brazil – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Don’t Believe What This Podcast Says About Misinformation

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, brazil, community notes, content moderation, labor rights, misinformation
Companies: meta, twitter, x

Why Making Social Media Companies Liable For User Content Doesn’t Do What Many People Think It Will

from the how-stuff-works dept

Brazil’s Supreme Court appears close to ruling that social media companies should be liable for content hosted on their platforms—a move that appears to represent a significant departure from the country’s pioneering Marco Civil internet law. While this approach has obvious appeal to people frustrated with platform failures, it’s likely to backfire in ways that make the underlying problems worse, not better.

The core issue is that most people fundamentally misunderstand both how content moderation works and what drives platform incentives. There’s a persistent myth that companies could achieve near-perfect moderation if they just “tried harder” or faced sufficient legal consequences. This ignores the mathematical reality of what happens when you attempt to moderate billions of pieces of content daily, and it misunderstands how liability actually changes corporate behavior.

Part of the confusion, I think, stems from people’s failure to understand the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. There is a very wrong assumption that social media platforms could do perfect (or very good) content moderation if they just tried harder or had more incentive to do better. Without denying that some entities (*cough* ExTwitter *cough*) have made it clear they don’t care at all, most others do try to get this right, and discover over and over again how impossible that is.

Yes, we can all point to examples of platform failures that are depressing and seem obvious that things should have been done differently, but the failures are not there because “the laws don’t require it.” The failures are because it’s impossible to do this well at scale. Some people will always disagree with how a decision comes out, and other times there are no “right” answers. Also, sometimes, there’s just too much going on at once, and no legal regime in the world can possibly fix that.

Given all of that, what we really want are better overall incentives for the companies to do better. Some people (again, falsely) seem to think the only incentives are regulatory. But that’s not true. Incentives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes—and much more powerful than regulations are things like the users themselves, along with advertisers and other business partners.

Importantly, content moderation is also a constantly moving and evolving issue. People who are trying to game the system are constantly adjusting. New kinds of problems arise out of nowhere. If you’ve never done content moderation, you have no idea how many “edge cases” there are. Most people—incorrectly—assume that most decisions are easy calls and you may occasionally come across a tougher one.

But there are constant edge cases, unique scenarios, and unclear situations. Because of this, every service provider will make many, many mistakes every day. There’s no way around this. It’s partly the law of large numbers. It’s partly the fact that humans are fallible. It’s partly the fact that decisions need to be made quickly without full information. And a lot of it is that those making the decisions just don’t know what the “right” approach is.

The way to get better is constant adjusting and experimenting. Moderation teams need to be adaptable. They need to be able to respond quickly. And they need the freedom to experiment with new approaches to deal with bad actors trying to abuse the system.

Putting legal liability on the platform makes all of that more difficult

Now, here’s where my concerns about the potential ruling in Brazil get to: if there is legal liability, it creates a scenario that is actually less likely to lead to good outcomes. First, it effectively requires companies to replace moderators with lawyers. If your company is now making decisions that come with significant legal liability, that likely requires a much higher type of expertise. Even worse, it’s creating a job that most people with law degrees are unlikely to want.

Every social media company has at least some lawyers who work with their trust & safety teams to review the really challenging cases, but when legal liability could accrue for every decision, it becomes much, much worse.

More importantly, though, it makes it way more difficult for trust & safety teams to experiment and adapt. Once things include the potential of legal liability, then it becomes much more important for the companies to have some sort of plausible deniability—some way to express to a judge “look, we’re doing the same thing we always have, the same thing every company has always done” to cover themselves in court.

But that means that these trust & safety efforts get hardened into place, and teams are less able to adapt or to experiment with better ways to fight evolving threats. It’s a disaster for companies that want to do the right thing.

The next problem with such a regime is that it creates a real heckler’s veto-type regime. If anyone complains about anything, companies are quick to take it down, because the risk of ruinous liability just isn’t worth it. And we now have decades of evidence showing that increasing liability on platforms leads to massive overblocking of information. I recognize that some people feel this is acceptable collateral damage… right up until it impacts them.

