The social network will go dark in the nation of 200 million, the result of an escalating fight between Elon Musk and a Brazilian judge over what can be said online.
This is how you deal with people like him. After trying to treat them fairly, act with strength and authority. Hit them in the wallet whenever possible.
That judge claims the people he wants banned from the platform are anti democracy and what not, but musk refused to comply. Its a complicated subject and my opinion is just that, my own opinion. That judge (most of them in fact) believe themselves to be all mighty, they interpret the law as they see fit and use their supreme court orders to do as they wish, when their role should be only to act as the highest instance of law in the country. Just today he also froze starlink's account in the country to charge fines from the twitter issue, that is not exactly the correct way to go about it, he is over stepping his powers.
To be short: fuck Elon but the supreme court here is also crap and needs a reform.
In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.
That's probably the worst part of the current press environment. If someone has a history of lying, that does not weigh on how their words are reported.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered internet providers to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a necessary legal representative in Brazil.
Stupid move here from Musk. All he had to do is hire a legal representative for Brazil. Even if he didn't care about Brazil access, doing nothing isn't a great optics move. He should have at least issued a statement, of not shut down X in Brazil on his end, if he wasn't willing to hire a legal representative.
Fuck Musk and everything, but Xitter has traditionally been a very powerful tool for the masses in impoverished countries to get the word out.
I know Brazil isn't exactly a 3rd world country, but it's not exactly the most stable of governments, either. They just recently had a Jan 6th kind of coup attempt when bolsonaros lost.
I hesitate to consider this a net good, despite hating Musk.
That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn't safe either.
The usefulness of Twitter ended when Musk took over. This is absolutely a new positive thing, as it’s better to use alternatives as opposed to the fascist website. There are lots of communication alternatives available, so it’s not like people won’t have a way to communicate.
The point of guerilla style social media activism that exposes oppression, is to reach as many eyes as possible.
Are there alternatives? Sure. But do they reach anywhere near the same size of an audience? Unless I'm extremely out of touch (I do not consume that kind of social media directly), then it's not even remotely close.
Maybe BlueSky is bigger than I think it is, but I rarely ever hear about it outside of very niche circles (like lemmy).
My point stands. Despite all the mishandling of Xitter, it's still a powerful tool to get grassroots news out for things like protests, oppression. The platform is certainly worse than it was before Musk, but it's still a decent tool for this specific usecase.