13 ms·

Rumble turns off access in Brazil because of government's censorship demands

127 points by bratao 3y ago

dfgfek 3y ago
[flagged]
- canadiantim 3y ago
  Yeah, between this and the recent unnecessary vaccine mandate, sure seems like Brazil's going down a dark path
  - throwawaysugar 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - logicchains 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      Fascism is laws I don't like! edit: I think it is wrong to call a vaccine mandate fascist.
      - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
        Nah. Facism has lots of prominent birthmarks. National populism. The cult of personality around an adored leader. A unifying cause against created enemies. Militarism and paramilitarism. Obsessive, fear-fueled NatSec. Demonization of human rights. Party capture of government enabling revenge based politics for starters.
        unethical_ban 3y ago
        I was being sarcastic. Honestly it was a low-effort post that doesn't belong on HN. You are correct. I was mocking the user above for suggesting that a vaccine mandate was "fascist".
        canadiantim 3y ago
        I never claimed it was fascist, just that it was leading Brazil down a dark path. The reason I believe this is because the pandemic is long over... there is no need for a mandate anymore. It's excessively heavy-handed government forcing an ideology onto everyone in that country.
      - logicchains 3y ago
        It's absolutely facist to pass a law that breaches fundamental medical ethics (no treatment without consent), and especially to mandate something that will kill some small number of recipients for the "greater good".
- deleted 3y ago
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- gullies 3y ago
  But this is under Lula...
  - friend_and_foe 3y ago
    That's the joke.
darth_avocado 3y ago
> “ Rumble is the only company at our scale that holds the line for free speech and American values” This is Brazil. I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere. I’m glad they shut it down instead of following the government demands because the company has a set of values, but that’s about it.
- timmytokyo 3y ago
  Ken White ("Popehat") wrote a recent essay on what it typically means when a company promotes their support for "free speech". He wrote it about Substack, but I think it applies equally well to Rumble. https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportunity https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportuni...
  - yareal 3y ago
    It's absolutely purely a monetary choice. Rumble isn't any more principled than any other free speech platform, they still moderate plenty of stuff that they find disagreeable. It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.) They also ban this: > You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service. "Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gorwell 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - logicchains 3y ago
jevoten 3y ago
I would prefer a "This user page censored in Brazil on order of the Brazilian government" for the censored users. Then we could see what they're trying to censor, and Brazilians could still read it with a VPN.
- whstl 3y ago
  This is what the court actually ordered.
cvbnht 3y ago
[dead]
- jevoten 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on "He also followed up with attacks on the Superior Electoral Court (TSE)"? What form did these "attacks" take - a machete, or written statements? > My question is, is this censorship or is this an investigation? Those are not mutually exclusive. In fact, censoring someone under investigation is the most pernicious censorship of all - it's scary enough to be targeted by the vast resources of the State with intent to imprison you, but then silencing you so you can't tell your side of the story, try to get public support (or legal aid/funding), or alert the public to any injustice or corruption in your prosecution, makes it outright tyrannical.
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    IIRC, publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated, to his 1M+ twitter followers.
    - jevoten 3y ago
      > publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated Let me preface everything with a disclaimer that I don't believe the elections were manipulated, and Bolsanaro's attempts to cast doubt on them was nothing but a ploy to keep power. However, they absolutely could have been, and doubting them is, in principle, extremely justifiable. Brazil has fully electronic elections without a paper trail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil), but let's first look at some tangential voting machine news from the US: The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-... I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-machine-hacking-russians.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-m... Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities - https://www.wired.com/story/voting-village-results-hacking-decade-old-bugs/ https://www.wired.com/story/voting-village-results-hacking-d... Pretty sorry state for the world's foremost democracy. It seems not trusting voting machines, in general, is amply justified. Now Brazil specifically: In a blow to e-voting critics, Brazil suspends use of all paper ballots (2018) - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-voting-critics-brazil-suspends-use-of-all-paper-ballots/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v... In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil’s Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil’s ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015. Wednesday’s decision came three months after a team of computer scientists published a research paper that reported a litany of serious technical flaws in Brazil’s current electronic voting system. The vulnerabilities included the hard-coding of cryptographic keys directly into the software, code libraries that were missing digital signatures verifying that they were authentic, and the ability of people with access to the machines to infect them with malicious code. So the same court system that recently declared questioning voting machines to be illegal, has before also gutted attempts by legislators to improve security with a paper trail, with the argument it risks ballot secrecy, despite many well-regarded democracies using a paper trail or all-paper voting without issue. The discreet US campaign to defend Brazil’s election - Amid widespread speculation about a coup attempt, the Biden administration pressured politicians and generals to respect the result - https://www.ft.com/content/07533564-2231-47a6-a7b8-2c7ae330efc5 https://www.ft.com/content/07533564-2231-47a6-a7b8-2c7ae330e... (unpaywalled: https://archive.is/e1tBD https://archive.is/e1tBD) The next day, the state department issued an unusual endorsement of the voting system, saying that “Brazil’s capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and the world.” “The statement by the US was very important, especially for the military,” one top Brazilian official says. “They get equipment from the US and do training there, so having good relations with the US is very important for the Brazilian military . . . The statement was an antidote against military intervention.” [..] The US also provided some practical help to the election process, helping to overcome supply chain difficulties to obtain components, especially semiconductors, needed to manufacture new machines. The former US ambassador to Brazil, Anthony Harrington, was able to leverage connections inside chipmaker Texas Instruments to, he says, “distinguish semiconductor needs and give priority to the impact on democratic elections”. The US pressured Brazilian institutions behind the scenes not to doubt the elections. It also built some of the voting machine computer chips. As directed by the US, the military found no problems with the vote (I believe their results were honest, but someone would be very justified in calling them biased): Brazil's military finds no problems with vote, but sees risks - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-military-finds-no-problems-with-vote-sees-risks-2022-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-military-find... A long-awaited report by Brazil's armed forces on the security of the country's electronic voting system did not mention any specific problems with last month's vote, but said there were vulnerabilities in the code that could potentially be exploited. Returning to the fact that the US supplied the chips, it is known that undetectable hardware backdoors can be introduced: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdoor.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo... Brazil tests their voting machines - on election day, some machines are chosen by lottery, gathered in a single place, where all the political parties, including opposition, non-anonymously cast votes, so the machine totals can be verified. Presumably the machines are airgapped throughout. But it would be possible to backdoor the hardware and add a radio receiver, just sensitive enough that a signal can flip a bit to tell the machine to alter the votes. Of course the software side cannot be trusted at all, as a trusting-trust style attack on developer machines could undetectably subvert it, despite the open-source code itself being secure. It's even possible one could encode the entire vote-altering malware into a backdoored memory chip, avoiding the need to infect developer machines. Such an attack would be extremely difficult, even for a superpower attacker like the US or China. But it is possible, and doubtless worth the effort to control a country of 200 million like Brazil. Unlike if there was a paper trail, it would scale, and be near-undetectable. Especially if you can install a government or judiciary that is unmotivated to detect it, and even willing to jail anyone suggesting it could have taken place. A perfect example of the necessity of strong free speech protections. A motivated judge could easily claim this post is spreading false information about the election (I say it is insecure, citing globally well-regarded news sites and making only limited, reasonable speculation, they say it is secure) and defending a crime (the streamer's claims of the same), send me to jail, and demand HN censor it, just like they're trying to censor Rumble.
throwawaysugar 3y ago
