> I'm still trying to understand what exactly is the straw that broke the camel's back for Musk

Moraes finding Starlink and Twitter under common control, which they technically are, may have been it. The unspoken threat being sanctions on Tesla, Musk’s dominant source of liquidity and a levered position, both for sales and raw materials exports.

More than its direct effects, the contagion risks of that strategy could constrain Musk if e.g. the EU played hardball.

Elon has been very clear about this: he follows the laws of each country. That is, if the government wants to restrict free speech, they must pass laws (or the equivalent in court) to do so and Twitter will follow their laws.

If their government wants to act in contrast to its own laws, then Elon will fight them.

He’s not trying to uphold some universal free speech liberty.

It's pretty simple; he doesn't really have a chance against strong, authoritarianism governments which doesn't accept any sort of challenges so he typically complies to them without any questions. In Brazil, He initially seem to think that there's a good chance to win if he escalates it to a political fight but now he's slowly realizing that there's no solid political ground for him (especially as a foreigner) when he crossed the line against the Supreme Court, the highest constitutional authority.

I think Musk is just selective in the causes he finds himself wanting to be a free speech warrior for.

Free speech for me and mine, all others pay cash

It's because the ones in trouble are right wing extremists. He's extremely consistent in his support and decisions on this.

> but it is also impossible to believe that Musk is some free speech warrior given how readily he complies with the demands of countries like Turkey and India

He didn't give up readily, those countries passed laws and even then Twitter sued the Indian government.

"India calls X a 'habitual non-compliant platform'" https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66805347

People only think he gave up readily in India because of the all the echo chamber comments repeating misinformation to make Musk look bad.

> I'm still trying to understand what exactly is the straw that broke the camel's back for Musk. Was it that he just didn't like his representation being allegedly threatened with jail

He felt that the judge's secret orders weren't lawful in Brazil, unlike in other countries.

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Have you tried thinking of his actions through a more than black and white perspective, from a military strategic perspective? E.g. Is it better for all Brazilians if there's a platform they are all already organized/organizing on to still have access to it, or none of them have access to it?

This is an interesting thought. If a completely different thing had happened then the conversation might be different. People are too often focused on what did happen and miss the importance of things that did not happen at all

100% just look at Lula's acceptance of the Venezuelan elections, is Brazil doing anything to clamp down on far left support for Venezuela?

Because he wouldn't have fought it?

This is a not very useful breakdown of the political situation. There is only one thing that is required to have a democracy, and that is the peaceful transition of power. And that requires that people have to accept the results of elections. Elections don't have to be fair. They don't have to be free from corruption. They don't have to be accurate, lord knows the elections in the United States are horribly skewed due to the fact that we have such low voter turnout. If you wanted to accurately assess who would be the best elected official in a given position you could do a lot better by just getting a board of statisticians and sampling the hell out of your electorate. But the thing that is important is that we go through a process, that process terminates, and we go with whatever it says the winner was. If it was a bad choice c'est la vie I'll see you again next election and if there was shady shit that happened, we can address that in the interim.

I don't give a shit what the far right views on like immigration or abortion or taxes are. I can disagree with them, but that's not like an existential threat to the country. What is in the US is the fact that we have a candidate for president who was still not conceded his loss in the 2020 election and is running again on the same premise that the elections are rigged. Like the bar is so low here.

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This is pretty accurate. We have some proposals in development for 2 and 3 but it won't be soon. 1 and 4 are straightforward. The rest take QoL hours. Probably an unnamed 5th bullet point is finding experience novelty which make the other 4 less important. We did novel things with algorithms and moderation, but we'd be smart to do novel things with the core product loop.

> No way to bookmark posts yet. This should be easy to implement.

Seems to be doable? Right-click & copy link on the time of a post, e.g. https://bsky.app/profile/brainnotonyet.bsky.social/post/3l4o...

It may be of note that Schenck was used by the government to argue that speech exhorting people to burn their draft cards was not protected speech. Spare me the "clear and present danger to democracy" nonsense.

ETA: It has also been essentially superseded in the US. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.

I don't know much about the Brazil case, but I think it's pretty clear it's not about "free speech" because he seems to treat countries very differently, depending on his personal opinion of the government in power (and who knows about any non-public deals).

Here's one article about blocking Modi critics in India: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...

Also worth noting that Twitter's terms of use themselves also prohibit the very same sort of content that motivated the Supreme Court order.

How was it a clear and present danger? I don’t see it.

If we’d considered subversive opinions clear and present danger and it was held up in court we may not have had a civil rights movement or a women’s suffrage movement, etc.

It’s like they like protests unless they disagree with the protests and then they label them threats to democracy.

Not true. It's like if a US Supreme Court justice got appointed the internet czar and started investigating, prosecuting and taking down things on the internet in secret without checks and balances.

