Every time Americans complain about low democracy in 3rd World countries there is a standard reaction: people from those countries get infuriated because Americans demand standards that they rarely hold. This is another one of those situations.
What the Brazilian courts are doing is persecuting the people who tried to do the equivalent of what those MAGA idiots did on January 6th. The "censorship" imposed by the Brazilian courts is not very different from the gag orders that American judges routinely impose on Trump.
Regardless of Musk's tantrums and throwing fits, Brazil is not a banana republic at the service of American economic interests.
So, here's a standard 3rd World answer: "Mind your business, gringo".
Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro recently attempted a coup d'etat to overthrow Brazilian democracy.
De Moraes is just doing his work: cracking down on him and other authoritarians who used platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter to conspire against democracy.
De Moraes is not the only judge in Brazil and doesn't have absolute power. For good or for bad the country lives under the rule of the law.
Don't trust internet influencers to know better than law professionals.
Let's imagine, hypothetically of course, that an American judge would apply a gag order on Donald Trump for threatening law professionals. Would that gag order be a threat to American democracy and freedom of speach?
Oh I'm sure the americans will quickly get sick of this unelected brazilian judge, a literal nobody from some barbaric communist country, thinking he can whimsically censor and fine their corporations. In fact I'm counting on it. I hope this guy pisses the americans off so much they actually apply sanctions to my own country.
Not the first time he does it either. Last year Google engaged in a little campaign against their proposed "fake news" law, they just added a little link to their home page. These judges censored Google: take it down or face totally arbitrary fines of about 200kUSD per hour.
They essentially threatened to steal from the american economy an average software developer's yearly salary every hour if their demands were not met. Their unconstitutional demands, by the way. Brazilian constitution says censorship is illegal. And these are the guys whose literal job is to apply that constitution.
Think about it. Google could have hired one person from here for every hour of "disobedience". Doesn't that piss you off? I hope it does. I hope it gets someone to write something to their representatives.
I don't know what the alternative is for the US matters. That's for US citizens to decide. Personally I don't believe there was any fraud in the US elections.
I know about my own country. And what happened here is this: they saw what Trump did and were seriously alarmed. In order to stop our Trump equivalent from winning, the supreme court basically staged its own silent revolution.
They gave themselves the power to do whatever they wanted. Then they implemented censorship, unheard of in Brazil since the military dictatorship of the 20th century. Blatantly unconstitutional censorship. Then they went to public events to brag about all of it. How would you feel if an unelected judge censored Trump and then publicly bragged about how he defeated Trumpism?
Smash a democratic institution? This is not a democracy. Unelected judges are running this country. They tried to pass "anti-fake news" censorship laws, Google even campaigned against it and got arbitrarily fined by these judges. The law was rejected. Then about a week ago they rammed the law through anyway via "electoral court resolutions". They determine what's fake, of course. Literal ministry of truth. They regulated AI too.
What do you do when your supreme court seizes power like this? What do you do when the guys who are supposed to enforce the constitution start shitting on it? The police obeys their "court orders". Do you see the point I'm making? They're arresting and persecuting everyone. People who protested this got worse sentences than murderers, rapists, drug traffickers.
Seriously doubt there will be any kind of civil war. Unlike the US, nobody here is willing to die over this cursed, corrupted land. The only solution for Brazil is the airport, as they say. Who knows though, maybe our current "president" will anger the israelis so much with his palestinian support they will nuke Brasília off the map. I mean, this guy is a communist so out of touch he publicly accused the jewish nation of holocausting the palestinians.
> The worst part is how people are fine with it. If you go to r/Brasil you'll see endless mobs cheering the supreme court.
Yeah it's disgusting, it seriously makes me sick. It's literally written in the constitution that censorship is illegal, especially that of a political nature. Yet the judge-kings censored their political enemies. And people cheered them on. They even made a public spectacle out of it. In other countries, they at least keep their corruption under wraps because they're afraid of the consequences. Here, they do it openly. They rub it in your face and dare you to do something about it. And people love it because the target is someone they don't like. They think the dictator is on their side.
The portuguese are not immune from brazilian persecution unfortunately. Couple months ago the polícia federal detained a portuguese citizen and journalist who visited Brazil to cover Bolsonaro's latest public rally. Looks like brazilian police was keeping tabs on this guy due to incredibly illegal opinions such as "Brazil is a judiciary dictatorship". Apparently they think it's illegal for the portuguese to hold wrong opinions too. Maybe they'll go back home and ruin Brazil's stellar international reputation?
