> “ 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.
I am curious as to how a court in Brazil can require a company that appears to be based in Canada and the USA to block access. If countries are allowed to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, anyone running a website might need to know and obey the laws of nearly 200 countries.
Some of those laws prohibit criticism of their respective governments, sex education, or pornography (including things most people in the US or EU would not consider pornographic).
Yep, I miss the days where websites said "you want to keep your citizens from accessing our site, get fucked, do it yourself, build a great firewall because we don't have to enforce your laws for you" but those days are long gone since Facebook and Google created a precedent of doing it to keep foreign markets. It's unfortunate but this is the new status quo.
The problem is that these sites are supported by advertising and if you can’t collect ad revenue in a country, you might as well not even let them access the site.
I've begun contemplating if these companies are complicit in whatever crimes against humanity these countries may be partaking in, wanting censored-suppressed - in the name of profit, party to industrial complexes working with authoritarian governments, being fascism.
They are absolutely 100% complicit, and not just by chance, they are knowingly complicit. They take contracts from governments to censor and oppress their people. Just like IBM helped catalogue Jews in Germany and Standard Oil fueled the Nazi war machine, these companies take money to control information flows within dictatorships, hide atrocities and even provide information technology to help then further their aims in more concrete ways like biometric tracking and hacking tools.
And, btw, just to make this also explicit: if someone works for one of these companies--and aren't doing it in some way by force, or aren't working from the inside to actively sabotage the company's goals--they are also complicit.
I’ve never been to gab so I can’t say exactly what their content is but I do have a memory longer than a goldfish and I can firmly say that you are not being truthful.
Gab was kicked off those platforms for not touting the “party” line on the covid shot, trans stuff, and other social hot button issues.
> If countries are allowed to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, anyone running a website might need to know and obey the laws of nearly 200 countries.
Yes, that's how it works. Specifically, the common argument that applies to most companies (incl. Rumble), is that you're trading within that country if anyone from that country is either paying for your product/service, or making money from your product/service; and therefore you essentially need to function as (if not actually legally have) a per-country corporate subsidiary amenable to the laws of that country, if you want to continue doing that.
And sometimes it's even worse; for at least the US and Canada, companies trading with people living in these countries have to know and follow the laws of the state or province their customers live in, when serving those customers.
These are mostly simple things like tax codes, yes; but sometimes it's things that are far more arcane — for example, Quebec prohibits promotional first-period pricing that automatically transitions into regular pricing (they consider this a predatory practice.) Companies that advertise promitions in Canada often have fine print that says "offer not valid in Quebec" because of this.
This tangled mess of required region-specific logic is, by and large, the moat of e-commerce platforms and payment processors. It's why even large e-commerce services like Steam, that build all this logic internally for most countries, will still integrate with payment processors like Stripe or PayPal — those services are made options to cover the long-tail of countries they don't want to learn and maintain regional rules for.
It's also why many companies don't bother to actually sell into every market; and instead allow companies that specialize in "partnering with foreign companies to sell their products into our own domestic market that we understand well" — a.k.a. importers — to do that for them (and skim off some of their margin in the process.)
> Yes, that's how it works. Specifically, the common argument that applies to most companies (incl. Rumble), is that you're trading within that country if anyone from that country is either paying for your product/service, or making money from your product/service; and therefore you essentially need to function as (if not actually legally have) a per-country corporate subsidiary amenable to the laws of that country, if you want to continue doing that.
I think an equally valid (and frankly more reasonable) interpretation is that if anyone from another country is paying for your product/service, then they're trading within _your_ country. If in doing so they contravene laws of _their_ country (e.g., forbidden speech, taxes, etc.) then that's their problem, not yours. This interpretation has the advantage of actually being enforceable, unlike the alternative.
And if a country doesn't like that then they're free to "protect" their citizens by building a Great Firewall, which is _totally and only_ for their people's benefit.