This dynamic should sound familiar to anyone who’s studied internet censorship. It’s exactly how China’s Great Firewall originally operated—not through explicit rules about what was forbidden, but by telling service providers that the punishment would be severe if anything “bad” got through. The government created deliberate uncertainty about where the line was, knowing that companies would respond with massive overblocking to avoid potentially ruinous consequences. The result was far more comprehensive censorship than direct government mandates could have achieved.

Brazil’s proposed approach follows this same playbook, just with a different enforcement mechanism. Rather than government officials making vague threats, it would be civil liability creating the same incentive structure: when in doubt, take it down, because the cost of being wrong is too high.

People may be okay with that, but I would think that in a country with a history of dictatorships and censorship, they would like to be a bit more cautious before handing the government a similarly powerful tool of suppression.

It’s especially disappointing in Brazil, which a decade ago put together the Marco Civil, an internet civil rights law that was designed to protect user rights and civil liberties—including around intermediary liability. The Marco Civil remains an example of more thoughtful internet lawmaking (way better than we’ve seen almost anywhere else, including the US). So this latest move feels like backsliding.

Either way, the longer-term fear is that this would actually limit the ability of smaller, more competitive social media players to operate in Brazil, as it will be way too risky. The biggest players (Meta) aren’t likely to leave, but they have buildings full of lawyers who can fight these lawsuits (and often, likely, win). A study we conducted a few years back detailed how as countries ratcheted up their intermediary liability, the end result was, repeatedly, fewer online places to speak.

That doesn’t actually improve the social media experience at all. It just gives more of it to the biggest players with the worst track records. Sure, a few lawsuits may extract some cash from these companies for failing to be perfect, but it’s not like they can wave a magic wand and not let any “criminal” content exist. That’s not how any of this works.

Some responses to issues raised by critics

When I wrote about this on a brief Bluesky thread, I received hundreds of responses—many quite angry—that revealed some common misunderstandings about my position. I’ll take the blame for not expressing myself as clearly as I should have and I’m hoping the points above lay out the argument more clearly regarding how this could backfire in dangerous ways. But, since some of the points were repeated at me over and over again (sometimes with clever insults), I thought it would be good to address some of the arguments directly:

But social media is bad, so if this gets rid of all of it, that’s good. I get that many people hate social media (though, there was some irony in people sending those messages to me on social media). But, really what most people hate is what they see on social media. And as I keep explaining, the way we fix that is with more experimentation and more user agency—not handing everything over to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk or the government.

Brazil doesn’t have a First Amendment, so shut up and stop with your colonialist attitude. I got this one repeatedly and it’s… weird? I never suggested Brazil had a First Amendment, nor that it should implement the equivalent. I simply pointed out the inevitable impact of increasing intermediary liability on speech. You can decide (as per the comment above) that you’re fine with this, but it has nothing to do with my feelings about the First Amendment. I wasn’t suggesting Brazil import American free speech laws either. I was simply pointing out what the consequences of this one change to the law might create.

Existing social media is REALLY BAD, so we need to do this. This is the classic “something must be done, this is something, we will do this” response. I’m not saying nothing must be done. I’m just saying this particular approach will have significant consequences that it would help people to think through.

It only applies to content after it’s been adjudicated as criminal. I got that one a few times from people. But, from my reading, that’s not true at all. That’s what the existing law was. These rulings would expand it greatly from what I can tell. Indeed, the article notes how this would change things from existing law:

The current legislation states social media companies can only be held responsible if they do not remove hazardous content after a court order.

[….]

Platforms need to be pro-active in regulating content, said Alvaro Palma de Jorge, a law professor at the Rio-based Getulio Vargas Foundation, a think tank and university.

“They need to adopt certain precautions that are not compatible with simply waiting for a judge to eventually issue a decision ordering the removal of that content,” Palma de Jorge said.

You’re an anarchocapitalist who believes that there should be no laws at all, so fuck off. This one actually got sent to me a bunch of times in various forms. I even got added to a block list of anarchocapitalists. Really not sure how to respond to that one other than saying “um, no, just look at anything I’ve written for the past two and a half decades.”