Suffice it to say my own parents who lived through an actual military dictatorship approached me and asked me to stop commenting on things online because they're afraid I might get arrested. I actually wonder if one day dang is gonna get some letter from the brazilian government because of my comments.
> Do most people agree with what's going on? Are they uninformed like in Portugal? Is it a loud internet minority thing?
Can't say for certain. Whatever I say will be colored by my horrible experiences trying to deal with all this stuff. HN is actually the only place where I feel free enough to speak my mind and even here I run into some incredibly misinformed people. I've had to explain to other brazilians here that Lula is a self-admitted communist. People think I'm trolling them or something. It borders on gaslighting.
I'll just take your word for it. Like I said, I don't object to the accusations levied against Trump. Truth is I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the Trump stuff. Keeping up with this circus right here is hard enough already. So I'll just refrain from commenting on that matter.
This is not good for Brazil at all. And it's not because they got rid of Bolsonaro, it's because of the blatantly unconstitutional methods they used to do it. You seem to be under the impression Brazil is a democracy. It's in fact some sort of judicial dictatorship. In 2019 or so the supreme court more or less granted itself whatever powers it needed to do anything it wanted. And not a single one of these judges is elected by the brazilian people.
Bolsonaro wasn't banned from office for election tampering or whatever. He was banned from office for wrongthink. The fucking judge said the voting machines are perfect and unquestionable. He questioned them. They literally hung him over the perfectly coherent criticism he levied against the machines. They could have chosen any of the incredibly stupid things he said or did over the years and they chose that. Obviously they're going to find literally any reason to incarcerate him, whatever sticks. It's only a matter of time.
> WhatsApp might have the HN crowd sympathy on this
Not mine. But Brazilian courts, with their over-arching powers, have even less sympathy; Brazilian bureaucracy, with their disregard for individual freedom, have even less sympathy; and lawmakers, with their disdain for those without as much command of the laws, the least of all my sympathy. That someone is not doing their every bidding - oh, I'm sorry, not treating them "the proper way" - is something that must be hard to muster. I guess their contempt made them blind to what makes sense and what doesn't.
Brazil doesn't get a free pass in something no one else in the civilized world is asking for.
Yes, the Brazilian legal system is based on civil law and the US one is based on common law, they work differently for example.
This is not the first decision against Google in this election and will probably result in nothing for Google and their president and workers, I have a couple of friends working in Google Brazil and life is the same as before, there's no police in the door of their building harassing them, if everything else fails he could appeal to the Supreme Federal Court who judges matters of constitutional issues, including free speech and complication involving this basic right.
Brazil does not have free speech as in the US, the legislation is almost the same that exist in France and a couple of other European countries for example, you cannot open a website containing hate speech, hosting neo-nazi websites is illegal in Brazil, hosting terrorism related websites is illegal in Brazil, the list follows, I prefer this way although I see value in the American system.
Following HN for such a long time I saw a couple of comments about how the legal system in the US also sucks and how the legal system there is a mess, nothing different from, people here in São Paulo generally idolizes the American criminal law and how it's easy to put people in jail for long times or even applying capital punishment, which does not exist in Brazil, with a exception in military justice in times of war, and yet I saw more than one discussion of how this same system in the US sucks right here on HN some months ago.
There's a point in the last paragraph, why are you generalizing? Are you a expert in comparative international law? If not I do not see how your opinion matters or how your last paragraph is valid, I used to be a grad student in the US I got the impression that Americans are over litigious and that the justice system generally benefits the rich who can pay better lawyers, not much different from here in Brazil, but that is just pure personal experience, I'm not a lawyer, I am a statistician. Must I say then that the US judicial system is corrupt? I don't think so, personally I would love to live in a world where judges are not necessary but we know that this won't happen.
And by the way in Brazil a judge is employed by the state not by a government.
Many other countries also do not have free-speech in the strict sense that the US guarantees in its Constitution. For example, in Germany one cannot protest in favor of neo-nazis, and in South Korea one cannot praise the North Korean regime. In the US any kind of speech is allowed, except for rare libel cases (which are extremely difficult to prove in court).
