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X goes offline in Brazil after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Brazilian here. This a controversial topic, so take what I say as an opinion.
Although Musk is a man child and a scumbag, he is right on this. He is not refusing to comply with local laws, he is refusing to comply with illegal, monocratic decisions from the supreme court.
It is not news that the supreme court had given themselves dictator-like powers. In this case, there is no law that mandates that a social network has to have legal representatives in the country, and there is no law that a social network has to censor specific person, unless they are commiting a crime, which of course require a investigation and the due legal process, all steps that the supreme court had ignored. Moreover, the supreme court is not persecution, so they can't just make this decision without being summoned.
They've been doing that for a while now, in the name of fighting "anti-democratic acts", which is just a faceless ghost. This is, again, based on no law whatsoever, so the supreme court had taken for themselves persecution and legislative powers, gravely hurting the separation of powers.
Disclaimer: I'm not right leaning, but I'm as libertarian as one can be
Law isn't defined just by legislation, it is also defined by case law. A judge's ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.
Now, I'm not saying this ruling is appropriate - I simply don't know enough about how it came to be. But if Brazil made laws about social media companies and then a judge made a ruling based on that law requiring social media companies have a representative, then that absolutely is valid law.
To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens. The EU made GDPR law (well, strictly speaking they made a directive, then member states make laws that must meet or exceed that directive), and then a judge interpreted that law and made it a requirement to have cookie splash screens. I would personally argue that the judge was trying to shove a square peg through a round hole there, when really he should have identified that data collection is in fact a secondary transaction hidden in the fine print (rather than an exchange of data for access to the service, this isn't how the deal is presented to the user; the service is offered free of charge but the fine print says your data is surrendered free of charge), and he should have made it such that users get paid for the data that's being collected. However, the judge's ruling stands as law now.
The GDPR is a regulation (that’s what the R stands for), not a directive. Directives must be transposed into national law by the member states, while regulations apply directly
Thanks, yet another reason why my example was a bit off hah.