America is a fucking mess right now, so clearly what you are pushing for doesn’t work. This one was the weirdest of all. Some people sending variations on this pointed to multiple horrific examples of US officials trampling on Americans’ free speech, saying “see? this is what you support!” as if I support those things, rather than consistently fighting back against them. Part of the reason I’m suggesting this kind of liability can be problematic is because I want to stop other countries from heading down a path that gives governments the power to stifle speech like the US is doing now.

I get that many people are—reasonably!—frustrated about the terrible state of the world right now. And many people are equally frustrated by the state of internet discourse. I am too. But that doesn’t mean any solution will help. Many will make things much worse. And the solution Brazil is moving towards seems quite likely to make the situation worse there.

Filed Under: brazil, content moderation, free speech, impossibility, intermediary liability, marco civil, platform liability, social media

Greek Authorities Fail In Their Attempt To Make VPN Founder Personally Responsible For The Action Of An Unknown User

from the good-but-not-perfect-tools dept

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move to bring a VPN operator to heel:

Windscribe, a globally used privacy-first VPN service, announced today that its founder, Yegor Sak, has been fully acquitted by a court in Athens, Greece, following a two-year legal battle in which Sak was personally charged in connection with an alleged internet offence by an unknown user of the service.

The case centred around a Windscribe-owned server in Finland that was allegedly used to breach a system in Greece. Greek authorities, in cooperation with INTERPOL, traced the IP address to Windscribe’s infrastructure and, unlike standard international procedures, proceeded to initiate criminal proceedings against Sak himself, rather than pursuing information through standard corporate channels.

The issue here is that the Greek authorities chose to prosecute Windscribe’s founder, Yegor Sak, rather than making an official request to the company for information about the alleged breach of the Greek system by a Windscribe user. That approach not only ignored established procedures for investigating such cases, it put a great deal of pressure on Sak — doubtless intentionally — in an attempt to force him to hand over information. Fortunately, the charges against Sak were dismissed last month, as the Greek court “did not find sufficient evidence to implicate Sak or Windscribe in any wrongdoing” according to Hackread.

If Greece had made VPN owners personally responsible for everything their users did online it would have set a terrible precedent, even if it would not have been legally binding elsewhere. In the face of such risks, some VPNs would doubtless have shut down, while others would have been forced to monitor closely what their users were up to. The Greek case was particularly important, because it involved a VPN provider that does not log user activity, and was therefore incapable of providing any information about the alleged abuse, even if ordered to do so.

It’s great news that the charges against Sak were dropped, albeit after a two-year legal battle, probably thanks in part to Windscribe’s no-logging policy. But the fear has to be that more governments will bring in laws that compel VPN services to keep logs in order to allow their users to be tracked and later identified. This is already the case in countries with repressive Internet laws, for example Russia, China, Iran, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, as that article on Comparitech notes, even in countries that nominally protect privacy, like the US, UK, Canada and Australia, there are laws that could be used to force VPN services to log users or build in backdoors. It’s another reason why VPNs, useful as they are, should not be regarded as cast-iron protection against surreptitious surveillance by governments and others.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Filed Under: australia, backdoors, brazil, canada, china, finland, greece, interpol, iran, italy, logging, russia, surveillance, uk, united arab emirates, us, vietnam, vpn, Yegor Sak
Companies: Windscribe

Otherwise Objectionable: How 230 Let US Internet Companies Win

from the a-world-without-230 dept

While politicians from both parties race to dismantle Section 230, we’re missing a crucial part of the story: how this uniquely American law helped US internet companies succeed globally. In the latest episode of Otherwise Objectionable, I explore with legal scholar Anupam Chander what might seem paradoxical — how a domestic liability shield became America’s most successful tech export without a single international treaty.

We discuss how other places regulate the internet, including Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Brazil and more. And how each of their approaches created real burdens — the exact kinds of burdens that Chris Cox and Ron Wyden were trying to avoid while drafting Section 230.

