>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
Brazilian electoral law tries to ensure all candidates have equitable access to media air time prior to the election. This filtering apparently exists to prevent distortions like X itself pushing candidates.
But incumbents have a natural advantage, right? So any type of control trying to ensure similar levels of access is clearly going to be to the advantage of incumbents.
It is interesting that attitudes, laws and initiatives that would be called "censorship" against traditional media are more and more accepted against social media platforms, all over the world in very democratic countries.
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 targets subversion. Censors seek to prevent the spread of antiestablishment information and ideas. So one can hardly claim that a universal ban on algorithmic recommendation for all candidates is censorship.
Even if we use an all-encompassing definition of censorship, this still doesn't quite qualify. It's just preventing the recommendation algorithms from working on the politician accounts. The accounts themselves were not censored.
It's still called censorship when it's against a social media company.
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.
I miss his feuds with the supreme court. Trump actually got the judges sanctioned under Magnitsky too, then dropped the sanctions not too long after. No clue if Elon helped with that.
Do you know if this applies to explicitly partisan media, such as media directly funded or run by political parties? Many newspapers in the US used to be openly run by political factions, a century ago.
Anyone sensible doesn't call this censorship. It might sound complicated if you live in a country where elections are won by who spends most money for airtime, but granting candidates equal airtime on traditional media is how it works if you want to hold normal elections. Since that can't work on algorithmic platforms where everyone sees different content, you just block their reach to avoid anyone gaming it.
Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.
Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.
> It might sound complicated if you live in a country where elections are won by who spends most money for airtime
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.
Seems Brazil's court (the TSE) banned platforms from recommending (via 'feeds' and similar) ~700 accounts related to its election, to avoid 'amplification' (unless the user already follows the account, in which case it's permitted).
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.
> But if I were Brazillian, I'd be immediately following all ~700 accounts (and probably unfollowing all 700 after the election).
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.
> But if I were Brazillian, I'd be immediately following all ~700 accounts (and probably unfollowing all 700 after the election).
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.
Your reasoning sounds like levels upon levels of paranoia. Read out loud to yourself what you are saying. You're saying that it's 1. Good to limit certain people from being heard and 2. Bad to let the public know which people have been censored.
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.
Well Musk has interfered in elections and riots before so it’s definitely a good idea to hold him under extremely close scrutiny. Being the world’s richest person and one of the most powerful influencers comes with responsibility, a responsibility that Musk has shown to be lacking.
Sure, but what does this have to do with what I wrote? The other poster is arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to know who has been censored. That's deep into 1984 or Soviet / Chinese censorship territory.
> That's deep into 1984 or Soviet / Chinese censorship territory.
Not if you consider the context of external influence, e.g. [1], and not wanting a Jan 6 in Brazil. Not letting such know their efforts are ineffective, is a tool to combat their effort. It is akin to shadowbanning.
Amplification of radical right by external entities is nothing new, btw. Russia did this in 2016. Musk does it now. But Musk won't show those parts of his machine. He still does shadowbanning, too.
Why not let them say whatever they want, but just cancel the election after the fact if you feel like the result endangers democracy? It’s worked before. It seems a little more honest and above-board, as well. No smoke-filled back rooms, just “election cancelled”.
That is exactly how the Soviet control apparatus reasoned. They were protecting the motherland from external influence. Your reasoning doesn't differ from theirs in any way at all. You are completely aligned. Don't you think the Soviets were just as paranoid about external influence? While doing it themselves to other countries.
Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections). The control fantasies of hackers aren't aligned to reality in this affair. Only aligned to Soviet doctrines which have been obsoleted for 40 years now.
Your Soviet comparisons are a dishonest take. They're also moot, since an issue would be authoritarianism. Regardless, yes, authorities need to exercise their authority to ensure the integrity of elections. It is difficult to do this in a fair way, and regardless it will stir controversy (another vector to throw oil on).
The external influences are documented. We know the Russians meddled with elections in The Netherlands (the 2016 Ukraine referendum), Romania (recently), Brexit, Trump 2016 (via the Clinton hack), 2020, and 2024, and likely also Hungary. In regards to Romania, yes the elections were repeated. That thing tends to happen when elections are fraudulent.
> Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections).
