For things like that, I always like to go to the source, and read the original order. It's the PDF at the bottom of this page: https://noticias.stf.jus.br/postsnoticias/stf-determina-susp... (it also has a link to a page with the PDF of the earlier order from two days ago).
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
What makes you think I specifically would think differently about apple? I don't think I've said anything here that would indicate that, so it seems like you're projecting.
The idea of a free Internet is an ideal that is subject to the sovereign laws of the country the packets travel to, and that is playing out here. All I know is that it's important to learn the lessons being taught now in the 2020s where control of the data transmitted to populations is how politics is won
Regarding this answer being posted twice, I guess my edit to the response in the wrong thread wasn't accepted, not much anyone but the mods can do about that now.
Cookie banners are not mandated by law, disclosure of and consent to tracking and capturing private user data and its sharing to third parties is. Cookie banners are just the easiest UX pattern to slap on to an existing website, and lends itself to dark patterns so users blindly click "accept all". There's multiple browser extensions that exist that will automatically opt you out and you never have to see those cookie banners again.
You have too black and white a view of this. It's not about accepting censorship, it's about refining the governing laws. Shouting "Fire" in the theater has always been a good line to draw, and a way to discuss what is healthy vs. not us important.
Alexandre de Moraes strikes again, with his sweeping anti democratic censorship orders. This man likes to suppress his political opposition - previously that meant banning individual users or deleting content but now it means entire platforms.
Perhaps "everyone" was really just two groups of people all along, one which kept silent in one occasion and the other in the other occasion.
Or perhaps you're right and people really have no moral principles and just say whatever is more convenient at different times. That's a scary thought. I choose to believe in the first alternative. Plenty of people complained about Moraes when he was bashing Musk.
I think there is a tendency to remember on those we spent the time disagreeing with more, or some similar effect, and then thinking "well gee, before the only thing people seemed to care about was disagreeing with me about <divisive subtopic> instead of <topic>". E.g. picking a random post result from an Algolia search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41275600
Top comment: Discussion on Moraes, not Musk
Second comment: References Elon/Elon's past compliance, some replies bash others support the policy
Third comment: About how companies will have to deal with more international events like this
Fourth comment: Mentions X but not Musk, some replies get into Elon back & forth though
Fifth comment: A pretty plain Musk bash
Overall sentiment of Musk certainly wasn't in overwhelming favor of Musk but the top commend and many other threads were focus on Moraes or things other than Musk. Of those that were, most seemed to mention him to bash but certainly not "everyone" bashing him by any measure of the word.
I think you see a lot more "dunk" on posts when it comes to the general political area around "Rumble" or the like. Personally more dunking on than I think is often fair as well, even though that direction is not my personal leaning. Musk himself is actually much less of a downvote trigger, even though he's got a way of getting mentioned way more often than he should in threads (like how the comments on this article have become largely about him when it's about Brazil and Rumble).
If Rumble wants to operate in Brazil all they need to do is…operate in Brazil.
They’re getting blocked because they won’t staff the company there and they’re getting into legal trouble for the content they post.
Twitter went through this and they were able to get legal and they’re fine now. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being persecuted for their right-wing political beliefs and they’re simply dealing with the natural consequences of their actions.
Calling it hostage-taking is just a coping mechanism. Every country has sovereignty over speech within its own borders. Otherwise, in the US for example, we could have Russian propaganda blasting us non-stop through social media and engaging in electioneering here, and we'd be powerless to do anything about it.
Government wants a throat to choke that is subject to their jurisdiction.
If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.
Having the company put an office there does not give you anything to choke, unless you did it like Brazil did and threaten lawyers with jail. Even then... that's just a Brazilian lawyer the company hired.
In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.
Well if we agree that it's reasonable that a company needs to have staff in a country it operates in, then you'd need to have staff in every country to operate. That seems unreasonable to me.