What’s particularly striking is how Section 230 functioned as a kind of incubator. The early freedom from crushing legal uncertainty allowed companies to build services compelling enough that international users demanded access to them, creating pressure on foreign regulators to accommodate these platforms rather than block them entirely. This explains what seems like a contradiction: how platforms built under Section 230’s protection can operate in jurisdictions with much stricter liability regimes. They succeeded not despite Section 230, but because of the head start it provided, reinforcing the idea that Section 230’s biggest value is in protecting smaller, newer platforms.

But this era of American digital success may be fading. As regulations globally become increasingly stringent (with the EU’s Digital Services Act, Australia’s Online Safety Act, and dozens of similar regulatory regimes), we’re witnessing the early stages of internet fragmentation. We discuss how platforms will need to make difficult decisions about which markets to exit when compliance becomes untenable.

The irony shouldn’t be lost on American legislators rushing to “reform” Section 230: they’re dismantling the very legal framework that made American digital innovation possible, just as the rest of the world is recognizing — through increasingly desperate regulatory measures — how effective it was.

Filed Under: anupam chander, australia, brazil, eu, france, germany, intermediary liability, japan, otherwise objectionable, section 230, south korea

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Bullshit In A China Shop

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

If you’re in London on Thursday 30th January, join Ben, Mark Scott (Digital Politics) and Georgia Iacovou (Horrific/Terrific) for an evening of tech policy, discussion and drinks. Register your interest.

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Filed Under: brazil, china, content moderation, donald trump, eu, mark zuckerberg, tiktok ban
Companies: apple, bytedance, google, meta, pornhub, tiktok

A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe.

Another manifestation of this insatiability is seen in the ever-widening use of Internet site blocking. What began as a highly-targeted one-off in the UK, when a court ordered the Newzbin2 site to be blocked, has become a favored method of the copyright industry for cutting off access to thousands of sites around the world, including many blocked by mistake. Even more worryingly, the approach has led to blocks being implemented in some key parts of the Internet’s infrastructure that have no involvement with the material that flows through them: they are just a pipe. For example, last year we wrote about courts ordering the content delivery network Cloudflare to block sites. But even that isn’t enough it seems. A post on TorrentFreak reports on a move to embed site blocking at the very heart of the Internet. This emerges from an interview about the Brazilian telecoms regulator Anatel:

In an interview with Tele.Sintese, outgoing Anatel board member Artur Coimbra recalls the lack of internet infrastructure in Brazil as recently as 2010. As head of the National Broadband Plan under the Ministry of Communications, that’s something he personally addressed. For Anatel today, blocking access to pirate websites and preventing unauthorized devices from communicating online is all in a day’s work.

Here’s the key revelation spotted by TorrentFreak:

“The second step, which we still need to evaluate because some companies want it, and others are more hesitant, is to allow Anatel to have access to the core routers to place a direct order on the router,” Coimbra reveals, referencing IPTV [Internet Protocol television] blocking.

“In these cases, these companies do not need to have someone on call to receive the [blocking] order and then implement it.”

Later on, Coimbra clarifies how far along this plan is:

“Participation is voluntary. We are still testing with some companies. So, it will take some time until it actually happens,” Coimbra says. “I can’t say [how long]. Our inspection team is carrying out tests with some operators, I can’t say which ones.”

Even if this is still in the testing phase, and only with “some” companies, it’s a terrible precedent. It means that blocking – and thus censorship – can be applied automatically, possibly without judicial oversight, to some of the most fundamental parts of the Internet’s plumbing. Once that happens, it will spread, just as the original single site block in the UK has spread worldwide. There’s even a hint that might already be happening. Asked if such blocking is being applied anywhere else, Coimbra replies:

“I don’t know. Maybe in Spain and Portugal, which are more advanced countries in this fight. But I don’t have that information,” Coimbra responds, randomly naming two countries with which Brazil has consulted extensively on blocking matters.

Although it’s not clear from that whether Spain and Portugal are indeed taking this route, the fact that Coimbra suggests that they might be is deeply troubling. And even if they aren’t, we can be sure that the copyright industry will keep demanding Internet blocks and censorship at the deepest level until they get them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally posted to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: anatel, brazil, censorship, copyright, core routers, due process, infrastructure

Elon Rehires Lawyers In Brazil, Removes Accounts He Insisted He Wouldn’t Remove

from the was-there-no-strategy? dept

Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won.