That's the interpretation that would apply if you were trading in e.g. equities. The stock exchange doesn't come to you; you come to it. (And therefore, you need to have a legal presence in the country where the exchange is located, with bank+investment accounts registered there, holding deposits denominated in that country's currency. You can't buy stocks from the NYSE using a European bank account, let alone one holding Euros — you have to first fund an American bank account with USD; then transfer that into a special American [government-]registered investment account; and then use that account to buy the stocks.)
In this scenario, the foreign investor is in a sense creating a legal "proxy person" — a virtual citizen of the country where the exchange exists. The foreign investor is then telling the proxy person to do the trades for them. If the pretend proxy person breaks the law, the real investor gets in trouble... but in ways that are more similar to the ways corporations get in trouble, than the ways citizens of the country get in trouble.
(And some countries don't even allow the creation of these pretend proxy persons; instead requiring you to employ, and hand your money over to, a real proxy person, who will face the domestic legal consequences for executing your trades! This is how e.g. Bahamian shell corporations work; it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines. It's never a good time.)
"The purchaser representing themselves legally in the country they're buying from" is also how the aforementioned import arrangements work. The importer registers an export company in the source country — essentially a proxy-person, though in the shape of a corporation — and the export company is what buys the goods and sends them to the import company.
Most trade isn't like this, though, because most trade isn't between legal peers (like an exchange and an investor — both basically "typed as" corporations for the sake of the trade, even if one is a sole proprietor); but instead is between one large company and a potentially-huge number of individually-legally-naive individual consumers.
It is impractical to ask all the people who want to buy a product, to create a foreign trading presence for themselves in the country of origin of that product, as if they were a professional importer. Governments don't want to maintain — or especially to validate and audit — huge databases of hundreds of millions of foreign individuals trading locally. Banks don't want to have to open and maintain hundreds of millions of tiny, individual, unprofitable(!) foreign-deposit accounts for those individuals to use to operate legally in the country.
So instead, governments and banks choose the far simpler route: making the foreign corporations register themselves in the markets they operate in. There are far fewer corporations to keep on the books for both the governments and the banks; and it's far easier to manage their accounts (because corporations are on average more competent at that kind of thing; because unlike individuals, corporations can afford to pay ~hundreds-of-dollar levies to maintain the systems tracking them and keep the bank-accounts revenue-positive for the banks; and because corporations will coalesce bank transfers, turning billions of little daily transactions to individuals' foreign-deposit accounts, into just a few daily transactions to each corporate foreign-deposit account.)
Ignoring the pragmatics, though, there's also a key distinction even in theory: when a company X from country A, trades with consumers in country B, company X is seeking to pull money out of (or put money into) a credit card or bank account that exists in country B (and which is denominated in the currency of country B), and move that money to/from country A, where it will then get exchanged for the currency of country A and drop into the company's country-A bank account.
The manipulation of the country-B bank account, can only legally be done (for most values of country-B) by a company legally registered in country-B to operate on the payment networks of country-B. There has to be a payment server sitting there physically in country-B, connected by dedicated line to the inter-bank network the banks of country-B use; and that payment server has to have signing certs installed to emit messages on the line that will be accepted by the network — signing certs which required a bunch of legal and contractual and trust-handshake hoops to be jumped with the banks of country-B before they'd be issued.
So these are the only options for getting access to such a payment server. Either:
- company X forms a country-B subsidiary XB, that goes through the process of applying for the certs and setting up the payment server; or
- company X pays existing country-B-local payments company Y to use their payments server to do the money-moving-around for them; or
- company X pays multinational payments company Z to provide them a country-agnostic interface for moving money around; when requested by X to perform a country-B transaction, Z will then either signal the servers of their existing country-B-local subsidiary ZB — or will pass the message to their country-B-transaction-partner Y — to do the real money-moving around.
Anything that seemingly doesn't have one of these three fundamental shapes — but which still results in a company in country-A moving around money in a country-B bank account — is just window-dressing on top of underlying infrastructure that does have one of these shapes.
