Elon Musk’s đť•Ź has been reinstated in Brazil, after having complied with all government demands, including paying millions in fines—though the restoration of đť•Ź in Brazil was delayed a week, the government apparently waiting until after the Oct 6th elections there. The platform has been banned in Brazil—the sixth most populous country in the world—since August 30th.
Many are celebrating the restoration as a victory for free speech—but it’s actually a victory for authoritarian states around the world, because in order to resume business in Brazil, đť•Ź was forced to comply with every government demand, including banning all accounts that the government mandates—which included accounts of elected officials, aka political opponents—and paying a huge fine.
And if that’s not bad enough, the Brazilian government also threatened to fine its citizens $9,000 per day—more than the Brazilian median annual income!—if they are caught using a VPN to try to access the đť•Ź platform while it was banned, as well as threatening to arrest people employed with đť•Ź, (including its lawyers), and also began seizing the assets and freezing the bank accounts of Starlink, a completely unrelated company also owned by Musk, in order to force compliance.
All these actions are obviously not promoting freedom of speech, but tyrannical overreach by the state, on what’s becoming a global scale.
For example, Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram App, was recently arrested in France for not satisfactorily complying with the government’s censorship and moderation demands, and the free-speech video platform Rumble had to shut down in Brazil and France due to their refusal to comply with those government’s censorship demands, and even the U.S. government threatened to ban TikTok for allowing pro-Palestine/Anti-Israel posts, as well many other similar actions being taken by other governments, as conveyed in the video below.
And the trend is worsening with time.
In the following System Update video, Glenn Greenwald conveys the dangerous precedent being set by these events.
In it, Greenwald summarizes with this warning:
“So I hope what you’re seeing here is this very visible, rapidly worsening, and very dangerous trend, where governments are tired of pressuring social media companies to censor. They’re now using force to do so. . .and now you see every one of these other countries banning social media companies until and unless they capitulate and promise to obey the state’s orders about the kind of content that can and cannot be permitted on the platform. If you believe a free internet and the ability to use the internet to speak freely is a high value, there are few things more dangerous than this trend.”
Worth a watch:
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