That would never fly in the US.

Here's from an earlier comment:

Here's a good explanation of how the Brazilian Supreme Court did a creative and novel interpretation of the law to give itself powers to investigate and regulate the internet without law enforcement or legislative/executive involvement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39966382

That's not enforcing the law.

As documented by the New York Times, the first thing the judge did after getting powers to censor was to call a Brazilian magazine article about the person that gave him those powers 'fake news' and got it removed. It later turned out that article was true so he had egg on his face and had to retract his censorship order.

> To run the investigation, Mr. Toffoli tapped Mr. Moraes, 53, an intense former federal justice minister and constitutional law professor who had joined the court in 2017.

> In his first action, Mr. Moraes ordered a Brazilian magazine, Crusoé, to remove an online article that showed links between Mr. Toffoli and a corruption investigation. Mr. Moraes called it “fake news.”

> Mr. Moraes later lifted the order after legal documents proved the article was accurate.

NYTimes article: https://archive.is/plQFT

How is the above 'clear and present danger' ? It's clear cut corruption.

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> De Moraes argued (correctly, IMO) that Musk's non-compliance was a "clear and present danger" to Brazilian democracy.

Democracy is when the government censors free speech, got it.

Gag orders and compelled speech.

wonder why a known corrupt judge doesn't want to make orders in his name. And is hiding rulings from those subject to the rulings.

Clearly improper.

Ad hominem is ad hominem even if you think it's clever.

> anti-“imperialist west” America helped install the Brazilian military dictatorship, helped to train them in the use of torture against it's civilian population. You either are ignorant in not knowing the role the US has played around the world, in which case you need to be educated, or you support it, in which case you need to be fought.

> he’s still legally beholden to investors

Unless you have seen the contracts signed you can't know that. Xitter is no longer a public company and as a private company has absolutely no such requirement.

While Burwell v. Hobby Lobby might be controversial it is still remarkable coming from such a high court to include this:

> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so.

Anti imperialist but if they had any chance they’d migrate to the great satan… oh people, such hypocrites.

> anti-“imperialist west” (cough cough America) sentiment

There's a difference between fringe rhetoric and actions.

The only countries more pro-American than Brazil in polls are America and India [0], and ironically, the Anti-American rate is higher in America than in Brazil (where there's a large neutral/indifferent cohort in polls). In general, pro-American sentiment is somewhere between 63-73% in Brazil [0][1]

Most political "anti-American" rhetoric in Brazil is due to agrarian protectionism - the same as India - as regional BigAg are major political player in both countries.

Most Brazilians in the diaspora who can immigrate will immigrate to the US.

American companies and Brazilian companies have very close relations with each other (ever had a Budwesier, Blue Moon, Burger King, or Popeye's? They're majority owned by Brazilian PE funds).

Finally, most of the underlying support for Lula comes from his "Bolsa Familia" program in the 2000s.

This lie of Brazilian or Indian anti-Americanism only went into overdrive on Reddit and then HN because of their indifference to the Russia-Ukraine war, as they have investments in both sides.

[0] - https://pro.morningconsult.com/articles/united-states-favora...

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/11/06/comparing-view...

> He still gets to shout about being silenced by evil socialist Brazil, even if he’s capitulated.

Socialist? This victim narrative is bizarre. There is almost no one outside of Brazil who supports what Moraes is doing, most people inside Brazil are against it (even on the face of it, Lula only won by a hair and half of the population are Bolsonaristas, and a significant number of the rest have free speech as a principle), and more than twice as many Senators in Brazil are for impeachment than are against*.

Pretending that this is some crusade by the evil right wing of the world directed by their leader Elon Musk against the socialism is bizarre, bad faith, and encouraged by anyone who supports the ban.

> He still gets to shout about being silenced by evil socialist Brazil, even if he’s capitulated.

Brazil didn't silence Musk, who can speak and be heard wherever he wants, whenever he wants. Brazil silenced Brazilians, and cut them off from the world. Musk is just some dickhead whose business has been going extremely well over the past decade or two, and is not the world representative of free speech. He's a pretense whose use by antidemocratic forces almost managed the achievement of banning all VPN usage in Brazil.

I wonder who is going to get the contract to build the Great Brazilian Firewall, seeing as the twitter ban was spotty and VPNs were still a way around it? Will it be a US company?

[*] https://veja.abril.com.br/coluna/marcela-rahal/qual-placar-s...

> the situation that arose was that the government was requesting action that went against the laws of the same country

There is no jurisdiction in which blowing off a court is a legitimate reaction to perceived lawlessness. Or more accurately, there is no jurisdiction where doing so doesn’t legitimately bring down on you the full force of the state. To do anything else is to cede the rule of law.

bs, doxxing campaign happening in twitter against government officers is not freespech