A Brazilian Supreme Court panel has unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X nationwide.
Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?
If so, what’s the substantive difference?
If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?
Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.
That’s a nice hypothetical but the facts of this case are much simpler. Would you agree that a country is sovereign, and entitled to write its own laws? Would you agree that a company has to abide by a country’s laws if it wants to operate there? Even an American company? Even if it is owned by a billionaire celebrity?
I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)
So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.
And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.
I don’t understand your statement, printing Nazi propaganda is a crime so yeah it will be shutdown for committing a crime, doesn’t matter if in the odds day they are printing school books.
And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.
It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.
People can say whatever they want but they will suffer the consequences of it, you can not make death threats to people, you can not make defamation like in the case of the female Olympic athlete. If the consequences for these acts are only monetary so the law only works for poor people.
To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It’s a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.
Except the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter isn’t being “shut down”, it’s being stopped at the Brazilian border. This actually happens all the time with print publications in many countries that don’t take Free Speech to toxic extremes—they get confiscated at the border by Customs officials. It’s less common these days than it used to be, but I’d bet that there are still instances of fringe porn and unapologetic Nazi propaganda being seized.
X-Twitter is free to go about its business in the country in which it’s based and in any other country where it hasn’t been banned, just not in Brazil, until and unless it decides to comply with the courts there. Which it is free to do at any time.
I can see both sides on this one I think?
Out of curiosity, would you feel differently about this if it had been a print newsletter or physical book publisher that was printing Nazi propaganda that got shutdown because they refused to stop printing Nazi propaganda?
If so, what’s the substantive difference? If not, are you affirming banning people from publishing books based on ideological grounds?
Obviously banning books is bad, but obviously Nazis are bad, and that’s a hard square to circle.
That’s a nice hypothetical but the facts of this case are much simpler. Would you agree that a country is sovereign, and entitled to write its own laws? Would you agree that a company has to abide by a country’s laws if it wants to operate there? Even an American company? Even if it is owned by a billionaire celebrity?
I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)
So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.
And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.
I don’t understand your statement, printing Nazi propaganda is a crime so yeah it will be shutdown for committing a crime, doesn’t matter if in the odds day they are printing school books.
Printing Nazi propaganda isn’t illegal in the US.
And I realize this isn’t in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn’t be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.
It’s the old, “I don’t agree with anything that man says, but I’ll defend to the death his right to say it,” thing.
Thank god is not the US.
People can say whatever they want but they will suffer the consequences of it, you can not make death threats to people, you can not make defamation like in the case of the female Olympic athlete. If the consequences for these acts are only monetary so the law only works for poor people.
To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It’s a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.
Except the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter isn’t being “shut down”, it’s being stopped at the Brazilian border. This actually happens all the time with print publications in many countries that don’t take Free Speech to toxic extremes—they get confiscated at the border by Customs officials. It’s less common these days than it used to be, but I’d bet that there are still instances of fringe porn and unapologetic Nazi propaganda being seized.
X-Twitter is free to go about its business in the country in which it’s based and in any other country where it hasn’t been banned, just not in Brazil, until and unless it decides to comply with the courts there. Which it is free to do at any time.