After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian news org Folha reports that ExTwitter has (1) rehired a law firm in Brazil (though hasn’t yet designated a “legal representative” for the purpose of being a potential hostage) and (2) begun taking down accounts that it was ordered to remove (translated via Google Translate):

X (formerly Twitter) began complying with court orders from the Federal Supreme Court (STF) on Wednesday night (18) and took down accounts that Minister Alexandre de Moraes ordered to be suspended.

This week, the company rehired the Pinheiro Neto law firm to represent it before the Court. The firm had been dismissed last week. The STF says it will only recognize the new lawyers after X appoints a legal representative in the country.

This all comes right after the mess where ExTwitter switched its CDN provider, leading to the site briefly becoming available again in Brazil. According to Bloomberg, de Moraes appeared none too pleased about this and ordered another fine on the company:

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has been sparring with Musk for months, ordered a daily fine of 5 million reais ($922,250) against the social media site and accused it of attempting to “disobey” judicial orders.

An order published Thursday instructs the nation’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, to ban X access through network providers such as Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno, which were “created to circumvent the judicial decision to block the platform in national territory.”

From everything I’ve heard, it really does appear that the Cloudflare thing was unintentional and just happened because ExTwitter was in the process of moving from Fastly to Cloudflare for CDN services. This was for a variety of reasons and not to avoid the ban in Brazil. ExTwitter put out a statement saying it was unintentional as well:

![When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team. To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users.

While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again shortly, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.](https://i0.wp.com/lex-img-p.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/img/f5d24997-e113-4cec-a710-e0ac0699263b-RackMultipart20240920-206-dnt3xe.png?ssl=1)

You can say that the company is lying, but that wouldn’t make much sense. Elon has had zero problems antagonizing and attacking de Moraes and the Brazilian government, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to lie about this. Especially if it is true that they had already begun the process of rehiring the law firm and banning some accounts.

Cloudflare quickly announced that it would segregate ExTwitter and make sure Brazilian traffic didn’t reach it. Anyone would have had to know this was the likely result if it really was intentional.

So, all of this sounds like Elon potentially realizing that he did his “oh, look at me, I’m a free speech absolutist” schtick, it caused ExTwitter to lose a large chunk of its userbase, and now he’s back to playing ball again. Because, like so much that he’s done since taking over Twitter, he had no actual plan to deal with these kinds of demands from countries.

Filed Under: alexandre de moraes, brazil, content moderation, elon musk, hostage employees, legal representative, takedowns
Companies: twitter, x

ExTwitter’s Brazil Ban Evasion: Cloudflare’s CDN Becomes Latest Battleground

from the cat-and-mouse dept

Update: Annnnnnnnd… Cloudflare has already said it will isolate and block Brazilian IP addresses from reaching ExTwitter. Original story below.

It appears that Elon has decided to take the Brazilian hornet’s nest he’d already kicked over the last few weeks and start slamming it with a baseball bat. It’s unlikely this will end well.

I’ve been pretty clear that I don’t think either Elon Musk or Brazil look very good coming out of the fight in which ExTwitter got blocked in Brazil. The process Brazil used, while legal in that country, has some deeply problematic components regarding due process and a lack of transparency. But, at the same time, Elon’s method of handling the situation also lacks both basic diplomacy and consistency.

Musk has made it clear that he’s fine bowing down to government orders to reveal information or to block users. Indeed, he’s insisted (stupidly, but whatever) that he thinks free speech means whatever the country’s laws allow:

Image

Just a few weeks ago, he reiterated that stance as he was fighting with Brazil.

Image

Of course, Elon was willing to obey similar orders from Turkey and India. It’s only when he disagrees, ideologically, with the government of a country, such as Brazil, when he suddenly decides to pretend to be a free speech martyr.

Even then, there were likely better ways to protest the secret court orders that ExTwitter was receiving. However, Elon decided to continually mock and poke at the judge, Alexandre de Moraes. He posted memes of de Moraes. He made fun of him. He called him a dictator. He released what he called “the Alexandre Files” to reveal at least some of the demands that were sent to the company (though often without context).