None of that invalidates President Dilma's point. I am actually the first one to criticize Brazil's lack of democracy, for example in the favelas (which are areas controlled by the drug traffickers and not by the state, and thus without real democracy), but in the international sphere she is absolutely right to raise the issue, as Brazil is an US ally and there was no reasonable explanation for the espionage whatsoever, especially to top-level officials. Furthermore, Petrobras is a oil exploration company -- This is effectively industrial espionage.
I am. Brazil is unfortunately under a judiciary dictatorship since 2019, when a news magazine was censored for publishing an article about how one of the supreme court justices was linked to the county’s largest corruption scheme [1].
After this, the so called “Fake News Inquiry” was established illegally (some reasons for its illegality are described in [2] but there are books written on the matter [3].
Its been going downhill since then, with people being held in prison for two years now without accusation and with their lawyers having no access to court documents.
Elon is allowing people outside Brazil to finally be aware what’s going on here and for that he should be commended.
I'm aware of the legal distinctions (I'm an attorney)... it was my lament that America in 2023 protects commercial enterprise against false reviews while the very foundations of American democracy are crushed by coordinated lies by politicians.
I am from Brazil, at least you don't have "Electoral Judges" that will happily fuck with the elections and ignore constitution to make sure their preferred candidate win.
The Electoral Judges in Brazil, are censoring actual facts, because despite being facts, they consider it "misinformation", it go so bad that a former supreme court judge of ours got censored for explaining something technical... Despite the fact our constitution explicitly bans any form of censorship. (ironically, as defense against US... our constitution promotes free speech to prevent CIA from subverting the country again).
It's generous of you to assume we're living in a democracy right now. We're actually under a judiciary dictatorship. As far as I'm concerned, democracy ended in Brazil when openly and proudly biased judges started disproportionally censoring Bolsonaro and his supporters before, during and after the election over "fake news". This continues to this day, it's happening right now. Surely a person from a nation founded on the principles of freedom of speech would understand how tyrannical you have to be to assume the role of ministry of truth so you can silence others based on what you believe is false. I witnessed them ban a documentary before it was even released without even watching it. Do you call this a democracy?
I don't blame them for attacking Brasília. They are tired of this corruption and literally don't know what else to do. I watched them get on their knees and beg the armed forces to do something, anything for over two months straight. If they must live under a dictatorship, they want a military one which they could at least respect, not this corrupt communist faux-democracy.
I agree completely and I've said that here on HN many times even despite downvotes. The censorship here began with last year's elections and has only been ramping up since then. The government wants what it wants and it will corrupt, destroy or silence anyone who opposes them. We're living under some sort of quasi-communist judiciary dictatorship. It sickens me to my soul to hear the word "democracy" come out of these people's mouths. Even North Korea calls itself a democracy...
> the court can just ban all the others for misinformation and give power to the party they agree with
That's exactly what they're doing. They've removed from office and made ineligible politicians over "disinformation". They accuse their opponents of the crime of "fake news" and then deplatform them. These all powerful judges who never received a single vote and are aligned with the ruling party.
I wonder if one of these days dang's gonna get a message from these fucking people because of my posts.
I’m seeing problems, but nothing rising to illegitimacy. We have a South African American billionaire essentially telling the top court of South America’s largest nation to go fuck itself.
I do believe in general principles of free speech—Musk was right in standing up to Turkey. But I don’t see a good-faith effort to work with Brazil’s legal and political system on this, versus unilaterally declaring its high court illegitimate.
Your bias is really showing. Brazilians don't have far fewer freedoms than Americans, in fact I'd say some of the freedoms brazilians enjoy are far more important than those in the US.
That doesn't mean Brazil is perfect, it's certainly not. It's a country with a lot of problems, but to say it is authoritarian is just straight-up false.
This is just a small list, there are many more examples if you bother to look for them.
It is hard to discuss about it, because out of Brazil, they are trying to create a parallel with the US Capitol attacking and then make things fit the rhetoric that Bolsonaro is the Latin version from Trump, which is just wrong in all together, but it doesn't matter now, and internally, everyone fears to be censored, arrested or fined by the Supreme Court which is ruling as Kings and Queens.
What the Brazilian courts are doing is persecuting the people who tried to do the equivalent of what those MAGA idiots did on January 6th. The "censorship" imposed by the Brazilian courts is not very different from the gag orders that American judges routinely impose on Trump.
Regardless of Musk's tantrums and throwing fits, Brazil is not a banana republic at the service of American economic interests.
So, here's a standard 3rd World answer: "Mind your business, gringo".
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