Brazil doesn't have "free speech" in the same way as the US does. Many countries don't, actually. For example, racism is a punishable offense in Brazil. You literally cannot say "I hate <insert race>". The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against. Brazil has many issues, but it has an impressively modern / progressive constitution dated from 1988, written after the end of the military regime. Sadly the law isn't always applied and definitely not evenly applied... Personally, I think "life" and "liberty" are the two most important inalienable rights, but in that order. Liberty cannot go as far as infringing on Life. And pretty much every other right exist for how they protect "life" and/or "liberty"
- lulznews 3y ago
  Try saying those things in America and you’ll find out how free speech is here pretty quickly.
  - yareal 3y ago
    People say, "I hate <minority>" in America all the time? I can't count how many times I've heard I hate the gays or I hate the Blacks/Indians/Mexicans or I hate women. It's truly staggering how common it is here.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- cortic 3y ago
  >The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against. Alternatively; The value of maintaining current discrimination is high enough to motivate laws protecting racists from exposing themselves publicly. Or; The value in maintain hatred within society is higher than the value of progressive discourse. My point is that there are a few ways to interpret speech controls, and i don't think its fair to just pick the positive spin.
  - throwawaysugar 3y ago
shipscode 3y ago
Good. Free speech is a natural human right. Most act like it was invented by the US constitution instead of acknowledged by it.
- atticora 3y ago
  I'm more of a free speech partisan that most people, but I don't understand the claim that it is a natural right in some sense. Is it more or less natural than the impulse of other people to suppress speech? I believe that protecting it is a better policy, but in what sense of the word is it more or less "natural" than suppressing it?
  - logicchains 3y ago
    "Natural right" means a right with a sound fundamental philosophical justification behind it, it doesn't mean "natural" in the sense of "something people do naturally". People by nature are often savages; learning to respect the rights of other people, and not just see them as tools for us to impose our own will upon, is part of the challenge of human moral development.
    - atticora 3y ago
      I'm in favor of human moral development through means such as free speech. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meaning, or rather can mean anything to anyone. It can envelop humanity's destruction as easily as its flourishing, depending on where your identity lies. I'd like to be able to deploy "natural" in defense of free speech, but I've found no substance to it. No premise beyond a personal value judgement, which I happen to share. So I default to appeals to utility.
      - logicchains 3y ago
        >. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meanin You're saying the entirety of moral philosophy has no meaning so people should just do whatever they feels like, that's a pretty barbaric position. >So I default to appeals to utility Utility also relies on a philosophical justification; if you throw out all philosophy, you also throw out utilitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...
htk 3y ago
Brazil has been on a slippery slope regarding free speech. I see parallels with the war on terror, where the 9/11 attacks gave carte-blanche to gain power of the population. Brazil started with the "war on fake news" and now they just ban/censor whatever they think is objectionable. I hope it's not as sticky as the increase in surveillance from the NSA and the authoritarian approach from the TSA.
- logicchains 3y ago
  It's not just Brazil; the vast majority of governments are trying to put a tighter leash on what people can say online. Because the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know.
  - herval 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - throwaway655368 3y ago
      I couldn't make any sense of your comment. You start with argumentative "People keep repeating this trope, and it seems to never be true.". Then you tear down some dumb "pizza shop" strawman. Then you basically agree with gp, while acting as if you are putting up some counterargument.
      - herval 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - ricardobeat 3y ago
    > the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know Racial superiority ideas and/or discrimination is the issue in this case, and 90% of other cases involving censorship in Brazil. How is that something “the rulers don’t want you to know”?
TriangleEdge 3y ago
I am currently in Brazil. This is on the front page of the website: "NOTICE TO USERS IN BRAZIL: Because of Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon."
hexage1814 3y ago
Gleen Greewald, who lives in Brazil, is one the few foreign journalists covering what is happening. Essentially, censorship has become acceptable there as long as it is against Bolsonaro supporters – or, honestly, as long as it is against anyone who doesn't support the current status quo and the Lula/Brazil Supreme Court government. https://nitter.net/ggreenwald/status/1738311336898027770 https://nitter.net/ggreenwald/status/1738311336898027770
