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Brazil just banned X. Could other countries follow suit?
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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The Brazilian Internet Law (Marco Civil da Internet) says that the content to be removed via judicial intervention must be specified. It does not allow the blocking of entire accounts from a social media platform. In fact, Brazilian Constitution forbids this kind of censorship (Censura Prévia). The decision to block X nationwide is based on a series of decisions that blatantly violate Brazilian Law.
By the way, the dictator-judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Starlink's asset freeze before Starlink wouldn't comply with X blocking.
The part of the law that talks about content removal (Section 3, articles 18 to 21) does not say that only content can be removed nor that accounts can't be touched. Before Moraes, judges have ordered people to be locked out of certain social media, so there is precedent.
It's also important to note that freedom of speech ends the moment it becomes a crime. Whether said xitter accounts have been committing crimes, and which crimes, is a different discussion
Fighting crime is desirable, but within the limits of the law:
Brazilian Internet Civil Rights Framework
Art. 19. In order to ensure freedom of expression and prevent censorship, the internet application provider may only be held civilly liable for damages resulting from content generated by third parties if, after a specific court order, it fails to take steps to, within the scope and technical limits of its service and within the specified timeframe, make the content identified as infringing unavailable, except for legal provisions to the contrary.
§ 1º The court order referred to in the caput must contain, under penalty of nullity, clear and specific identification of the content identified as infringing, which allows the unequivocal location of the material.
Note that the legislator took the trouble to say right at the beginning that the intention is to prevent censorship. Few laws are written in such detail as to reinforce their guiding principles in the middle of the provisions. If the legislator went to this trouble, it is because the intention of avoiding censorship is fundamental to this law. If judges are ignoring the law, they're ignoring the will of the people.