Because it is about a local law regarding airtime. A law Musk doesn't respect. But because now it requires an active action of the mark to get into a propaganda tarpit, instead of the timeline, it is a reasonable deterrent.
You are not putting in effort. I haven't argued here against the measures by the election tribunals. I have argued against the commenter who wants secret censorship - specifically that the public shouldn't know who has been censored or why. That is his own suggestion - which would fit in the Soviet Union, but not in Brazilian elections.
There is no such secrecy within these measures in Brazil. The accounts are limited specifically by function of belonging to political candidates. The election tribunals - the censors - want the public to know who has been limited and why. As does X. And it has nothing at all to do with any supposedly foreign influence, as hackers are dreaming up in their paranoia. Foreigners cannot run for political office.
But I've noticed that people - especially on HN - will frequently use paranoia as an excuse for not making any mental effort or taking the time to understand what an article or discussion is about. Always looking to steer anything and everything into familiar thought channels where there's an already familiar conclusion, and a familiar enemy to hate.
> But because now it requires an active action of the mark...
I think people misunderstand what democracy is. To many people they think democracy is a resistance against, ultimately, the Nazis again. The West is structured this way. Post WWII we had a quiet revolution around this. It seems so ingrained people don't even think about it.
To many people, they believe there is a constant and persistent threat of Nazis and that it is the duty of enlightened government officials to continuously stage interventions to stop them. They think people are the problem so it is good to be totalitarian. It is kind of a type of paranoia it's just widely accepted as fact and it's a part of Western institutional ethos.
They’re not propagandists, they’re the official accounts of candidates in the election. I don’t see any problem with this as long as it’s applied to all candidates equally.
These laws don't "protect democracy," even the most charitable interpretation of them is that they protect liberal values against democracy. They're inherently counter-majoritarian. Democracy doesn't mean liberalism. E.g. If Iran's ayatollah was elected by free and fair elections, but otherwise the country's laws and policies were the same, that would still be democracy.
Ultimately the only antidote to US propaganda is nationalism. Anyone in my country who is caught funded with US money may as well hang themselves they are electorally dead as a dodo.
This to be fair is why the CIA had to move suitcases with money instead of bragging about it on Fox News...
antidote to US propaganda is anti-US propaganda :)
nationalism doesn't oppose US if US has bought all the nationalist movement (like f.e. in Ukraine circa 2014) - you get all the minuses of totalitarianism without all the bonuses of independence from US
They didn't ban recommendations because they thought it was a "good idea".
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.
To make reality comply with a specific government's jurisdiction is such an absurd proposition, that people would've laughed at someone 100 years ago if they suggested this as a practical option.
> Instead of applying the law, the supreme court decided to legislate...
Actual quote from an actual laywer I knew, one of my professors, around 10 years ago.
My legal medicine professor, who was a doctor and a cop, was onto something as well:
> Doctors think they're gods, judges know.
Here's another interesting thing an actual lawyer once told me to my face:
> Judges = gods in this country, and supreme court judges even more so.
This is nothing new, it's been going on for decades and decades. Anyone who deals with legal matters can see it. Start observing and you too will see the pattern of judicial activism. Every single occurrence of it is a small coup against the representatives we actually elected.
flipbrad | a day ago
Cider9986 | a day ago
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
matheusmoreira | a day ago
Sounds good to me. Filtering all recommendations is fair, and they are not censoring the profiles.
jfoster | a day ago
gpm | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
jfoster | a day ago
marcosdumay | a day ago
Proportionally to their incumbency.
Some company distorting the reach is way worse than favoring the incumbents. But the access is not even supposed to be equitable.
delduca | a day ago
diego_moita | a day ago
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.
surgical_fire | a day ago
And those platforms are absolutely agents of American imperialism. Latin American countries in particular should be very wary of these.
pocksuppet | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
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.
pocksuppet | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
pocksuppet | 18 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
surgical_fire | a day ago
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.
pocksuppet | a day ago
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.
matheusmoreira | a day ago
matheusmoreira | a day ago
Censorship is deletion of the candidate's social media presence.
Xirdus | a day ago
iamnothere | a day ago
well_ackshually | a day ago
Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.
Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.
tt24 | a day ago
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.
marcosdumay | a day ago
nomilk | a day ago
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.
Shank | a day ago
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.
Fnoord | a day ago
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.
carlosjobim | a day ago
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.
mschuster91 | a day ago
carlosjobim | a day ago
Fnoord | a day ago
Not if you consider the context of external influence, e.g. [1], and not wanting a Jan 6 in Brazil. Not letting such know their efforts are ineffective, is a tool to combat their effort. It is akin to shadowbanning.
Amplification of radical right by external entities is nothing new, btw. Russia did this in 2016. Musk does it now. But Musk won't show those parts of his machine. He still does shadowbanning, too.
[1] https://medium.com/dfrlab/election-fraud-narratives-surge-on...
iamnothere | a day ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
iamnothere | 6 hours ago
carlosjobim | a day ago
Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections). The control fantasies of hackers aren't aligned to reality in this affair. Only aligned to Soviet doctrines which have been obsoleted for 40 years now.
Fnoord | 20 hours ago
The external influences are documented. We know the Russians meddled with elections in The Netherlands (the 2016 Ukraine referendum), Romania (recently), Brexit, Trump 2016 (via the Clinton hack), 2020, and 2024, and likely also Hungary. In regards to Romania, yes the elections were repeated. That thing tends to happen when elections are fraudulent.
> Fortunately in this case of Brazilian elections, there is nothing secret about the list of accounts which have been limited. The censors are very open about who has their account limited and why (all political candidates during elections).
Because it is about a local law regarding airtime. A law Musk doesn't respect. But because now it requires an active action of the mark to get into a propaganda tarpit, instead of the timeline, it is a reasonable deterrent.
carlosjobim | 7 hours ago
There is no such secrecy within these measures in Brazil. The accounts are limited specifically by function of belonging to political candidates. The election tribunals - the censors - want the public to know who has been limited and why. As does X. And it has nothing at all to do with any supposedly foreign influence, as hackers are dreaming up in their paranoia. Foreigners cannot run for political office.
But I've noticed that people - especially on HN - will frequently use paranoia as an excuse for not making any mental effort or taking the time to understand what an article or discussion is about. Always looking to steer anything and everything into familiar thought channels where there's an already familiar conclusion, and a familiar enemy to hate.
> But because now it requires an active action of the mark...
The "mark"? Are you talking about voters?
onetimeusename | 22 hours ago
To many people, they believe there is a constant and persistent threat of Nazis and that it is the duty of enlightened government officials to continuously stage interventions to stop them. They think people are the problem so it is good to be totalitarian. It is kind of a type of paranoia it's just widely accepted as fact and it's a part of Western institutional ethos.
bspammer | a day ago
rayiner | a day ago
NooneAtAll3 | a day ago
PearlRiver | a day ago
This to be fair is why the CIA had to move suitcases with money instead of bragging about it on Fox News...
rayiner | a day ago
Ironic, isn't it?
NooneAtAll3 | 5 hours ago
nationalism doesn't oppose US if US has bought all the nationalist movement (like f.e. in Ukraine circa 2014) - you get all the minuses of totalitarianism without all the bonuses of independence from US
airstrike | a day ago
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.
Zenul_Abidin | a day ago
airstrike | a day ago
It is almost a perfect definition of sovereignty—to shape reality such that it fits what the state deems appropriate.
This by no means imply it's perfectly effective, but that's besides the point. We're debating what the state ought to do, not whether it succeeds.
matheusmoreira | a day ago
The brazilian judiciary legislates on a daily basis.
maleldil | a day ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
Actual quote from an actual laywer I knew, one of my professors, around 10 years ago.
My legal medicine professor, who was a doctor and a cop, was onto something as well:
> Doctors think they're gods, judges know.
Here's another interesting thing an actual lawyer once told me to my face:
> Judges = gods in this country, and supreme court judges even more so.
This is nothing new, it's been going on for decades and decades. Anyone who deals with legal matters can see it. Start observing and you too will see the pattern of judicial activism. Every single occurrence of it is a small coup against the representatives we actually elected.
etchalon | a day ago
Georgelemental | a day ago
cantfixstupid | a day ago
marcosdumay | a day ago
tene80i | a day ago
backtr4ck | 14 hours ago