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  Reminds me of the expression that every nation has freedom of speech for the speech they agree with. The litmus test is whether they defend speech they don’t agree with.
- throwawaysugar 3y ago
  [flagged]
- gota 3y ago
  In fairness, Lula's block has little to do with it. A bit more now that Lula gets to appoint new court Judges, I guess, but - there have been many pushes from the Supreme Court against the right-most Bolsonaro block because it openly flirted with a military coup. This is the blowback. In fact, the very first instances of those pushes were during Bolsonaro's presidency; some motivated by government inaction or overreach (the disputes between Federal and State government during the pandemic comes to mind), some by political clash (Bolsonaro's son openly flaunting "closing down" the Court with military intervention; the usage of state cerimonies as rallies, and most importantly the Jan 8th stuff) As far as I can tell, a political group that threatened the established government structure lost and said structure is now reinforcing itself. If the purpose is to ensure resilience against future attacks or a power grab is anothee discussion, but the primordial movement's reasons are clear
descartavel 3y ago
[flagged]
Racing0461 3y ago
[flagged]
weare138 3y ago
If these individuals were in the US I would bet dollars to donuts Rumble would have banned them if asked by a US law enforcement or regulatory agency rather than cut off access to the US.
ponorin 3y ago
it's dangerous to equate freedom in freedom of speech as having less restrictions, because then the only speech you will hear is the one from people who can recover from whatever bullsh1t they spit. just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes. in that regard, united states isn't even the most free in terms of speech, it only has the least restrictions. indeed you see cases where the supposed land of freedom severely limits free speech such as dmca (specifically the anti-circumvention law) or charging edward snowden for feloney.
- devwastaken 3y ago
  "bad takes" do not rise to a level where censorship is warranted. Humans communicate to learn, they are often wrong and convinced of wrong things. This is necessary to learn what a good take is. The moral panic of this age is synonymous to mcarthyism and the ages past. It never worked and as demonstrates today backfired to whole generations no longer believing their country or government are to be trusted.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  > just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes. No, freedom of speech is actually unique in that there can be no "reasonable" restrictions on it. This is because determining whether a particular restriction is "reasonable" would require free discussion about that restriction, which is impossible as long as the restriction is in place.
deleted 3y ago
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Pat_Murph 3y ago
Hilarious the dudes getting je banned are accusing the government of being a dictatorhip but their podcasts are based off their defense of an attempted coup by à wanna be dictator... And people are defending their right to encourage en entice people to fight against the elected government in place... Free speech absolutists are a joke. And they are mostly Americans. And they often ignore the fact that even in America there are limits on speech. It's just libertarian non sens. They want to say and encourage the worst shit and not face the consequences... Having a forum and being able to reech hundreds of thoudands of people like these clowns. There are and should be responsabilies and consequences for not meeting those resposibilities.
0dayz 3y ago
Right, for the site proclaiming to be for free speech it doesn't seem that their in favor of practicing transparent speech i.e. Showing the court case or the individuals involved in the takedown: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monark_(podcaster) https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monark_(podcaster) You can think of the case against this individual as you please, my gripe with the site is that I just cannot trust outlets that brand themselves as an interest group and then withholds information when convenient, since then it's just propaganda. Oh and doing some further digging they even manages to somehow misread the EU media freedom act so badly that they quote a part of it that clearly states to protect journalists against Spyware, and yet they write that the EU wants to use Spyware against journalists.[1] And in the same article they paint orban as some freedom fighter of free speech. [1] . [1]https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-media-freedom-act-passes-key-vote https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-media-freedom-act-passes-key-vo...
- Pat_Murph 3y ago
  Yep their bias is clearly on display we can Atleast give them that but them not gobong5the details of what the accusations are just comes off as dishonest... Hard to take seriously. As these free speech absolutist activists usualy are...
  - 0dayz 3y ago
    Yeah, it's unfortunately something I've seen happen with a lot of single-vote movment/groups, at best they play the useful idiot or have obvious biases that makes them not impartial.
byyll 3y ago
How is self-censoring "challenging government's censorship demands"?

