Apparently Twitter/X did have such a representative and this judge froze her bank accounts and threatened to imprison her.
> “When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the post from X Global Government Affairs notes.
I'm no lawyer, but the claim is that the request made by the Brazilian judge doesn't comply with Brazil's own laws. Presumably if X (not Elon) has complied with other censorship requests they found the requests to be lawful.
It's not up to X/Musk to decide that though. If they feel that way, there are legal avenues to pursue. They should always comply with the court orders, then challenge them. Not doing so is breaking the law and should be punished as such.
That really depends on leverage. The Brazilian Supreme Court really has very little leverage over Twitter (or Musk directly).
Twitter has little to gain by complying with the judge's ban before challenging it in court, but they do have a lot to lose. It'd be a different story if Twitter was being challenged by the US Supreme Court, they have mhch more leverage to damage Twitter if they don't comply.
They have essentially lost all ad income driven by Brazilian users. I'd say that's quite a bit of leverage. Furthermore, SpaceX have had local assets frozen. That seems like some leverage to me. Starlink have now decided to comply with X blockage in the country [0] after Musk rattling his sabre saying they wouldn't. It _feels_ like there is at least some leverage.
> They have essentially lost all ad income driven by Brazilian users
This one, at least, isn't really leverage. If they did comply the ad revenue would be lost anyway. If Twitter does somehow win a legal challenge they can at least try to sue for lost ad revenue, they likely couldn't make that case if they chose to comply.
I'm not sure how they can legally go after SpaceX here. Definitely not claiming to know Brazilian law here, it just seems surprising that they could be roped in only for having the same founder/CEO. Unless I'm mistaken they aren't even sibling companies under a shared corporate parent.
> If they did comply the ad revenue would be lost anyway.
If they had complied, only a subset of Twitter accounts would have been removed from the website. All over 100 million Brazilian users would still be generating traffic to them and the ad revenue that comes with it. I think this is pretty large leverage.
> I'm not sure how they can legally go after SpaceX here.
> it just seems surprising that they could be roped in only for having the same founder/CEO.
From my understanding (which is developing along with the whole situation), even big names in Brazilian law are disputing this. So far I haven't seen anyone say the decision was illegal, but I have seen some questions being raised.
That said, my (very poor) understanding is that it's not because Musk is founder or CEO, but because he is the largest investor in both, exerts significant control over both, and essentially uses both in tandem in order to pursue his interests. Again in my very poor understanding, these factors combined made the judge rule the 2 companies more or less like one large financial group, giving him the ability to freeze one company's assets as insurance for the other's unpaid fines.
Pardon my lack of legalese or proper understanding and description of things. Hopefully this helps a bit on your own journey of understanding.
I also don’t want companies to have to have offices in every country where they operate.
X is big enough but it’s silly of Brazil to require a literal physical presence. They can serve whatever they need electronically to wherever X is these days.
It's not about serving them. They have already been served multiple times, refused to comply, got fined and refused to pay the fines. Pulling out their office was simply a means to avoid paying fines, that's all. There's no big motive there but cash.
One can argue about the politics of this all day. There are political views to be discussed about the morality of the requests to ban accounts versus the morality of keeping the accounts online, but the law is the law. If you want to operate on a certain country you need to abide by that country's laws, there aren't really any exceptions anywhere in the World.
Lots of platforms operate in Brazil without a legal representative, the country is actually very lax about that. There's no Substack or Medium office as far as I know, and I'm writing this comment on Hackernews without any issue. Generally, the legal representation is only required when someone takes legal action against the platform for some reason.
Obviously larger platforms like Twitter, Instagram and their likes have lots of legal actions in local courts. They also collect a shitload of ad revenue from local companies, and in both cases they are required to have a local representation. Twitter has laid-off all their engineering and marketing in Brazil when Musk bought it, and just recently decided to close down their legal and finance office to avoid paying the said fines. Whatever the political stand-off that brought them to this, there's no reasonable justification to stand with Twitter now.
"I don't aggree with your laws" is not a valid reason for a company to break these laws in any country, for any law.
> Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.
If you believe the law is immoral, then break the law and accept the consequences.
You are always morally responsible for your actions. The fact some of your actions may have been compelled by law does not absolve you. Nazis who were just following orders were still punished.
It may seem strange, at least to me, but the company Lumen Orbit (YCS24) [1] aims to offer data centers in space. If they, or another similar company, succeed in the future, it could change jurisdictional rules.
Why not just be glad they're taking a stand now? I'm so confused.
Edit: also looking at the history here... They fought those bans too. I'm guessing, due to Indias importance to the IT industry, twitter was unable to pull out entirely, leaving their employees vulnerable if they didn't comply.
Not sure about turkey, but it looks like in this case, they are able to avoid censorship by pulling out entirely. Brazil is an inconsequential country.
The issue in Brazil, based on what I read, was that Twitter’s lawyers in Brazil and Elon believed that the requests being made violate Brazil’s constitution.
That's for the nations courts to decide and not Elon. It's just an excuse to support authoritarian governments that have no checks and balances in their constitutions at all.
That is not an argument in a nation of law. If twitter thinks this is unconstitutional in Brazil, then they can by all means sue! Courts are the institutions that rule whether that is true or not, not some billionaire with a bad day.
The judge threatened the company's legal representative with incarceration for a failure to comply, so Musk unappointed the company's legal representative.
The judge demands that Musk now appoint a legal representative, which Musk refuses to do.
Why would Musk appoint someone for the judge to incarcerate?
Brazil could attempt to ban the accounts somehow, they don't have jurisdiction to force Twitter to ban them. The whole play here is a game of chicken - "ban these accounts or we cut you off from the Brazilian user base"
Local law says censorship is unconstitutional. It goes out of its way to spell out that on top of censorship being unconstitutional, political censorship is especially unconstitutional. That means it's super mega ultra unconstitutional.
That's the whole point, you know. We think this supreme court judge is violating the constitution by doing things like ordering the censorship of "fake news". These were political accounts engaged in speech of a political nature. They cannot be censored.
What do you do when the guy who's supposed to interpret and apply the constitution starts blatantly violating it? I have no idea. People actually tried asking the brazilian military to intervene. This guy called that an antidemocratic act despite the fact not one soul voted for him. Called it a coup attempt. Then he put those people in a gulag.
PL 2630/2020, the proposed "fake news" law. Not approved, despite their unrelenting attempts at passing it with urgency. At least not yet. And certainly not before all this stuff began, which would be in 2019.
> They literally just approved a law against misinformation.
Huh? I searched for newly approved "fake news" laws but couldn't find any new information. Why don't you cite some?
There is no problem with requiring X to appoint local representatives. This has nothing to do with that.
Follow the chain of events.
The "fake news" inquisition started when some magazine ran a damning article on one of these judges.
In retaliation to that, they granted themselves extensive powers. They gave themselves the right to investigate, prosecute, judge, sentence and punish crimes against themselves.
Then comes the 2022 election. These judges become openly partisan. They start censoring Bolsonaro supporters for "fake news". This is what I claim is unconstitutional.
Obviously, Bolsonaro was not reelected. These judges are very happy about that. They're so happy they go to public events and showboat about being the ones who personally defeated Bolsonaro.
Fast forward to today. The censorship continues. They keep ordering X to ban accounts. Which led to it pulling out of the country. Which led to it getting blocked due to not having a local legal representative. Which led to everything we are witnessing in real time right now.
There is no problem with requiring local legal representation. The problem is with the B point in your timeline. They shouldn't be "asking" (actually ordering) the removal of accounts for "misinformation" at all. That is political censorship and it is unconstitutional.
Therefore everything that happened after B, should not have happened at all.
Big Tech representatives have been jailed for failing to comply with judge orders. I remember those news... They were told to do things like wipe out a woman's nude pictures off of search results if not the entire internet. Judges even used their success against them. What do you mean it's hard? You're Google right? Maybe use your smart people and your trillions to figure out a way to comply?