I'd argue that if applied as a universal principle, then:
* It would make it even harder specifically for smaller companies, who don't have ~200 employees to position one in each country, to get started online. If for instance you're an independent designer based in Luxembourg, maybe making fonts or website templates, would you only be allowed to sell to other people in Luxembourg?
* It would likely segment the Internet, and render much of it inaccessible to anyone living in smaller countries, because realistically most websites aren't going to bother with all countries.
* The intended goal, that websites would more likely bend to local law because they have employees there to be imprisoned/punished if they don't, seems questionable to me in the first place. In many cases the demands they'd be caving to would be "remove anti-government content" or "give us the IP and phone number of this journalist".
> Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
The world is not as it was before the takeoff of the Internet, and trying to revert back would be "unreasonable" to many.
In this case Rumble is a business model that didn't exist pre-Internet, and has to compete with Amazon/Google which have global availability (or close to it). Just because brick-and-mortar stores used to manage does not make it feasible for businesses like Rumble.
It was rhetorical, but is a nice page of text to cleverly never provide any meaningful answer to the question.
A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.
If people in Brazil want to access Rumble, and Rumble wants to allow them access, why should Rumble defer to the regime? Facebook used to run a hidden service for users in China, this is the example to follow.
You could say the same about Silkroad in the US, or Google in China, or online casinos in specific states. It’s simply the law of the land. The people voted for it so that’s what it is.
Ok, are you ascribing a motive of extortion here? You seem to be repeating an awfully simple principle but not making clear what you think the context is. Could you explain what your perspective is here?
Banning political posts or commentary or users based on the content of the messaging is almost always authoritarian and against every basic liberal principle. It is one thing to have privacy laws or laws around ownership or transparency on algorithms or whatever. It’s another thing to ban thoughts the state doesn’t like.
The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees. And why should they staff anyone there anyway? There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
> The reason they don't is that staffing their company in Brazil would jeopardize the freedom and security of their employees.
If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there. Brazil would be wise to lock them out like they would any would-be criminal organization.
> There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
>If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there.
Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US. A legitimate legal system does not censor free information, does not jail people without trial, does not empower a court system to launch "investigations" according to the whims of judges, and does not make demand on outside organizations with no operations in the country (lack or jurisdiction). The situation is this: Like other regimes (China, India, etc), the government of Brazil has enacted a hostage-taking law so they can threaten and intimidate foreign companies into getting what they want. Instead of complying with this law, companies would be wise to protect themselves and their employees by ignoring it.
>Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
Brazil has a TFR of ~1.5 and is rapidly aging. It's just a bigger Italy, and another country that will never be wealthy.
I can't comment on whatever went down in Brazil, but hey, at least those American prisoners you vaguely alluded to are free - except for the minuscule, practically microscopic handful who, you know, actually did something violent.
Or maybe you were alluding to a certain president? Hard to say because he wasn't there, or involved.
Brazilian here. This guy is the most power crook in power, and he's definetely has been abusing it, many similar cases. The guys from Rumble are lucky they are not in Brazil, otherwise they would be fucked, extortion for sure (pay or go to jail / get fucked).
Also, google him, he looks exactly like a evil movie villain, and he has this nasty villan look all the time.
If I'm reading that correctly, the court is taking this action after requesting that rumble respond to their requests and rumble has not responded. It's not censorship from the get-go, it's brinkmanship from rumble to get this response, it seems
It's a relevant factor. There's a lot of statistically significant information about someone's personality that can be inferred from their face: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-65358-6 . It may be politically incorrect to do so but that doesn't mean it's not useful.
Yeah, why mention his appearance at all? It's crass and his actions should speak for themselves. Someone can be born with "villainesque" features and live a noble life, it's unfair to disadvantage them by perpetuating negative stereotypes.
Those stereotypes have a basis in reality; the way people think and behave etches itself on their faces. I don't think anyone with real life experience could seriously, honestly argue that it's not possible to discern any information about someone from their face/facial expressions and how they carry themselves.
