Posted on 08/31/2024 8:51:40 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
The world’s internet regulators are no longer playing around.
Two days after France indicted Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on a range of charges, Brazil on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it defied a mandate to designate a legal representative in the country. While the details differ in important ways, both cases involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls who thumbed their noses at authorities perhaps one too many times.
The crackdowns, which come months after the United States passed a law that could lead to the banning of TikTok, herald the end of an era. Not the social media era, which is still going strong. But the era in which tech titans enjoyed free rein to shape the online world — and a presumption of immunity from real-world consequences.
While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy. Politicians and regulators recognized there was bad stuff on the internet, decried it and sought ways to mitigate it. But banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did.
Now, for better or worse, it is.
“The pendulum has swung from public discourse being all about ‘internet as a tool for freedom’ to ‘internet as a threat,’” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and a former Google lawyer. “So there are far fewer other governments, media, civil society, etc., taking the platforms’ side.”
Does that represent an ominous turn toward repression, or a long-overdue reassertion of the rule of law in the...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
...Does that represent an ominous turn toward repression, or a long-overdue reassertion of the rule of law in the digital realm? The answer might depend on one’s politics.
An accidental admission that it's all about suppressing the opposition's political speech.
Those that do so are no longer "liberal democracies". They are authoritarian or totalitarian leaning autocracies.
If the outlook depends on your politics, the action is obviously political.
Musk had a legal representative in Brazil but the judiciary shut down her bank accounts and other means of making a living.
So the WaPo missed a cut to get it right with Musk.
I noticed that too.
collectivism is on the march
collectivism is a monopoly
it cannot allow competition
Goose-stepping little POS.
Apparently the leadership and staff of the Post are either too self-absorbed or too stupid to see how far from even faintly resembling 'democracy' what they support is. What they are pushing is very, very dangerous to the world.
They're all leftist oligarchies now. The next step is communism (or Islamism for some countries like the UK).
Right now the U.S. is ruled under a leftist oligarchy. Joe Biden (or Kamala Harris is a figurehead)
Argentina was ruled under a leftist oligarchy for nearly 100 years aka Peronism. That is our likely destination.
regulators = authoritarian control freaks
Revenge of the fascists, not “regulators.”
The message is clear - “play ball” like Google and Meta (or Twitter pre-Musk) by allowing government censorship, and leftist political control of your website, and you’ll be permitted to keep your $$ billions.
Weird how the Postie gaslighter sWill Oremus didn't mention PedoInstagram ONCE in his hitpiece...
It isn't.
They don’t even hide behind the tissue fig leaf of ‘it’s for the children’ anymore.
When we wrote the Grundgesetz for West Germany in 1948-49, we modeled their civil liberties after ours - with one exception. That exception was that the Basic Law could not be changed by people voting or by lawmakers. And a special court was created with the unilateral power to ban speech, writing, singing, images, constitutional amendments, political figures and political parties, or anything that could return the NSDAP to power.
That was then. In 1948 there were millions of adult Germans who had voted the NSDAP into power, and who (plausibly) would do it again if allowed unrestricted civil liberties.
When East Germany was absorbed into West Germany, länder were required to subscribe to the Basic Law.
So far, so good.
Except now is now. The last person who could have legally joined the NSDAP on May 7, 1945 is now 97 years old.
But, like any government function, the special court has expanded its powers to attack "misinformation" and "hate speech", and as the supply of actual Nazis falls to zero, the demand for Nazis to repress has never been stronger.
Virtually all European states have adopted the powers conferred on the West German state in 1948-49, and don't doubt for a second that this poor Telegram guy is a target for that reason - and if they get him, Elon Musk, RFK jr, and our next President will all be attacked this way.
And many American liberals including high-achieving legal scholars are pushing "hate speech" and "misinformation" exceptions to our First Amendment. And if things break the wrong way, you can bet they will get those exceptions.
The authoritarian‘s at the same time or screwing with and awakened people around the world. Or maybe social media will be rain down and we will have eight or 10 decades of Soviet style repression. And or maybe the authoritarian‘s will pay a price they don’t anticipate and freedom will research. Billionaires didn’t become billionaires by getting easily rolled. Eventually the authoritarians will have to be overthrown, the police and military support them, so that means all of those will have to be overcome. By the way, I heard Brazil is a very violent country… street crime happens you know. Especially when you’ve pissed off a billionaire autistic guy.
“ both cases involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls who thumbed their noses at authorities perhaps one too many times.”
Interesting way to phrase things.
Wow... That’s rich coming from the Washington Post.
They’ll be squealing like a pig when Trump gets back in office and demanding their right to “free speech”
The certain implication that “democratic governments” are not necessarily free societies stands out.
democracy is being redefined to mean socialism at best
Thank God we’re a republic
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