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Brazil Blocks X After Musk Ignores Court Orders
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Fuck Musk and everything, but Xitter has traditionally been a very powerful tool for the masses in impoverished countries to get the word out.
I know Brazil isn't exactly a 3rd world country, but it's not exactly the most stable of governments, either. They just recently had a Jan 6th kind of coup attempt when bolsonaros lost.
I hesitate to consider this a net good, despite hating Musk.
The usefulness of Twitter ended when Musk took over. This is absolutely a new positive thing, as it’s better to use alternatives as opposed to the fascist website. There are lots of communication alternatives available, so it’s not like people won’t have a way to communicate.
The point of guerilla style social media activism that exposes oppression, is to reach as many eyes as possible.
Are there alternatives? Sure. But do they reach anywhere near the same size of an audience? Unless I'm extremely out of touch (I do not consume that kind of social media directly), then it's not even remotely close.
Maybe BlueSky is bigger than I think it is, but I rarely ever hear about it outside of very niche circles (like lemmy).
My point stands. Despite all the mishandling of Xitter, it's still a powerful tool to get grassroots news out for things like protests, oppression. The platform is certainly worse than it was before Musk, but it's still a decent tool for this specific usecase.
You use a different network tool after the last one is compromised. Usefulness matters now and in the future, not in the past.
Ok. Agreed.
But that doesn't change the fact that Xitter is still number 1 by a large margin, unless I'm mistaken. And since no one here even seems to be disputing that, it seems we agree on that point.
So it's the other point that seems to be what is controversial. That, even with all the bad shit Musk has done - maliciously gaming the algorithm so these things won't rise naturally like they did before, actively banning "woke" accounts, etc.
Even with all these bad changes, Xitter is still the best way to get your crisis message to the masses, especially outside your country.
You can argue about idealistic things like "it won't change until people are forced to look elsewhere", but that's not a luxury that people in crisis have.
And that's exactly why I think this is more negative than positive. It takes away the most powerful tool available at getting your reality out of a war zone, out of dictator controlled media bubbles, etc, so that outside observers can get a glimpse at what's really going on.
And until you have a real contender for a replacement that's gaining massive traction, "not perfect" is a luxury of armchair activists.
When the need arises people will use whatever works best for their purposes. I doubt it will be Twitter again, but who knows.
The good thing about uprisings is you you can't predict how it'll spring up. That's part of what makes them successful.
You're better off focusing on a different platform though.
Guerrilla style social media activism suffers when the platform in question actively bans for reporting facts or algorithmically hides progressive voices and trends.
It also benefits the very fascists we are attempting to address by driving engagement on their platform. But no group at this time can be sure that they won’t be banned, (or worse, get Twat by Elon and end up receiving death threats) tomorrow. It’s also very risky to rely on such a platform.
But more pragmatically, these groups won’t stop organizing. The general public will also be migrating from Deadbirdsite.They’ll all use the next best tool and still persist, so there’s no real disadvantage there. If the effort can’t exist outside of Twitter, it isn’t really trying.
There has been a huge spike in BlueSky use, and Lula is now active there.
You once could say the same about Facebook. Both it and X have been used to coordinate genocides.
It's almost as if it was the point all along
This whole thing started because right wing accounts were spreading misinformation and Moraes demanded they were taken down. Musk didn't comply and removed Twitter's legal representative here in order to not suffer the consequences.
While I think it's fair for Twitter to be taken down for that specific reason, the judge is also taking all vpn off google and apple which is incredibly dumb and a dangerous precedent. Lots of people use vpn to work or study. It's like banning a knife because it has the ability to hurt people. I hope they contest this one part at least.
Edit: they just went back on the decision to remove vpn, so it's all good. Hooray.
That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn't safe either.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk
Maybe a private, for-profit corporation run by a narcissistic billionaire shouldn't be relied on for such things.