Because blocking a website that values hosting misinformation, conspiracy theories, ideological fascism and hateful bigoted content really makes you a bad guy. Do you free-speech absolutists ever take a look in the mirror?
IMHO, HN would be much better if any discussion with a hint or politics in them were not allowed, with the focus going back to purely technological discussion. The political climate right now is absolutely toxic right now, right now all it does is drive out any actual discussion of technology.
I think the incentive structures created by adding the concept of voting and flagging posts destroy the possibility of productive conversation long-term. If a user can control the visibility of opinions with less effort than defeating those opinions through debate then that mode of operation will end up dominating. Throw in enough users who have similar beliefs within this incentive structure and you start seeing some narratives promoted through upvotes and others hidden through downvotes and flagging. HN obviously has some magic sauce and wonderful moderators to try and prevent this, but I think they're fighting a losing battle just like every other online forum with similar mechanics.
There is a reason “Most stories about politics […] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon” is the first guideline about what not to post on HN.
Political discussions quickly lead to polarization and abuse of the vote system. Doesn’t help that 90% of comments are simply parroting known opinions and not offering anything of particular interest for most readers.
True, politics tends to amplify this problem quite a bit as people tend to be very emotionally invested. I have absolutely noticed this same phenomenon at work in non-political stories though and the problem seems to be getting worse, although that is just from personal observation. Hence why I said that long-term these incentive structures dictate behavior; they don't manifest immediately and simultaneously.
The mods like to pretend that diverse perspectives are always welcome, flags are only for guidelines. Definitely not true. If your opinion falls too far out of the HN overton window you’re silenced.
Sad that free speech has been unceremoniously tossed out of the Overton window, and aggressive censorship is so widely seen as the right way to deal with bad ideas.
I'm an avid reader of Glenn Greenwald (of the Snowden mass-surveillance revelations) and he's been talking about the lawsuit they're bringing against the government following this. I really love the type non-partisan journalism that he practices and hope they manage to shut this nonsense down.
I’m not sure about Glenn Greenwald, but this author seems extremely left / socialist. Here’s a tweet where he calls for Silicon Valley to be nationalized. I would take that into account.
This is a great example of why the ever-shifting definition of fascism (as it's used in popular parlance) is so bad. You could get two completely contradictory answers to your question that are both correct depending on what "fascism" means to that person. Advocating violence against such an ill-defined group is dangerous, and if I believed there was such a thing as "evil" I would call it evil. To be clear I'm not implying that you are personally calling for violence, just speaking generally.
What about Apartheid? Isn't that Racism implemented in a governamental level?
I agree that Fascism is implemented at governmental level, but does not exclude the fact that the origin of the movement starts with the ultranationalism which does require a group of people to believe in it.
If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"
While I get where you are coming from where do you draw the line? If a country sinkholes an IP range/domain name because it is actively being used to defraud its citizens should the rest of the internet drop their interconnects with that country? How about CP? Where should the line in the sand be drawn or should the internet be a FFA for every piece of content possible?
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?
EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
>So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".
I feel that the US is going very protectionist atm (at least its leaders are), so I'm not very surprised by such statements. though imo even if Europe was completely aligned with the US on free speech, something else would be the reason to threaten military support.
(just a side note: personally I wish Europe as a whole would shift its stance on freedom of speech to be closer to the US's stance on it then it currently is over here, so I'm not going to complain if the VPs statements do actually help kick our leaders up the arse.)
I think you're assuming the leadership of those countries will think this is a bad thing. It wouldn't be. They would get to make the big mean globalists the bad guy and tamp down dissent in their country simultaneously.
They absolutely wouldn't make the globalists the bad guys.
They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".
Or they never try to get i back but have now a conveniently locked down internet for their citizen, nicely packaged with a scapegoat to wag their finger at shouting "look at these evil countries trying to force their will on us, they keep YOU from the internet"
Nah, just require it by law for the press / media / social media to annotate removed information with who is responsible for the decision.
