Late on Friday afternoon, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – who has been engaged in a dispute with X’s owner, Elon Musk, since April – ordered the “immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations” in the country, “until all court orders … are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country”.
He gave Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency 24 hours to enforce the decision. Once notified, the agency must pass the order on to the more than 20,000 broadband internet providers in the country, each of which must block X.
In an interview with the TV channel Globonews, the agency’s president, Carlos Manuel Baigorri, said the order had already been passed on to internet providers.
“Since we’re talking about more than 20,000 companies, each will have its own implementation time, but … we expect that probably over the weekend all companies will be able to implement the block,” he said.
Justice Moraes also summoned Apple and Google to “implement technological barriers to prevent the use of the X app by users of the iOS and Android systems” and to block the use of virtual private network (VPN) applications.
The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.
I’m kind of on the fence with this one.
As much as I dislike Twitter/X and it’s owner; their ‘crime’ is refusing to silence the political opponents of those currently in power, then further refusing to pay fines for that decision… Decisions, at least in principle, I agree with.
That said: I haven’t actually seen the content that’s at the center of this dispute; the posts of those political opponents. I’m also not very familiar with Brazils politics, so perhaps there’s context I’m missing.
First they came for the christofascists who attempted a coup, and I didn’t speak out 😔
musk has no problems with taking down political opponents’ xitter accounts when the request is coming from “right wing” governments (rather authoritarian or far-right)
he doesn’t care about freedom of speech, he only cares about his kind of speech. If he refused all take down requests, i would agree with you
As far as I understand this is a right-wing authoritarian gov silencing left-wing opponent’s.Am i mistaken?/pre-post edit: Yes, yes I am.
That certainly throws out any bit of sympathy I may of had… Though I still think they made the right decision to refuse to comply.
¯\(-_-)/¯ oh well.
It seems that the strongest justification is that they closed their local branch, and have no legal representation here in Brazil, which is required by law for them to be able to operate.
That was due to threats of arrest for not paying these fines, that were issued for refusing to silence critics.
I was trying to skip past all those middle steps and get to the root of the issue. What started it all.
Isn’t it natural: if you refuse to obey numerous court orders and pay your fines, you’ll get even worse court orders. This is not exactly the way to challenge the reasons for these other orders.
If that’s what you think is wrong with Twitter, you might be one of the bad guys
?
What is ‘that’ exactly…?
I’ve said nothing about what’s wrong with twitter. I’ve said I agree with refusing to silence political opposition for those in power, at least in principle. I’ve also, at least tried, to be pretty clear I’m likely missing some contex; so that may be a bit of a misinterpretation of the situation.