127 points by bratao 3y ago

dfgfek 3y ago

[flagged]

canadiantim 3y ago
Yeah, between this and the recent unnecessary vaccine mandate, sure seems like Brazil's going down a dark path
- throwawaysugar 3y ago
  [flagged]
- logicchains 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    Fascism is laws I don't like! edit: I think it is wrong to call a vaccine mandate fascist.
    - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
      Nah. Facism has lots of prominent birthmarks. National populism. The cult of personality around an adored leader. A unifying cause against created enemies. Militarism and paramilitarism. Obsessive, fear-fueled NatSec. Demonization of human rights. Party capture of government enabling revenge based politics for starters.
      - unethical_ban 3y ago
        I was being sarcastic. Honestly it was a low-effort post that doesn't belong on HN. You are correct. I was mocking the user above for suggesting that a vaccine mandate was "fascist".
        canadiantim 3y ago
        I never claimed it was fascist, just that it was leading Brazil down a dark path. The reason I believe this is because the pandemic is long over... there is no need for a mandate anymore. It's excessively heavy-handed government forcing an ideology onto everyone in that country.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      It's absolutely facist to pass a law that breaches fundamental medical ethics (no treatment without consent), and especially to mandate something that will kill some small number of recipients for the "greater good".
deleted 3y ago
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gullies 3y ago
But this is under Lula...
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  That's the joke.

darth_avocado 3y ago

> “ Rumble is the only company at our scale that holds the line for free speech and American values” This is Brazil. I’m all for freedom of speech, but not all cultures are the same and neither are local laws. Sometimes what works for America doesn’t work elsewhere. I’m glad they shut it down instead of following the government demands because the company has a set of values, but that’s about it.

timmytokyo 3y ago
Ken White ("Popehat") wrote a recent essay on what it typically means when a company promotes their support for "free speech". He wrote it about Substack, but I think it applies equally well to Rumble. https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportunity https://popehat.substack.com/p/substack-has-a-nazi-opportuni...
- yareal 3y ago
  It's absolutely purely a monetary choice. Rumble isn't any more principled than any other free speech platform, they still moderate plenty of stuff that they find disagreeable. It's a very American sense of "free speech" that allows for Nazis and forbids video that contains any topless people. (Which, if you've been to many parts of the world, is not at all obscene.) They also ban this: > You may not post or transmit any messages pertaining to charity requests, petitions for signatures, requesting donations, relating to pyramid schemes, or pertaining to the manipulation of the Rumble Service. "Hey, can you sign my petition" sure seems like a cornerstone of free speech... surprised to see it considered against the rules by a supposed "principled" company.
- deleted 3y ago
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- gorwell 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - logicchains 3y ago

jevoten 3y ago

I would prefer a "This user page censored in Brazil on order of the Brazilian government" for the censored users. Then we could see what they're trying to censor, and Brazilians could still read it with a VPN.

whstl 3y ago
This is what the court actually ordered.

cvbnht 3y ago

[dead]