So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:
This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:
List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)
The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)
Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)
How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)
The idea of a free Internet is an ideal that is subject to the sovereign laws of the country the packets travel to, and that is playing out here. All I know is that it's important to learn the lessons being taught now in the 2020s where control of the data transmitted to populations is how politics is won
Regarding this answer being posted twice, I guess my edit to the response in the wrong thread wasn't accepted, not much anyone but the mods can do about that now.
Websites are subject to the laws in which they are based, not the packets' destination!
Example: Germany requires Impressum displayed upon the website. It is requires only for sites based in Germany and not enforceable anywhere else!
It's nothing new.
However we (English speakers) hear only about high profile sites.
Many journalists and nonprofits have called him a threat to Brazilian democracy for good reason (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...). Also see this comparison of the Brazilian constitution and example censorship orders from de Moraes (https://x.com/alexandrefiles/status/1829979981130416479/phot...).
Or perhaps you're right and people really have no moral principles and just say whatever is more convenient at different times. That's a scary thought. I choose to believe in the first alternative. Plenty of people complained about Moraes when he was bashing Musk.
Top comment: Discussion on Moraes, not Musk
Second comment: References Elon/Elon's past compliance, some replies bash others support the policy
Third comment: About how companies will have to deal with more international events like this
Fourth comment: Mentions X but not Musk, some replies get into Elon back & forth though
Fifth comment: A pretty plain Musk bash
Overall sentiment of Musk certainly wasn't in overwhelming favor of Musk but the top commend and many other threads were focus on Moraes or things other than Musk. Of those that were, most seemed to mention him to bash but certainly not "everyone" bashing him by any measure of the word.
I think you see a lot more "dunk" on posts when it comes to the general political area around "Rumble" or the like. Personally more dunking on than I think is often fair as well, even though that direction is not my personal leaning. Musk himself is actually much less of a downvote trigger, even though he's got a way of getting mentioned way more often than he should in threads (like how the comments on this article have become largely about him when it's about Brazil and Rumble).
They’re getting blocked because they won’t staff the company there and they’re getting into legal trouble for the content they post.
Twitter went through this and they were able to get legal and they’re fine now. It’s almost as if they’re not actually being persecuted for their right-wing political beliefs and they’re simply dealing with the natural consequences of their actions.
https://restofworld.org/2021/social-media-laws-twitter-faceb...
https://restofworld.org/2022/twitters-censorship-india/
If you have laws governing businesses that operate in your country it seems like a giant loophole if those businesses can avoid them simply having their servers/staff in another country. And in practice this shutting them out of the market is the stick they have to encourage compliance.
In order to do it right you have to be like a recent SEA nation that demanded the full investment from Apple in their national infra.
Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
I'd argue that if applied as a universal principle, then:
* It would make it even harder specifically for smaller companies, who don't have ~200 employees to position one in each country, to get started online. If for instance you're an independent designer based in Luxembourg, maybe making fonts or website templates, would you only be allowed to sell to other people in Luxembourg?
* It would likely segment the Internet, and render much of it inaccessible to anyone living in smaller countries, because realistically most websites aren't going to bother with all countries.
* The intended goal, that websites would more likely bend to local law because they have employees there to be imprisoned/punished if they don't, seems questionable to me in the first place. In many cases the demands they'd be caving to would be "remove anti-government content" or "give us the IP and phone number of this journalist".
> Within my lifetime that wasn't even physically possible.
The world is not as it was before the takeoff of the Internet, and trying to revert back would be "unreasonable" to many.
In this case Rumble is a business model that didn't exist pre-Internet, and has to compete with Amazon/Google which have global availability (or close to it). Just because brick-and-mortar stores used to manage does not make it feasible for businesses like Rumble.
A government - elected by its people - should not allow a foreign corporation to flout their laws. "If you want to operate in our country you have to actually operate in our country, where you cannot evade responsibility and the law." is not in any way an unreasonable requirement.