> it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines
Strange - here in Lapu-Lapu, a too-nasty salesperson has convinced me (a foreigner) to enter a contract to buy a not-yet-built condo unit. I just pay a certain amount every month using my bank account, they get the money, and on an agreed-upon date, the unit will be mine. I can go at any time and watch how the construction work proceeds. So far, their proposed date looks like a reasonable expectation of when the unit will be ready.
In other words, it's the same process as in my former home country.
Extremely fine point of distinction that's important here: a condo is treated as real-estate, but it isn't. (Condo ownership is really more of a transferrable, indefinite exclusive use-right.) Real-estate is fundamentally about buying and selling plots of land, and is only coincidentally about what's sitting on those plots. Buying a condo doesn't put you in top-level possession of a plot of land; even if the building is a residential co-op, what you'd get would be equity in a corporation that holds the plot of land. For non co-op buildings, you don't even get that.
For legal and tax purposes, most countries do abstract over the separate low-level concepts of plot-of-land ownership and condo ownership, resulting in a legal ADT called a "lot"; where each "lot" has its own title that can only be transferred through a notarized process; has yearly property taxes levied against it in proportion to its market value; etc. This isn't a natural abstraction, though — just a common legal "interface" used by the government to manage instances of the two separate underlying contractual implementations. Those implementations still each have their own separate laws that apply to them.
Which brings me to the point: foreigners are forbidden from owning plots of land in the Philippines.
That doesn't stop you from owning a condo — because buying a condo doesn't translate to buying any land.
But you can't legally buy a house in the Philippines — since that purchase would come with land. (Or rather, is a purchase of land, where that land happens to at this moment have a house on it.)
Instead, to do something equivalent to buying a house, you'd need
1. a Philippines citizen (a real proxy person) to buy the house for you, and then assign you
3. possession of the "materials that make up all current structures built on the land" (so you can tear the house down, if you like), and
4. the right to build whatever other new structures you like on the land, and use them for whatever purposes you see fit, including subletting.
(I'm actually not sure whether there's any legal instrument the proxy-person can grant you that would allow you to apply to re-zone "your" land. They might have to apply for that in your stead!)
Thanks for writing this up — that's a really interesting perspective on the problem, and definitely worth pondering. I'm not familiar with the underpinnings of cross-country payments so I'll just take your description as valid.
I think it's not completely incompatible with my view, though: if you don't have a country B subsidiary (the assumption underlying this entire discussion!) then the most country B can do is tell the payment processing company you're contracting with to stop doing business with you. That's completely fair and I see it as a kind of "financial firewall" for country B.
Even this power is subject to some checks and balances, though:
1. If your service/site is popular, country B's population may object to no longer being able to do business with you and put pressure on country B's government.
2. You could bypass the financial system with crypto payments. (Yeah, not terribly practical for most use cases, but could become more popular in case of government overreach.)
3. Ad-supported businesses — like the one in the original article, apparently — are immune to this kind of intervention!
Ultimately, a country can only control entities with a physical presence inside its borders, and while some common commercial architectures necessitate this (to some degree) not all do. Countries that make laws that pretend otherwise just end up looking silly.
Yes that is how it works. If you want your website to be available in a country, you need to follow local laws. Otherwise, they can shut you down.
It is different in terms of enforcement for someone running a server in their apartment and a corporation. And it depends on the law broken. If you’re running a piracy server in Haiti, the US government can decide they want to shut you down. But if it’s something minor, the government will just ignore you. Companies are different because they’re easier to target when it comes to enforcement.
Reminder, that this was in response to the Supreme Court of Brazil ordering this platform to remove certain users. They don’t need to build a firewall, this can be dealt with using international treaties and laws. US government often cracks down on websites that break US law without building a firewall. There are other levers to doing it.
Also, they don’t need a firewall, ISPs can block domain names (which the courts can force them to since they operate in the country) very easily and is used across the world.
I would include ordering blocking by local ISPs in "build a firewall". It seems what has happened here is Rumble is doing the blocking. A mechanism existing by which Brazil can force a company with no presence in Brazil to block access to web content strikes me as problematic.
Of course when a company is trying to do business in a country, it needs relationships with local companies, access to banking and payment infrastructure, etc... and governments can certainly prevent those from doing business with it. It doesn't sound like that's the issue here though.
