What about the rights of people who want to use twitter? Would you use the same characterization for Chinese censorship (ie. "The New York Times is not an fundamental right, as access to users isn't a right to [The New York Times Company]")?
Musk is willing to censor for Turkey but not for Brazil. It’s a massive double standard. His company has major shareholders who are part of the Saudi monarchy. Twitter under Musk isn’t a company that can make any honest claim to care about democratic free speech.
He’s already suspended left-wing and Musk-critical journalists and activists without a specific TOS violation or explanation while not doing the same for anyone that aligns with his ideology.
He doesn’t have kind of the moral high ground that other companies do on these matters, e.g., the kind that Google had when they exited China.
I also think that using china’s style of censorship as an analogy to other styles of censorship is also potentially a flawed exercise. I would argue that things like Germany’s censorship of Nazi ideology is a positive for human rights and democracy. Even the USA’s prohibition of the government’s speech on the topic of religion and political speech is technically a form of censorship - self-censorship, essentially.
I could imagine a hypothetical democratic government where speech is generally free but anti-democratic ideology is not tolerated, since that speech oversteps the boundaries of free speech and crosses into a territory of speech that harms others.
In other words, a society that overcomes the paradox of tolerance.
For example, Trump has spoken of elimination of term limits, becoming a dictator for a day, and has generally advocated for political violence. Because of his rhetoric there are a large percentage of people in the USA who would end democracy entirely if it meant that their dear leader Trump was president for life rather than a member of the opposition party. In the USA the first amendment protects him, but I would argue that it should not - that a democracy that intends to survive the constant onslaught of opportunistic authoritarians should criminalize anti-democratic activity and speech.
(I am not specifically commenting on Brazil’s orders to censor people on the Twitter platform because I am not equipped with that context. I don’t know specifically who those people are, what those people said, said and whether that court order was sensible. I merely speak in philosophical hypotheticals here - and at the end of the day whether my hypotheticals are “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant in the context of Elon’s asymmetrical application of “free speech”)
Now, part of the order makes it illegal to use VPN to access Twitter, which is an actual free speech issue, if you'd care to argue on those grounds.
All the websites China bans are also ostensibly for "failing to comply with the law". Would you say those bans are also "not a free speech issue"?
This part was later struck down by the court.
The goal is absolute harmony. Especially at the expense of rights.
For me, freedom of speech is part of what brings societies forward, and that includes deep changes which obviously means unstable societies at some point.
Humans would be stuck in Stone Age if we would have had only stable societies.
I agree with you and mistyped. I really need to proof my comments better.
I think the goal is not harmony but value and beauty.
Interoperability should cover this. If the platform is barred from doing business in a given country, users should be able to download all their data and move it to another platform of their choice. People must not be made hostages of the platforms.
Before Musk bought Twitter there were plenty of people arguing on here that in the age of the internet Twitter and places like it are essential as forums of public discourse, and access to them should be as unlimited as possible.
Twitter refusing bans and continuing operations in a hostile country was some people's wet dream just a couple years ago. I guess it's a lesson to be careful what you wish for.
In this specific case, Twitter doesn’t provide an essential service and, if it did, that’d need to be regulated and forced to provide services in an equitable and fair way.
Individual rights should be safeguarded against abuse as much as possible. Maybe it means that Musk should block less, but it certainly means that governments shouldn't muzzle people too easily.
In this case, an entire country of 200 million is threatened with massive fines for the horrible crime of using VPN to access a social network.
Yeah, Brasil really makes a good member of BRICS with this judgment.
The sanest implementation would probably just be some nominal monthly charge that an account holder can pay to Twitter to have their account publicly accessible to all.
You have a right to vote in your country, doesn't mean that you can demand they collect the vote in your bedroom and claim your rights are violated if they refuse.
Twitter since elon’s criminal “leadership” has become a bot-infested cesspool of racist bullshit, where he unilaterally censors whatever he dislikes in his sissy fits. In this form, this is a manipulation device, and good riddance.
If I were a Brasilian, I would certainly deeply resent the idea that my government treats me like a digital serf who is only allowed to move within a certain "area".
I don't believe in merits of censorship, regardless of all the putative benefits it always claims. And yeah, I am aware that Musk isn't a good personal example either. But it is worse if an entity with a monopoly on violence (= government) engages in that.
The idea that governments should stick their fingers into anything they want is literally the definition of a totalitarian society.
If that is true then why do Biden, Kamala, the DNC, and most European politicians continue to post heavily on it?
You can easily verify my statement if you wish, look up all the instances where Elon decided to ban stuff he dislikes, the rate of flat out racist bullshit, etc.
Companies absolutely have rights especially when they're owned by an individual. Banding together in groups does not eliminate human rights.
He has, in fact, zero rights to communicate in Brazil.
The report here asserts that every single other Brazilian Supreme Court Justice has backed that ban.
You may not be a lawyer, like Musk, but I'm led to believe that all the Justices of the Braziian Supreme Court are, and that they understand the Brazilian Legal system.
Musk et al bent over backwards for India and Turkey and suddenly gained principles in Brazil?
A Supreme Court Justice who rules on constitional law is fairly definitive, now even more so .. in India and Turkey X-itter sided with the the ruling conservative right wing party in power, in Brazil X-itter sided with the losing conservative right wing party that spread election denial propaganda.
There's a clear pattern.
The question isn't what morals the company decides to stand on other than the moral that they will only comply with government requests and court rulings that are legal under that jurisdiction's laws.
I don't know details of Turkish or Indian law, but I do generally understand their governments to be more oppressive than the US. It seems plausible that the requests made by those governments were legal there, as opposed to the Brazilian request that Twitter is claiming not to be legal there.
Supreme Court justices are in fact fallible. There have been a handful of decisions coming out of SCOTUS that many have been extremely unhappy with to the point of claiming the rulings were unlawful or unconstitutional. Is it impossible that the Brazilian judge made a request/demand and threat that isn't actually lawful?