There are principled ways to stand up for free speech and push back against excessive government demands. But it does not appear that Elon cared to bother with such an approach.

That said, Brazil’s approach has been problematic as well. There are serious due process concerns about a single Supreme Court judge being able to sign orders to block content, even if it’s possible for those orders to be reviewed by a large segment of the court at a later date. Furthermore, allowing a single judge to order a block of an entire site and/or the jailing of a local representative and/or the seizing of another company’s assets all seem problematic.

The fact that de Moraes’ original order effectively banned VPNs in the Google/Apple app stores (even if that was quickly put on temporary hold) should at least give you a sense as to how this kind of power has a high likelihood of abuse.

However, now it’s being reported that ExTwitter quietly put its service behind Cloudflare’s CDN, enabling people in Brazil to access it again, at least for a little bit.

A news release from ABRINT explains how Musk was able to outfox the country’s ban allowing people to access the platform.

It says the X app was updated overnight and the new software started using IP address linked through Cloudfare, which “makes app blocking much more complicated”.

“Unlike the previous system, which used specific, blockable IPs, the new system uses dynamic IPs that change constantly,” the news release states. “Many of these IPs are shared with other legitimate services, such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services.”

The BBC says this is ExTwitter “outfoxing” Brazil, but it seems very unlikely to last very long.

The original order from de Moraes makes it pretty clear that all levels of infrastructure providers must stop Brazilian IP addresses from reaching ExTwitter’s services. I would imagine that, if it hasn’t already, Cloudflare will be quickly receiving a notification from Brazil’s Supreme Court that it needs to do something about this or face legal consequences.

I have no idea if Cloudflare has a legal representative in Brazil. However, that rep could face jail, since the Brazilian Supreme Court seems to enjoy putting tech company employees in jail. Alternatively, it could face fines or the nuclear option: banning all Cloudflare IPs in Brazil. That would create quite a mess for people in Brazil who want to use the internet, as a huge portion of the internet (including Techdirt) relies on Cloudflare for CDN services.

The most likely outcome is that either Cloudflare boots ExTwitter from its services or quickly works out a way to block traffic coming from Brazil from reaching the service.

Of course, this still isn’t great. I know some people who simply dislike Musk or ExTwitter will cheer on this result, but, again, consider what other countries are the ones that regularly ban apps and demand third party tech providers help them. It tends not to be the kinds of countries generally seen as big on freedoms: China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and more. Brazil has been big on freedom, and internet freedom specifically, over the years, so this situation isn’t great for anyone.

Either way, I trust that if Cloudflare does receive such a demand from the Brazilian Supreme Court, its response would be at least a bit more diplomatic than Elon posting AI-generated memes about de Moraes.

Filed Under: alexandre de moraes, brazil, cdn, elon musk
Companies: cloudflare, twitter, x

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Judge, Jury And Moderator

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.

Filed Under: brazil, content moderation, internet archive, oversight board, pavel durov, starlink, texas
Companies: meta, spacex, telegram, twitter, x

Elon Had SpaceX Defy Brazilian Supreme Court Order To Block ExTwitter, But Then Backed Down

from the will-he-won't-he dept

In the ongoing battle between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Court, it appears that Elon was the first to blink. At least a little bit.

What started to shape up as a new front in the battle, with Elon’s SpaceX defying the order to block X on its Starlink satellite internet service, crumbled on Tuesday as SpaceX announced it would comply, though under protest (some reports claim SpaceX missed the deadline to appeal the ruling, though). Of course, that was the adults at SpaceX saying that, and it’s always possible that Elon will look to overrule them. At the time of this posting, Elon hasn’t directly commented on SpaceX’s announcement yet.

Last week, we wrote about the still ongoing battle between the Brazilian Supreme Court and Elon Musk over his refusal to remove certain content (and share some information on users) from ExTwitter. It then morphed into a fight about having a “local representative” when Elon pulled ExTwitter out of Brazil entirely, after a threat was issued with the potential to jail local employees. On Friday, we wrote about the ban order issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

The initial ban ordered basically every level of the telecom/internet infrastructure stack to ban access to ExTwitter. That included, among other things, that Apple and Google had to block it from their app stores in Brazil, that ISPs in Brazil had to block access to ExTwitter and its app, and that internet backbone and telecom providers also had to block access to ExTwitter.

