An excerpt of the crimes commited[0]: "As of July 9, 2024, the profile @mveustaquio, possibly linked to teenager MARIANA VOLF PEDRO EUSTÁQUIO, daughter of the fugitive OSWALDO EUSTÁQUIO FILHO, joining the campaign started by ALLAN LOPES DOS SANTOS, starts making posts exposing Delegate FÁBIO ALVAREZ SHOR, as well as his family members, with the publication of photos of the server, his wife and his minor son, subjecting them to media scrutiny."
One of the threats that the Investigator FÁBIO ALVAREZ SHOR received[1]:
"In the report made to the Federal Police itself, the police chief said that, on July 13 of this year, “unidentified people placed a doll, in the shape of a monkey, in the back” of his vehicle. The car was parked outside Shor's residence, in Brasília." [...]
"Shor claims that, after the exposure, he became the target of “a wave of mass attacks” on social media. And that the threats on the web would also extend to his family members."
0. https://noticias-stf-wp-prd.s3.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/wp-co...
1. https://www.metropoles.com/colunas/paulo-cappelli/delegado-d...
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.
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.
https://restofworld.org/2021/social-media-laws-twitter-faceb...
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.
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).
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.