So Brazil has shut down X/ Twitter!
It's all gone off (quite literally) because of a row over disinformation, at least disinformation according to a high court judge in Brazil, obviuously not Elon Musk who is a radical free speech advocate.
The Brazilian State did give X a chance to stay open, but X failed to comply with the State's demands: namely they failed to pay a fine and to appoint a new legal representative as requested.
Elon Musk clearly thought the Brazilian authorities were too weak to stand up to him, but he got this wrong and a High Court judge pulled the plug back in early September, leaving the 20M X/ Twitter users high and dry!
Musk's then attempted to subvert the ban...
He initially tried subverting the block by maintaining access via his own Starlink, but he then backtracked.
He then tried a further subversion of the block more recently by updating its communicaation network so access to X was routed outside of Brazil, via Cloudfare, but this has since been remedied.
NB Cloudflare had to co-operate with this because you can't just blanket ban all traffic going through Cloudfare, that'd ban half the internet apparently!
Implications...?!?
We've seen autocratic coutries such as China and Russia banning Wester social media before, but this is the first time a democracy has shut down a Big Tech platform, and this is HISTORIC.
There is a rational.... Twitter/ X blatantly fails to comply with governments' requests to take down misinformation, in the case of the UK riots in early summer 2024 Musk even spread misinformation himself.
And these platforms have a huge capacity to undermine democracy through manipulating the information people are fed, especially in the build up to elections.
Subtle changes to algorithms can make less visible those posts which Musk and other Tech Barons do not favour, and such changes are hard to monitor because there is no oversight of the algorithms, no one outside gets to see them.
So maybe this change is a good thing. Maybe governments for too long have been too passive with these social media companies. I mean not that governments are the good guys, not that governments can themselves guarantee us access to a balanced reporting of information, but because the information processing processes on platforms such as X/ Twitter and Facebook are black boxed, which makes me personally feel a little uneasy!
Having a billionaire decide the processes that govern what information I get isn't necessarily any better than political representatives.
Then of course there's the fact that X/ Twitter and Facebook are not the only ways of communicating, there are plenty of alternatives.
And also, maybe, just maybe, putting a spanner in the works of these quick-link platforms where rapid-fire first to get it out is what counts practices is going to be good for us all.
I mean personally I analyse the news a week after it's happened, I just find that's a much more balanced way of assessing what's going on, and it's very rare I need to know something NOW - if it was that urgent someone would damn well phone me, or the neighbours would knock, or I'd hear people screaming.
And I don't like Musk, he's a petulant child that just seems to want to play disruptive political games now that he's 'got his'.
Anyway, just a rant!