jevoten 3y ago
Could you elaborate on "He also followed up with attacks on the Superior Electoral Court (TSE)"? What form did these "attacks" take - a machete, or written statements? > My question is, is this censorship or is this an investigation? Those are not mutually exclusive. In fact, censoring someone under investigation is the most pernicious censorship of all - it's scary enough to be targeted by the vast resources of the State with intent to imprison you, but then silencing you so you can't tell your side of the story, try to get public support (or legal aid/funding), or alert the public to any injustice or corruption in your prosecution, makes it outright tyrannical.
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  IIRC, publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated, to his 1M+ twitter followers.
  - jevoten 3y ago
    > publishing unfounded claims about the elections being manipulated Let me preface everything with a disclaimer that I don't believe the elections were manipulated, and Bolsanaro's attempts to cast doubt on them was nothing but a ploy to keep power. However, they absolutely could have been, and doubting them is, in principle, extremely justifiable. Brazil has fully electronic elections without a paper trail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil), but let's first look at some tangential voting machine news from the US: The Myth of the Hacker-Proof Voting Machine - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-hacker-proof-voting-machine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-... I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-machine-hacking-russians.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/opinion/election-voting-m... Some Voting Machines Still Have Decade-Old Vulnerabilities - https://www.wired.com/story/voting-village-results-hacking-decade-old-bugs/ https://www.wired.com/story/voting-village-results-hacking-d... Pretty sorry state for the world's foremost democracy. It seems not trusting voting machines, in general, is amply justified. Now Brazil specifically: In a blow to e-voting critics, Brazil suspends use of all paper ballots (2018) - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-voting-critics-brazil-suspends-use-of-all-paper-ballots/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/in-a-blow-to-e-v... In an 8-2 majority, justices on Wednesday sided with government arguments that the paper trails posed a risk to ballot secrecy, Brazil’s Folha De S.Paulo newspaper reported on Thursday. In so doing, the justices suspended a requirement that 5 percent of Brazil’s ballot boxes this year use paper. That requirement, by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court, already represented a major weakening of an election reform bill passed in 2015. Wednesday’s decision came three months after a team of computer scientists published a research paper that reported a litany of serious technical flaws in Brazil’s current electronic voting system. The vulnerabilities included the hard-coding of cryptographic keys directly into the software, code libraries that were missing digital signatures verifying that they were authentic, and the ability of people with access to the machines to infect them with malicious code. So the same court system that recently declared questioning voting machines to be illegal, has before also gutted attempts by legislators to improve security with a paper trail, with the argument it risks ballot secrecy, despite many well-regarded democracies using a paper trail or all-paper voting without issue. The discreet US campaign to defend Brazil’s election - Amid widespread speculation about a coup attempt, the Biden administration pressured politicians and generals to respect the result - https://www.ft.com/content/07533564-2231-47a6-a7b8-2c7ae330efc5 https://www.ft.com/content/07533564-2231-47a6-a7b8-2c7ae330e... (unpaywalled: https://archive.is/e1tBD https://archive.is/e1tBD) The next day, the state department issued an unusual endorsement of the voting system, saying that “Brazil’s capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and the world.” “The statement by the US was very important, especially for the military,” one top Brazilian official says. “They get equipment from the US and do training there, so having good relations with the US is very important for the Brazilian military . . . The statement was an antidote against military intervention.” [..] The US also provided some practical help to the election process, helping to overcome supply chain difficulties to obtain components, especially semiconductors, needed to manufacture new machines. The former US ambassador to Brazil, Anthony Harrington, was able to leverage connections inside chipmaker Texas Instruments to, he says, “distinguish semiconductor needs and give priority to the impact on democratic elections”. The US pressured Brazilian institutions behind the scenes not to doubt the elections. It also built some of the voting machine computer chips. As directed by the US, the military found no problems with the vote (I believe their results were honest, but someone would be very justified in calling them biased): Brazil's military finds no problems with vote, but sees risks - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-military-finds-no-problems-with-vote-sees-risks-2022-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-military-find... A long-awaited report by Brazil's armed forces on the security of the country's electronic voting system did not mention any specific problems with last month's vote, but said there were vulnerabilities in the code that could potentially be exploited. Returning to the fact that the US supplied the chips, it is known that undetectable hardware backdoors can be introduced: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdoor.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/adding_backdo... Brazil tests their voting machines - on election day, some machines are chosen by lottery, gathered in a single place, where all the political parties, including opposition, non-anonymously cast votes, so the machine totals can be verified. Presumably the machines are airgapped throughout. But it would be possible to backdoor the hardware and add a radio receiver, just sensitive enough that a signal can flip a bit to tell the machine to alter the votes. Of course the software side cannot be trusted at all, as a trusting-trust style attack on developer machines could undetectably subvert it, despite the open-source code itself being secure. It's even possible one could encode the entire vote-altering malware into a backdoored memory chip, avoiding the need to infect developer machines. Such an attack would be extremely difficult, even for a superpower attacker like the US or China. But it is possible, and doubtless worth the effort to control a country of 200 million like Brazil. Unlike if there was a paper trail, it would scale, and be near-undetectable. Especially if you can install a government or judiciary that is unmotivated to detect it, and even willing to jail anyone suggesting it could have taken place. A perfect example of the necessity of strong free speech protections. A motivated judge could easily claim this post is spreading false information about the election (I say it is insecure, citing globally well-regarded news sites and making only limited, reasonable speculation, they say it is secure) and defending a crime (the streamer's claims of the same), send me to jail, and demand HN censor it, just like they're trying to censor Rumble.