If there is a mechanism by which the government of Brazil can force a company based in the USA or Canada to block visitors to its website, I would like to know the details so I can advocate that the USA withdraw from the relevant treaty. I'd apply the same logic to the USA trying to force foreign websites to shut down or block visitors from the USA.
A court order would have forced all Brazilian ISP's or the international peering operators on Brazilian soil to block it - Rumble simply pre-empted it to make drama around free speech.
I remember when free speech was an ideal that was universally recognized as crucial to a functioning democracy.
"Making drama" by refusing to participate in a censorship program strikes me as admirable.
What a strange world we live in where so many people sneer at the concept of free exchange and the marketplace of ideas, and those that seek to support it.
US concepts are NOT universal - in South Africa we have strong laws against racist hate speech - call somebody a local slur for black person (k word) here you going to get prosecuted and fined and perhaps even jail never mind being dragged on social media.
We call it "crimen injuria" in our laws - right to dignity is defined in our constitution and frankly this has NO place in our society considering our history.
You don't remember when free speech was an ideal for democratic societies?
You must live in a very different world than I do.
"the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom." - John Locke
Certainly never been in the US. The US decides holocaust denial is fine, but saying “I’m going to kill the President” isn’t. Other countries have different views. The US is happy to arrest people who work for companies who disagree with US limits on free speech who happen to visit the US (Skylarov), and even to use its economic might to get other countries to uphold its anti free speech agenda (Kim Dot Com)
Define "wants to do business in the EU". If a US-based and targeted site gets one single visitor from the EU, are they now "doing business" there? Your reply is eactly the sort of vague handwaving about.
Generally, no. It's more about (for example) selling ads to EU companies. The narrative is about EU users but the leverage is via the EU advertisement business.
Can’t they just kindly reply “no” to any foreign governments requests? I’m confused why shutting off all access was the answer when they’re not (to my knowledge) operating in Brazil
To answer: Brazil can't specifically enforce what it asked for. Brazil isn't demanding the entire website to be blocked, it is demanding certain users to be blocked. This can only be done at the website level (nobody is gonna build a "Great Firewall" just for this).
What a court in Brazil can do in case of a "no", is then block the whole website, often done in simple ways (DNS) at local ISPs. It can also put the burden on local representatives of Rumble in Brazil, as it did with Facebook in the past (this means jail time for not complying with a court order).
In theory some people below mentioned that it can also forbid local Brazilian entities from performing commerce with the entity (like eg: fining advertisers paying for ads, or the advertise), but I'm not sure how that would work, since I'm not a lawyer.
Ok, thanks, I too was looking for this answer. What is the logic in voluntarily shutting down? Simply to preempt a ruling that would bar them from operating? Additionally, it would help stop the potential for action against Brazilian individuals and businesses who I guess could use a VPN which would be a gray area currently?
I can only speculate. Trying to get publicity? Wanting to comply with the court order without censoring individual streamers? Just moving away from a problem? No idea.
What generally happens when an international service refuses to comply with a court order in Brazil is a temporary blocking that must be enforced by ISPs. Often it is DNS blocking, trivial to circumvent. Sometimes IP-level blocking, often also easy (via VPNs).
This often works and rarely lasted more than a day. I don't think I was ever personally affected by one of those blockings when I was in the country.
I don't really remember any case where a large server failed to comply and remained blocked.
EDIT: There are things that were blocked and remained blocked forever, but they're often things like piracy, CSAM sites... which are things that often get blocked even in the USA. Sometimes this is a harsher block directly at the host of the website, either via court order when it's a Brazilian host, or because international laws were broken, or because the host simply complied.
Ultimately, the only thing Brazil can do is take action on entities inside of Brazil. So yes, Rumble could just say on and put the ball back in Brazil's court for them to block Rumble or go after Brazilian advertisers.
I don't know, but the end result of that sounds a whole lot similar to what Rumble's doing right now. Therefore, I'd say that for other websites in similar positions, they could just send Brazil's mad demandz to the junk pile.
