I just don’t understand the insistence on targeting the woke demographic instead of core gamers. They’ve repeatedly shown that they are masters in the complaining department, but when it comes to buying diversity-infused games, they are a no-show.
The fines were applied under illegal pretenses. It’s like a castle built on sand.
And X is not entirely safe from being blocked. The messaging app Telegram suffered similar judicial abuses by the same judge during the 2022 elections. Telegram did not have legal representation in Brazil, but the judge threatened to block Telegram in Brazil anyway if they did not establish an office to officially receive his orders there. Then he began his usual judicial harassment campaign against Telegram: secret orders to block dissidents, daily fines, summoning the company’s representatives to testify before the Federal Police, and so on.
At the time, the Supreme Court was openly promoting a legislative bill that would facilitate their censorship efforts. In practice, this proposed law would dismantle the DMCA-like takedown request system that shields platforms from responsibility for user-generated content, something U.S. users take for granted. Please note how absurd it is for the judicial branch to sponsor a legislative bill: it blurs the separation of powers.
The same bill included provisions to appease big media conglomerates, as it would force Google to pay for news snippets on Google Search and Google News. It would also require Netflix to pay residuals to Brazilian actors, even if past contracts did not stipulate anything of the sort. And since the right-wing political spectrum would be the most negatively affected by a censored internet (traditional media is already pro-left), the left-wing portion of parliament also supported this bill. A large consortium was formed in defense of the bill: the Supreme Court, traditional media, artists, left-wing politicians, and the left-wing Executive government itself.
However, Google and Telegram opposed the bill as it interfered with their business and would incentivize arbitrary censorship. Both companies published prominent Op-Eds on their homepages, warning about the severe consequences of this bill. In Telegram’s case, a message was sent to all users criticizing the bill. The Supreme Court judge was livid and ordered Google and Telegram to remove the Op-Eds, accusing them of political interference (as if the Supreme Court was not doing the same by advocating for the bill’s approval). Note that there is no law forbidding companies from expressing their opinions on their platforms; the judge was simply unhinged and fabricated this accusation. The judge even summoned Google’s local CEO to testify before the Federal Police to intimidate the company.
Is being a pro-free speech platform anti-democratic?
If you’re trying to say that some of X’s users are “threatening democracy,” there are already laws in Brazil to address this without resorting to illegality.
The law states that platforms are only required to remove content by a court order, and the content to be removed must be specified. The Supreme Court judge I referred to earlier was blocking entire accounts, which amounts to “preventive censorship,” clearly prohibited by the Brazilian Constitution.
Moreover, this judge created a parallel judicial system where he denies citizens the right to be tried by their local judges: the process goes directly to his desk, and he acts as both prosecutor and judge simultaneously. It’s a gross violation of the principle of due process.
They’re just shutting down their local offices in Brazil, which are primarily used to represent X legally.
This is happening because a Supreme Court judge is conducting an inquiry to persecute those he deems propagators of fake news. In most legal systems, it would be considered highly illegal for a judge to conduct an investigative inquiry. It is also illegal in Brazil, but the other members of Supreme Court authorized this inquiry (“in the name of democracy”) and turned a blind eye for all its absurd consequences.
This judge doesn’t need the prosecutor’s office or any private individual to initiate the proceedings. The scope of this inquiry is very broad (fake news as a whole) and has no expiration date, making it potentially eternal. In some cases, he himself is supposedly a victim of fake news, which means this judge potentially occupies three roles: judge, prosecutor, and victim. As a result, ordinary citizens in Brazil can be “summoned” to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction immediately if the accusations are connected to this Fake News inquiry. Since the Supreme Court is the final jurisdiction for appeals, people unfortunate enough to get caught in this arbitrariness lose the right to appeal the decisions of a judge that is also the de facto prosecutor.
A few days ago, there were some leaks showing this judge’s assistants being asked to write reports against some individuals and news organizations that the judge wants to prosecute. In one instance, where there was no wrongdoing to report about a certain right-wing newspaper, the judge replied to his assistant: “Just look for some spicy allegations and be creative”. So this judge is using his superpowers to direct the investigation to serve his own ends, which mostly involves silencing critics of the Supreme Court and himself.
His most recent power trip involves sending secret orders to X’s Brazilian legal offices, demanding some accounts be blocked, and asking for all information related to these accounts. The judge stipuled daily fines for disobedience. But X’s Brazilian workers don’t have direct control of which accounts are blocked or not, so they tried to appeal to the full Supreme Court judges (which so far has not responded), and no account was blocked or doxxed. The judge then raised the daily fines further and threatened to jail X’s chief lawyer in Brazil, even though this lawyer has no control over what happens to X’s accounts. It’s as if he were threatening to arrest a lawyer for the supposed crimes of his client. To protect these workers from unfair arrests, Elon Musk laid off all workers from X’s local offices in Brazil, effectively closing all operations in the country.
The site and the app will continue working until the judge comes up with some bullshit reason to order all Brazilian ISPs to block access to X’s servers.
I’m a user of the fork “NewPipe Sponsorblock”, and so far I received no update.
That’s an awful decision by Twilo. I deliberately only install Authy on my Desktop computers because they’re always at home and cannot be easily stolen/lost like my phone.
I feel like if this article was written with no mention of Arabs, Muslins or Palestinians employees, but just mentioned employees in general fearing being retaliated, Sugarfree’s comment would still stand nonetheless. And I kind of agree that if they fear expressing their opinions it’s because their opinions are too extreme and they know it. I mean, the “from the river to the sea” kind of opinion.
What’s being proposed is that the extension would modify the page to add a Lemmy frame for commenting. This frame is autonomous in the sense the user must provide his Lemmy login information for it to work, which is different from Google login information. Google is not even aware the page is being modified by an external comment section, and even if it could detect it, it wouldn’t be able to track individual users.
I read a variation of this news in the past where there was some major controversy about Google accounts that have active YouTube channels with videos uploaded to it. The solution is that Google would not delete inactive accounts if they have uploaded YouTube videos on it. I just don’t know of this policy still stands or if they changed their minds.
They should put the gift card through a scanner and send the image. If it’s that easy, charging for it is asshole-ish for sure.
This is extremely true for modern social media sites. Normal news sites used to push their apps too, but I guess this fad has passed.
Some banking apps are asking for live-selfies for authentication, so it’s not entirely useless.
So the writing’s on the wall: Imgur will sooner or later intensify its enshitification, so it’s not safe relying on it for image/gif uploads for Lemmy…
If I may ask, what’s the difference between those two you mentioned and “Active”?
Perhaps these communities you follow from remote instances are not very active, so your subscriptions from lemmy.world (which tend to be larger and more active communities) are obscuring them.
I suggest you change the sorting order to “New”. I found that the default “Active” sorting always shows the same trending topics for days. Reddit also had this lazy refresh cadence with its “Hot” sorting, but to a lesser extent.
If they’re not clear about this, I’d assume the language their sidebar is written on is the official language of the instance.
I’m more motivated to participate when there’s fewer comments. On Reddit I often refrained from commenting when I noticed the other commenters already covered the point I wanted to make.
I read its characters got woke designs and it cast a bad reputation on the game, like it was a game made for DEI pandering.
But that’s just part of it. I guess it’s the Live Service Gaming fatigue, and this game didn’t bring anything new to the table to set it apart from Overwatch.