throwawaysugar 3y ago

Brazil doesn't have "free speech" in the same way as the US does. Many countries don't, actually. For example, racism is a punishable offense in Brazil. You literally cannot say "I hate <insert race>". The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against. Brazil has many issues, but it has an impressively modern / progressive constitution dated from 1988, written after the end of the military regime. Sadly the law isn't always applied and definitely not evenly applied... Personally, I think "life" and "liberty" are the two most important inalienable rights, but in that order. Liberty cannot go as far as infringing on Life. And pretty much every other right exist for how they protect "life" and/or "liberty"

lulznews 3y ago
Try saying those things in America and you’ll find out how free speech is here pretty quickly.
- yareal 3y ago
  People say, "I hate <minority>" in America all the time? I can't count how many times I've heard I hate the gays or I hate the Blacks/Indians/Mexicans or I hate women. It's truly staggering how common it is here.
- deleted 3y ago
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cortic 3y ago
>The value of saying what you want is not held higher than the value of not being discriminated against. Alternatively; The value of maintaining current discrimination is high enough to motivate laws protecting racists from exposing themselves publicly. Or; The value in maintain hatred within society is higher than the value of progressive discourse. My point is that there are a few ways to interpret speech controls, and i don't think its fair to just pick the positive spin.
- throwawaysugar 3y ago

shipscode 3y ago

Good. Free speech is a natural human right. Most act like it was invented by the US constitution instead of acknowledged by it.

atticora 3y ago
I'm more of a free speech partisan that most people, but I don't understand the claim that it is a natural right in some sense. Is it more or less natural than the impulse of other people to suppress speech? I believe that protecting it is a better policy, but in what sense of the word is it more or less "natural" than suppressing it?
- logicchains 3y ago
  "Natural right" means a right with a sound fundamental philosophical justification behind it, it doesn't mean "natural" in the sense of "something people do naturally". People by nature are often savages; learning to respect the rights of other people, and not just see them as tools for us to impose our own will upon, is part of the challenge of human moral development.
  - atticora 3y ago
    I'm in favor of human moral development through means such as free speech. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meaning, or rather can mean anything to anyone. It can envelop humanity's destruction as easily as its flourishing, depending on where your identity lies. I'd like to be able to deploy "natural" in defense of free speech, but I've found no substance to it. No premise beyond a personal value judgement, which I happen to share. So I default to appeals to utility.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >. But "a sound fundamental philosophical justification" doesn't appear to have any meanin You're saying the entirety of moral philosophy has no meaning so people should just do whatever they feels like, that's a pretty barbaric position. >So I default to appeals to utility Utility also relies on a philosophical justification; if you throw out all philosophy, you also throw out utilitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights_and_legal_right...

htk 3y ago

Brazil has been on a slippery slope regarding free speech. I see parallels with the war on terror, where the 9/11 attacks gave carte-blanche to gain power of the population. Brazil started with the "war on fake news" and now they just ban/censor whatever they think is objectionable. I hope it's not as sticky as the increase in surveillance from the NSA and the authoritarian approach from the TSA.

logicchains 3y ago
It's not just Brazil; the vast majority of governments are trying to put a tighter leash on what people can say online. Because the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know.
- herval 3y ago
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  - throwaway655368 3y ago
    I couldn't make any sense of your comment. You start with argumentative "People keep repeating this trope, and it seems to never be true.". Then you tear down some dumb "pizza shop" strawman. Then you basically agree with gp, while acting as if you are putting up some counterargument.
    - herval 3y ago
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- ricardobeat 3y ago
  > the decentralisation of information transfer is allowing citizens to be more informed than ever before about things their rulers don't want them to know Racial superiority ideas and/or discrimination is the issue in this case, and 90% of other cases involving censorship in Brazil. How is that something “the rulers don’t want you to know”?

TriangleEdge 3y ago

I am currently in Brazil. This is on the front page of the website: "NOTICE TO USERS IN BRAZIL: Because of Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in Brazil. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon."