They're a website. "Not actively blocking IPs" is literally the business they're in. If you think it's a low bar, then why bother to argue about it on the internet? Clearly you think they were doing something impactful, why is that not "business"?
> 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.
If free speech doesn't work in some particular culture, then it's that culture that needs to be discarded, not free speech.
You'll be surprised to learn that the way free speech exists in the US doesn't really exist in most other countries. In many western countries, hate speech, racism and nazism are prohibited speeches.
To add to this, I’d say as a European that I’m more concerned with the US limiting speech than our own laws. The US is good at excercising its diplomatic, trade and military power to prevent other countries from wielding free speech wrong.
Trading with Iran is one example of that. You can be effectively shut out from the financial system of the world if you decide to ignore US sanctions, even when you don’t have entities, customers, suppliers, or employees in the US. Cuba and Panama’s existence are other examples of when countries ignored the US and paid the price.
I don’t think the US is particularly evil or anything like that, but true free speech is a whole lot easier to safeguard when you’re not relying on the patronage of a superpower. And today, most countries either are a superpower in their own might or rely on one for participation in the global economy and modern world.
…and there’s some cruel irony in suggesting the dismantling of a culture to leave room for free speech. I believe any sort of sustainable freedom of speech will have to grow organically into the culture. And that unfortunately takes time.
Okay that argument makes sense. The culture cannot change overnight when majority of your population is not educated. So what do you propose we do till then? Give free speech to everyone and let it all burn down?
Seeing some your nuts in the US in positions of power - Jewish Space Lasers and QAnon adherents it shows me how unregulated free speech don't work so well.
It might have been the case when the reach was the next town by donkey but in this day and age all it takes is an unhinged person to start a new cult around kids being molested at a Pizza Palour.
It's not even unregulated, libel and defamation are illegal for example. They've just grown up with those speech restrictions and so they don't view them as a threat. This is the essence of conservatism, whatever exists is good and whatever is different is bad. Reasons are then created to justify the predetermined conclusion that the current balance of speech restrictions is perfectly correct.
Paraphrasing XKCD 1357: citing "free speech" is bad, because it's admitting that the best argument you have is "it's not literally illegal to say this".
And when it's literally about Nazis (it seems like it always is) ... Rumble isn't the one looking like they have standards here.
Free speech is the only exception. Bad ideas can be rooted out with good ideas. Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work. It is a pure waste of everything.
It is not. You’re used to countries with strong law and order. Countries where this doesn’t exist, free speech often leads to devastating results.
> Banning opinions have never worked ever and it will never work.
It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
Edit: Before everyone just points to communist states as what happens when you have censorship, you also need to acknowledge the extreme violence that happens when speech is unrestricted in every case. For example Rohingya genocide was fueled by unrestricted “opinions” on the internet.
https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Besides, some form of restrictions on speech absolutely exist everywhere in the world. People look at censorship as either complete freedom or Soviet Russia, but in reality middle ground does exist.
>Countries where this doesn’t exist, free speech often leads to devastating results
Never anything as bad as the murder of tens of millions of their own citizens committed in countries with no free speech like Stalin's Russia and Mao's China.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany
If that's your metric for success it's absolutely failed, given the "Alternative for Deutschland" is now polling at over 20%.
As much as I personally dislike the AfD, claiming they're breaking the law by doing Nazi propaganda is going a bit too far.
They definitely straddle the line, but no court has judged them as Nazi yet. There were however other parties, like ANS, NO and FAP (amazing name) that were banned in Germany because of that. Perhaps that's why AfD has wised up.
If you have a government unwilling or unable to even enforce the laws against violence, they will be similarly unwilling or unable to enforce the laws against thoughtcrime, or will enforce them against the victims of the atrocity.
Or you've got a case of someone in country A filing suit over something happening in country A under the laws of country B. Now what is the company supposed to do if the laws in country A and country B conflict? Was following the laws in the country where they're operating (i.e. the country committing the atrocity) the outcome you wanted? What about leaving that country, so that people there have to use a service which is in that country?