If they intend to commit break laws in Brazil, then yeah obviously they shouldn't have employees there. Brazil would be wise to lock them out like they would any would-be criminal organization.
> There are nearly 200 companies in the world, should every website have to open an office in each one of them?
Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
Let's not pretend Brazil is a serious country with due process and anything approaching legitimate rule of law like we have in the US. A legitimate legal system does not censor free information, does not jail people without trial, does not empower a court system to launch "investigations" according to the whims of judges, and does not make demand on outside organizations with no operations in the country (lack or jurisdiction). The situation is this: Like other regimes (China, India, etc), the government of Brazil has enacted a hostage-taking law so they can threaten and intimidate foreign companies into getting what they want. Instead of complying with this law, companies would be wise to protect themselves and their employees by ignoring it.
>Brazil is an economy the size of Italy (and unlike Italy, growing). Rumble is free to stay out of a 2+ trillion economy. Nobody's forcing them.
Brazil has a TFR of ~1.5 and is rapidly aging. It's just a bigger Italy, and another country that will never be wealthy.
They are throwing their coup plotters in prison, I don't know if the US compares favorably lately.
Or maybe you were alluding to a certain president? Hard to say because he wasn't there, or involved.
So the way somebody looks is half of your argument?
"The reanimation of pseudoscience in machine learning and its ethical repercussions" https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00160-0
shows why this is pseudoscience and harmful.
But the guy has definitively decided on turning his country into a dictatorial hell hole.
Brazil had already more than enough problems nobody was doing anything about, it really didn't deserve someone with a beyblade as a moral compass.
Let's hope he'll get a "Am I the baddie?" realization and doesn't enjoy it.
Reading them, they mostly seem acceptably divergent political opinion, nothing that worrisome imo.
(If political discussions quickly become uncivil, that is a separate issue solved like with any other uncivil discussion.)
Political discussions quickly lead to polarization and abuse of the vote system. Doesn’t help that 90% of comments are simply parroting known opinions and not offering anything of particular interest for most readers.
https://www.powells.com/book/owned-9781645030461
I find he is consistent on his ideology, but I don't follow him closely to confirm my speculation
https://x.com/eoinhiggins_/status/1891267740247237109?s=46
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html
You guys are both a little full of the partisan kool-aid.
I agree that Fascism is implemented at governmental level, but does not exclude the fact that the origin of the movement starts with the ultranationalism which does require a group of people to believe in it.
If any country bans speech, they lose ALL internet access. Then send the country a message: "You requested to be shut off from a specific IP, so we blocked x.x.x.x/0"
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, but I still have lines in the sand where "speech" turns from being free to being criminal. Who gets to decide where those lines in the sand are? Who would you trust to be the gatekeepers?
EDIT: My point is that every nation has its own set of morals, lets takes the US's take on free speech, its very broad (not a bad thing imo), much broader than pretty much every one of its allies. So should the US cut ties with its allies because they don't agree with every single point that defines free speech?
The American vice president recently gave a speech in Europe where he basically said "if you're going to be locking people up for posting memes online, there's no common values and we're not going to keep providing you military protection".
(just a side note: personally I wish Europe as a whole would shift its stance on freedom of speech to be closer to the US's stance on it then it currently is over here, so I'm not going to complain if the VPs statements do actually help kick our leaders up the arse.)
They'd hail them as our saviors, heroically travelling from country to country in their private jets and yachts to share with us USB sticks full of information and news "from other countries".
So instead of a post just not showing up for yourself on Twitter, you'd see hundreds of posts saying things like:
This post has been hidden from you, due to this person being subject to the "5 minutes of hate act". Your brain has been kept safe. Please thank the following people for their service:
List of politicians having voted on the act, broken down by party: (Archive Link)
The judge and prosecutor on this case: (Archive Link)
Transparency report of all similar cases in your country: (Link)
How to appeal this decision: (Link to guide on how to raise a huge bureaucratic stink)