hexage1814 3y ago

Gleen Greewald, who lives in Brazil, is one the few foreign journalists covering what is happening. Essentially, censorship has become acceptable there as long as it is against Bolsonaro supporters – or, honestly, as long as it is against anyone who doesn't support the current status quo and the Lula/Brazil Supreme Court government. https://nitter.net/ggreenwald/status/1738311336898027770 https://nitter.net/ggreenwald/status/1738311336898027770

r3trohack3r 3y ago
Reminds me of the expression that every nation has freedom of speech for the speech they agree with. The litmus test is whether they defend speech they don’t agree with.
throwawaysugar 3y ago
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gota 3y ago
In fairness, Lula's block has little to do with it. A bit more now that Lula gets to appoint new court Judges, I guess, but - there have been many pushes from the Supreme Court against the right-most Bolsonaro block because it openly flirted with a military coup. This is the blowback. In fact, the very first instances of those pushes were during Bolsonaro's presidency; some motivated by government inaction or overreach (the disputes between Federal and State government during the pandemic comes to mind), some by political clash (Bolsonaro's son openly flaunting "closing down" the Court with military intervention; the usage of state cerimonies as rallies, and most importantly the Jan 8th stuff) As far as I can tell, a political group that threatened the established government structure lost and said structure is now reinforcing itself. If the purpose is to ensure resilience against future attacks or a power grab is anothee discussion, but the primordial movement's reasons are clear

descartavel 3y ago

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Racing0461 3y ago

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weare138 3y ago

If these individuals were in the US I would bet dollars to donuts Rumble would have banned them if asked by a US law enforcement or regulatory agency rather than cut off access to the US.

ponorin 3y ago

it's dangerous to equate freedom in freedom of speech as having less restrictions, because then the only speech you will hear is the one from people who can recover from whatever bullsh1t they spit. just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes. in that regard, united states isn't even the most free in terms of speech, it only has the least restrictions. indeed you see cases where the supposed land of freedom severely limits free speech such as dmca (specifically the anti-circumvention law) or charging edward snowden for feloney.

devwastaken 3y ago
"bad takes" do not rise to a level where censorship is warranted. Humans communicate to learn, they are often wrong and convinced of wrong things. This is necessary to learn what a good take is. The moral panic of this age is synonymous to mcarthyism and the ages past. It never worked and as demonstrates today backfired to whole generations no longer believing their country or government are to be trusted.
Georgelemental 3y ago
> just like "free market" needs strong regulations to prevent monopoly and price gouging, freedom of speech should be about levelling the playing field and not as an excuse for bad takes. No, freedom of speech is actually unique in that there can be no "reasonable" restrictions on it. This is because determining whether a particular restriction is "reasonable" would require free discussion about that restriction, which is impossible as long as the restriction is in place.

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Pat_Murph 3y ago

Hilarious the dudes getting je banned are accusing the government of being a dictatorhip but their podcasts are based off their defense of an attempted coup by à wanna be dictator... And people are defending their right to encourage en entice people to fight against the elected government in place... Free speech absolutists are a joke. And they are mostly Americans. And they often ignore the fact that even in America there are limits on speech. It's just libertarian non sens. They want to say and encourage the worst shit and not face the consequences... Having a forum and being able to reech hundreds of thoudands of people like these clowns. There are and should be responsabilies and consequences for not meeting those resposibilities.

0dayz 3y ago

Right, for the site proclaiming to be for free speech it doesn't seem that their in favor of practicing transparent speech i.e. Showing the court case or the individuals involved in the takedown: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monark_(podcaster) https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monark_(podcaster) You can think of the case against this individual as you please, my gripe with the site is that I just cannot trust outlets that brand themselves as an interest group and then withholds information when convenient, since then it's just propaganda. Oh and doing some further digging they even manages to somehow misread the EU media freedom act so badly that they quote a part of it that clearly states to protect journalists against Spyware, and yet they write that the EU wants to use Spyware against journalists.[1] And in the same article they paint orban as some freedom fighter of free speech. [1] . [1]https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-media-freedom-act-passes-key-vote https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-media-freedom-act-passes-key-vo...

Pat_Murph 3y ago
Yep their bias is clearly on display we can Atleast give them that but them not gobong5the details of what the accusations are just comes off as dishonest... Hard to take seriously. As these free speech absolutist activists usualy are...
- 0dayz 3y ago
  Yeah, it's unfortunately something I've seen happen with a lot of single-vote movment/groups, at best they play the useful idiot or have obvious biases that makes them not impartial.

byyll 3y ago

How is self-censoring "challenging government's censorship demands"?