"Everybody has free speech" doesn't solve every problem, but censorship doesn't solve any of those problems either, it just creates wicked new problems.
The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech. The argument that censorship creates new problems is true, however there are absolute cases when censorship is needed. In this case, it was the country’s Supreme Court requesting removal of users and it was related to speech causing violence. The same request would have been completely legal in US as well.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech.
No it doesn't. The First Amendment constrains the government from prohibiting most speech. It doesn't require any speech to be prohibited. If the US Congress wanted to be free speech absolutists, they wouldn't have to change the constitution.
> there are absolute cases when censorship is needed.
There are cases where most countries sanction it. That doesn't prove that it's needed.
Can you even name a case where it would be necessary as opposed to being possible to solve through e.g. vigorous enforcement of the laws against violence?
You're also avoiding the question. Sure, sometimes the same thing is illegal in both the US and China, but that's not the common case for free speech questions.
And putting aside the absolutist position, that's not even what you're arguing for here. The government can punish a direct speaker for imminent incitement of violence without imposing a prior restraint or putting intermediary liability on a third party who is merely a common carrier.
It does because I learned this in the law class I took in undergrad. A quick google search would’ve told you that there are limitations to first amendment.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech
It does no such thing. It prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of speech. Congress is not required to make any laws constraining speech, even if it is allowed to, and the First Amendment itself does not prohibit any speech.
> The constitution of United States, in the first Amendment prohibits certain speech, speech inciting violence is one of those prohibited speech.
It does? Here's the full text of the First Amendment:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Which part of it says that? I don't see it anywhere.
>It absolutely works. There’s a reason Nazi propaganda is banned in Germany.
You can't know that for sure. If Nazi propaganda was not banned and the Nazi never took over again then free speech would work as well. We just don't know if banning speech has made less people pro Nazi.
you're 100% correct. seeing comments like yours downvoted and greyed out makes me very worried for the state of the internet, i can't tell if it's bots or people have really begun to believe that free speech isn't a fundamental pillar of democracy.
The battle against free speech (I am in favour of free speech) has been being furiously waged pretty much since the concept was enshrined in law. The fact that the US 1st amendment still stands and appears to be broadly respected is very much the exception, not the rule.
"When our opponents say: Well, we used to grant you the [...] freedom of opinion - yes, you to us, but that is no reason that we should do the same to you! [...] That you gave it to us - well that is proof of how stupid you are!"
The take above is a classic well-meaning, but ill-informed opinion from an American with a lack of understanding of how the Nazis actually operated and how they could've been stopped.
Let's not act as if free speech doesn't have various definitions and limitations even in the land of the free. You can't get two Americans to agree to the same definition.
When our opponents say: Well, we used to grant you the [...] freedom of opinion - yes, you to us, but that is no reason that we should do the same to you! [...] That you gave it to us - well that is proof of how stupid you are!
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.
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.
>Clever how censors have convinced people that they are the good guys
It's not that clever; they control all the information and ideas that a significant fraction of the population are exposed to, it'd be surprising if they didn't manage to paint themselves in a positive light.
Unless it's censorship [1] they don't like, in which case they call it book-burning. And we all know who burned books, don't we?
[1] The bar to be called that can be as low or high as needed. Book publishers, online stores, credit cards, and social media platforms banning a person can be just "freedom of association", but not giving government support to a work by placing it in school libraries is censorship. You can take a guess at how many books that Amazon won't sell are on school library shelves. Yet that's not censorship.
> And it's not always a reactionary act. It's sometimes for pragmatic reasons - to prevent or curtail a non-ideological issue.
Literally all of the examples in #Cold_War_era_and_1990s either were explicitly ideological, or seem plausibly likely to have been ideological, and the latter are all along the lines of "Well, they might have had a personal grudge against the author." or "We don't have any idea why they commited arson against a library.". Do you have any specific examples of attempted curtailment of a non-ideological issue? (No, "but our ideology is RIGHT!" doesn't count; denying people that shortcut is more or less the point of free speech.)
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.