’s just pissed off in this case that he’s being asked to do it in a way that would hurt his friends in Brazil. The site has been called out over the last several years multiple times for refusing to take any steps to moderate misinformation spread by Bolsonaro and his political allies in attempts to undermine democracy and influence the results of the last election, like the endless claims of electronic voting being insecure in the lead up to the last elections, Bolsonaro’s COVID denialism and many other examples.
Absolutely not trying to take the side of musk here, dude’s a shitter. Fact of the matter remains the government in this case is using its power to remove people from the public eye, I would dislike that regardless of what platform or who was refusing to do it
the government in this case is using its power to remove people from the public eye
These aren’t people, they’re accounts. And the accounts in question appear to have been coordinating the attack on the Brazilian congressional office in 2023. This is comparable to, say, the traffic on Parlor shortly before the J6 riot in the US.
Organized violence would not be tolerated as “free speech” in Brazil or the US. No government or civilian authority considers active insurrection a protected category of speech. These accounts were effectively coordinating a military coup. They weren’t just trash talking the new President and his party.
Blocking traffic from an enemy military force is a military response to a rival military operation. And Musk’s refusal to shut the accounts down amounts to taking a side in a military campaign.
Is it though? Refusing to take a side isn’t the same as taking a side. You should never be obligated to remove content the government doesn’t like, you should merely be required to provide data about accounts to local authorities to assist in investigations. If someone is posting illegal content, they should be accountable to the law, but it should always be the host’s discretion whether to remove that content.
It is well established that the right to free speech is NOT unlimited, and the “fire in a crowded theater” people tend to be the loudest complainers. Brazil is a sovereign nation entitled to its own interpretation of how to handle free speech protections, and X has repeatedly made the claim they obey the laws of the countries in which it operates.
Also, it’s disingenuous of anybody to take X’s side on this over free speech when the past two years they have complied with basically every single request from every government for personal identifying information for any user. People are serving multi-decade prison sentences for their speech because X has refused to stand up to, for example, the government of Saudi Arabia when demanding the identities of state critics.
So it’s okay to kowtow to governments when they want to violate the right to privacy, but not when they want to shut down speech which is outside a sovereign nation’s definition of free speech? And let’s be clear - we were talking about 7 users.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s reasonable for a company to violate ONE right for a government under absolutely unethical circumstances and not another under SLIGHTLY debatable circumstances and expect anybody to take your position seriously. X is not a freedom fighter, and it’s not an actor for justice. It’s a partisan cesspool run by a man who is stacking the deck for the side he wants when it serves his interests.
I’m by no means defending musk or X. I think they shouldn’t have banned those users and also think they shouldn’t have revealed info about users who are not actively threatening to hurt someone
My statement was that in general it concerns me that governments are able to silence anybody in this way, which is where federation comes in handy
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.
We don’t dislike government censorship of CSAM. it’s all a spectrum based on the legitimacy of the government order and the legitimacy of the tech billionaire’s refusal to abide.
Honestly, while I think CSAM is disgusting, I am kind of against government censorship of it. Some go so far as to ban anything resembling CSAM, including imagery that looks like it, but doesn’t actually involve a real child. The problem is the abuse required to create it, but if that abuse didn’t happen, there is no crime, and it should therefore be completely legal.
The same goes with free speech more broadly. The speech itself should never be illegal, but it should be usable as evidence of another crime. A threat of violence is the crime, and that should be prosecuted, but that shouldn’t mean the government should force the host to censor the speech, that should be at the host’s discretion. What the government can do is subpoena information relevant to the investigation, but IMO it shouldn’t compel any entity to remove content.
That said, Brazilian law isn’t the same as US law, and X and Space X should respect the laws of all of the countries in which they operate.
That’s…actually a pretty reasonable take. Fuck Musk, but you’ve convinced me that government censorship is just a bad thing in general and that should apply to Musk as much as anyone else.
I do think there’s a counter argument to be made that the resources involved in setting up fake accounts to spread bullshit are trivial compared to the resources required to track down and prosecute account owners for crimes, so in a practical sense banning accounts is possibly the only thing one can do (especially if the account owners are foreign). If you give lies the same freedom as truth, you tend to end up with 10 lies for every truth.
Op’s take is not reasonable imo- if you think threats are harmful enough to prosecute they should also be harmful enough to censor.
Maybe a more soft form of censorship, such as hiding them behind a cw and a “user was vanned for this post” label rather than outright removal, but you can’t just do nothing.
I’m willing to bet the people that government wanted were not infact posting CSAM, I’m pretty sure even x would ban them of its own volition pretty quickly if they were doing that
why is everyone banning everything?
Stop it! Let people have fun on the internet!
Because they broke the law.
The law being, “Thou shalt not have fun on the internet” ?
I mean, you’re being facetious, but no, the law being “your company must have a legal representative to be within our borders”
X was told about it, given a deadline, they missed the deadline, they can’t be in Brazil
Actions have consequences
