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Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm not sure if this is a good or bad idea. But if I were Brazillian, I'd be immediately following all ~700 accounts (and probably unfollowing all 700 after the election).
Love or hate X, it deserves a massive hat tilt for its transparency here.
They banned it to have reality comply with Brazilian electoral law which is written so that every candidate has the same amount of airtime.
It is not the job of the judiciary to determine whether a law should or shouldn't exist, but to make sure all laws are correctly enforced. Remembering this fact isn't optional.
Said differently, arguments about such decisions should revolve around whether the law says what the courts say it does or whether it was applied correctly—not whether the law should exist.
I would certainly not, as it is most likely propagandists; these aren't interesting.
But either way, the purpose of this is to protect democracy, and by mentioning the very accounts, this could have a Streisand effect. That by itself is influencing the election, and Musk knows this. That is the purpose of his action. Musk does the same with regards to other democracies, such as AfD in Germany.
I couldn't think of a seasoned KGB commander with more totalitarian reasoning than what you are voicing. Not even the censors you are defending have anything against the public knowing which accounts are limited and why.
This to be fair is why the CIA had to move suitcases with money instead of bragging about it on Fox News...
I wonder how many normal people actually follow political accounts like this. I follow my local government because they sometimes tweet emergency info but I don’t follow candidates at all. I don’t follow political influencers either. It’s far too noisy.
DeepL:
>Starting August 16, Brazilian election law requires providers that use recommendation systems to exclude from their recommendations the official accounts of candidates registered with the Electoral Court and the posts from those accounts.
>On X, these accounts and their posts will no longer be recommended in the “For You” tab during the election period unless the user explicitly follows the account. Official candidates are not suspended, and their content will remain available on their profiles. This measure is expected to affect the visibility and reach of these profiles and their content.
>We are implementing this measure to strictly comply with TSE Resolution No. 23,610/2019. This is neither a penalty nor a change to X’s rules. We are committed to setting a new standard of transparency regarding our algorithms. Follow our work here: https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
Sounds good to me. Filtering all recommendations is fair, and they are not censoring the profiles.
I am not against these attitudes. I just want to point to that.
A possible reason is that these platforms are seen as either monopolies or American imperialism agents. In both cases these are very damming perceptions. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have been disastrous in branding their platforms.
Censorship is deletion of the candidate's social media presence.
What interests me more is that Elon has completely reversed his anti-censorship stance. He was always censoring while opining against censorship and getting sued for millions of dollars for ignoring a Brazilian censorship law. Now he's just quietly complying with Brazilian censorship law.
Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.
Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.
Which country are you referring to here? I’m not familiar with any that work like this. In the United States, Trump famously spent less than his competition and won both times. Bloomberg outspent his competitors by multiple orders of magnitude and endured a humiliating loss.
And those platforms are absolutely agents of American imperialism. Latin American countries in particular should be very wary of these.
Were it just one or two candidates, then it would indeed be a form of "soft censorship". That doesn't seem to be the case here.
Brazilian regulations just dictates that candidates cannot be recommended, regardless of party.
Candidates are forbidden of doing many things to keep elections free and mostly fair.