There were also two more controversial parts of the ban. The first part told Apple and Google that they had to also block access to VPNs that might allow users to get around the bans. A later part threatened massive fines on Brazilians caught getting around the ban by any means, including using a VPN. A few hours after the initial order was released, Moraes backed down on the first part, temporarily suspending the order that Apple and Google block VPNs, though the fine for users still stood. Many people incorrectly thought that part was rescinded as well.

On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld the overall ban. Moraes said that the ban on personal use for VPNs would only be enforced for users who sought to “engage in conduct that defrauds the court decision,” which seems somewhat broad and open to interpretation. One other judge wanted to limit the individual fines only to users who got around the ban and used it to post racist or fascist supporting content, but that request did not receive the necessary support from the other judges.

Still, there is an interesting element in all of this. Another of Elon’s offerings, Starlink from SpaceX, is one of those ISPs that would need to block access to ExTwitter in order to comply with the order. Given that Moraes had already started freezing SpaceX assets, it’s no surprise that Musk basically told Brazilian regulators he wasn’t going to abide by the blocking order either, according to the NY Times:

On Sunday, Starlink informed Brazil’s telecom agency, Anatel, that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink’s frozen assets, Anatel’s president, Carlos Baigorri, said in an interview broadcast by the Brazilian outlet Globo News.

Mr. Baigorri said he had received that response from Starlink’s lawyers. “Let’s wait and see if they formalize this in the records,” he said.

Mr. Baigorri said he had informed Justice Moraes “so that he can take the measures he deems appropriate.” Mr. Baigorri said his agency could revoke Starlink’s license to operate in Brazil, which would “hypothetically” prevent the company from offering connections to its Brazilian customers.

However, just a little while ago, Starlink announced that it was going to comply with the order, though it is doing so under protest. It posted to ExTwitter:

To our customers in Brazil (who may not be able to read this as a result of X being blocked by @alexandre):

The Starlink team is doing everything possible to keep you connected.

Following last week’s order from @alexandre that froze Starlink’s finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in Brazil, we immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets. Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil.

We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre’s recent orders violate the Brazilian constitution.

There’s at least a bit of irony here, given that Elon’s famous “sorry to be a free speech absolutist” line came in saying he would not block news sources “unless at gunpoint.”

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I guess he sees Brazil as holding a gun.

This came just a day after Elon posted wildly about why the US should seize Brazilian government assets in response to Brazil seizing Starlink assets. This was after Elon saw reports of the US seizing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s airplane.

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Of course, it is meaningless to declare that “Unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of 𝕏 and SpaceX, we will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too. Hope Lula enjoys flying commercial…” given that Elon is not in the government. However, if his preferred candidate, Donald Trump, wins, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an attempt to help his financial backer on this one.

Starlink represents an interesting leverage point in all of this. It has been used in Brazil for a few years now, including by some in the government. But, as NY Times’ Jack Nicas (who covers tech in Brazil) noted earlier this week, when it launched in Brazil, Elon pledged to hook up 19,000 Brazilian schools with Starlink.

Apparently that never actually happened. But it didn’t stop Elon from just retweeting someone claiming that it had happened.

Either way, this situation and Elon Musk’s vast empire make some of this stuff way more complicated than most any other comparable scenario.

It also seems unlikely to end here. Remember that the current fight is a follow-on to the fight back in April when ExTwitter at first refused to remove some content that Moraes demanded, then quietly backed down… only to then change its mind again later.

Indeed, there are reports coming out of Brazil as I finish this article saying that Moraes is ordering more Starlink seizures which could potentially impact users’ ability to even use the service at all. It’s unclear on the timing of that with regards to Starlink saying it would comply with the blocking. But since the seizures are more about punishing Musk for not complying with ExTwitter, rather than about Starlink itself, it seems likely that these will move forward.

Filed Under: alexandre de moraes, blocking, brazil, elon musk, seizing assets
Companies: spacex, twitter, x