Between Elon deciding who to block (and he blocks quiet often) and democratically elected governments deciding, I prefer the one that's got at least some checks and balances.

I don't. Governments are very powerful and the necessary checks and balances may be either nonexistent or weak, or corrupt, or very slow.

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.

Court says to remove porn child accounts. Racist accounts. Nazists accounts. Musk refuses.

I often can't read Twitter because I do not have account. Is my human right violated?

Well, I think it would be very reasonable for a government to compel Twitter to allow access without an account to at least certain accounts that dispense information that is of real-time public interest. e.g. In the case of some recent wildfires here, updates about the emergency were primarily available on Twitter.

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.

The coercion inherent in the Brasilian ban (massive fines for users who dare use VPN to access Twitter, massive fines for ISPs who don't comply) is many orders of magnitude greater than the coercion inherent in a paywall.

Accounts are free and easy to create, so it's your choice rather than a restriction on your rights.

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.

There are other places than Twitter to read stuff written by other people. Even in the conservative exotic orient.

That is like saying that unless you ban the entire library, people shouldn't complain about books being banned.

That’s why regulation should apply to services like that, the same way a private company should not be able to block a highway that is critical to the functioning of a country.

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.

There is a lot more than racist bullshit that is going on on Twitter/X, for example, a lot of interesting voices from Ukraine.

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.

Governments are elected by people, and are the best representatives of what the people want. You rather a foreign agent with questionable motives be the arbiter of truth, rather than the body that is elected more or less democratically?

I don't want governments to be arbiters of truth at all. Elected, unelected, I just don't want them to do this kind of job, much like I don't want a plumber to dictate the contents of my next lunch.

The idea that governments should stick their fingers into anything they want is literally the definition of a totalitarian society.

I don’t want Musk to be an arbiter of truth either, and I’m sure we can all agree how much of a terrible idea that’d be.

> 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 that is true then why do Biden, Kamala, the DNC, and most European politicians continue to post heavily on it?

The two statements are not contradictory, and it still hasn’t lost all its users from the twitter times, when it was a decent social media.

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.