When Zuckerberg mentioned ‘secret courts in South America that order content removal without publicly disclosing it,’ everyone in Brazil immediately knew he was referring to our Supreme Court. The Court has been working in tandem with the federal administration to suppress laws approved by Congress, including a 2013 law that implemented a notice-and-takedown system similar to the DMCA. Under this system, internet content providers are only held responsible if they fail to remove content after receiving a specific court order.

The Supreme Court is now attempting to declare this notice-and-takedown system unconstitutional, while the federal government simply parrots the same fallacious arguments made by the judges. Every article I’ve read on this subject fails to identify which part of our Constitution the system supposedly violates, and I’ve personally searched for it without success. I suspect the Court is determined to stifle free speech in Brazil and will come up with an excuse for the law’s unconstitutionality later—likely something vague, like ‘violation of human dignity.’ Supreme Court judges often use this phrase liberally in their televised oral arguments.

The federal government and the Supreme Court claim to be protecting democracy, yet they seem unconcerned with preserving one of its core tenets: the separation of powers."

Al Jazeera, a news network banned in both Israel and Saudi Arabia for alleged biased reporting, had one of its reporters identified as a Hamas militant during the early stages of the war. Seems legit?

I always wondered what’s the source of this GIF…

For some time the site has been reluctant in posting Nintendo stuff. Their focus seems to be hacks from other consoles like Playstation. If that’s the case, I don’t know why the owner is no longer posting new content to the site.

For me, the page doesn’t allow me to scroll past the first sentence of the article.

Maybe it’s because I’m using mobile Firefox with uBO? I only managed to read the article through here.

I got genuinely curious, and so I asked ChatGPT to write a less biased headline. I got this: “Israeli airstrikes target Hamas militants hiding in civilian areas, leading to tragic collateral damage at a hospital in northern Gaza.”

“World Socialist Web Site”. No wonder the headline is so biased.

The moment Hezbollah resorted to launching missiles at Israeli territory, and Israel fought back, then diplomacy failed already.

Then maybe they should identify themselves as war inspectors or historians? “Peacekeepers” is kinda misleading…

If they’re indeed peacekeepers, then they failed their job miserably. As it stands, their only usefulness is being human shields for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah can throw any excuse they want, but the reality is that they attacked first. They should have known the limits of their military strength and shown restraint against a much more powerful nation. Too bad they were lacking in common sense. Now all their top leaders are eliminated, half their missile launchers are destroyed, and if a ground incursion by Israel occurs, they’re basically finished.

And if Israel ends up occupying the south of Lebanon, it won’t be the first time they’ve done so. In the year 2000, they voluntarily withdrew from the south of Lebanon after defeating Hezbollah, in the hopes that they’d stop attacking Israeli territory. Looks like being the nice guy with a terrorist group that’s determined to destroy them at any cost is not a very good idea.

Hezbollah has been sending missiles to Israeli territory for almost a year. So they started this war, but Israel has been very lenient by not starting a full-scale war until now. The patience has run out. Like they used to say: fuck around and find out.

Maybe they’re eyeing potential spoils of war? These military operations will need sources of financing.

But, realistically, they’re probably planing the formation of an exclusion zone to avoid Hezbollah installing missile launchers so close to Israel’s borders.

I’d argue Lemmy is turning into its own echo chamber. I’ve seen some mods power tripping just like good old Reddit. I erroneously thought people would learn from past mistakes, but sadly this is not what happened.

In other words: the judge issued an order that affects everyone, not only the parties involved in the judicial process, and without the need for each affected individual to be formally notified so he/she can know how to avoid being fined. So, he basically legislated by himself. No wonder people are saying he’s a dictator.

Before Elon acquired Twitter, the platform enforced an one-sided policy of censoring right-wing points of view. It even started actively shielding the left from any criticism, such as when the Hunter Biden Laptop story was blatantly censored so as to not affect Joe Biden’s presidential campaign negatively.

Now, he lets both sides of the political spectrum participate in the debate without censorship. Are you trying to say things got worse because of this?

Actually, Bolsonaro is a fraud. He only acts in the self-interest of himself and his immediate family members. As he’s being threatened by the dictator, with some speculation that he could be arrested at any time, he’s keeping silent during this whole X blocking incident so he doesn’t suffer retaliation from the dictator.

As for Musk, I know that, like every businessman, he has his financial interests. I surely would if I were one, and I would not blame anyone for doing the same, as nobody gets rich spending money unwisely. However, I can recognize that his passion for free speech is genuine; otherwise, he wouldn’t have bought Twitter for $44 billion. Under the most reasonable analysis, this was a bad deal in terms of return on investment. Maybe it’ll bear fruit in the long term, but it’s a big, nebulous maybe. So as he decided to buy it anyway, he surely did so on principle, not for money.

If the solution is as simple as downloading a VPN app from the smartphone app store and clicking “activate VPN,” I wouldn’t consider it tech-savvy territory. In the past, VPNs were indeed esoteric tech for nerds, but nowadays they’re commoditized stuff. And if Brazil’s regime keeps getting more repressive under the dictator, with the blocking of more social media sites, more people will have the opportunity/necessity to learn about VPNs.

Free VPNs don’t cost money. And times have changed: there are some reputable free VPNs, like ProtonVPN and Cloudflare’s WARP.

When a X user finds himself unable to load X’s main page or the app, he will be motivated to investagate why, and finally he’ll find out VPNs are the solution. X’s brazilian users were already discussing and suggesting VPNs to each other on the days leading up to the block. And the block is not 100% yet: smaller ISPs are taking longer to set up the block.