Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data.
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. I think the judge is reaching a bit but I don't know much about Brazil's legal code. Common law countries tend to be extremely accommodating of business entities because they're obsessed with procedure (imho) to the detriment of doing any enforcement. Civil law jurisdictions take the approach of 'we need compliance up front, we can quibble about legal liability afterwards.' Common law countries demand high levels of personal accountability but have elaborate mechanics for distributing accountability across organizations that (again imho) allow the creation of private quasi-sovereignty, and they maintain this in part because it attracts capital to those countries.
I think I once read an interesting term for "rule through courts" in reference to Islamic/sharia courts (which also had some tribal significance iirc) in Somalia who acted as the de facto after the central govt collapsed. I can't find it again.
Yes. Supreme court judge mandates are essentially lifetime. There's no fixed term, only way they leave is when they're forced to retire at 75 years old. They're just now trying to limit it to 8 years.
The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Its sole purpose is to attack certain institutions and/or governments, while excluding other institutions and governments from criticism even though they share most or all of the same characteristics.
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
> Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?"
They are not. Censorship is unconstitutional in Brazil, especially that of a political nature. Yet I don't think it's been a month since I last saw news of some politician being banned from holding office because they posted "fake news" online or something.
Basically the strategy now is to criminalize "fake news", accuse your opponents of spreading it and deplatform them because criminals can't hold political office. Show me the man, I'll show you the crime.
You make many good points but this is absurd: The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything.
Of course it does, you can quantify the degree to which a country is authoritarian even if it has nominally democratic institutions like North Korea or Iraq under the Ba'ath party. To be sure, the word is bandied about a lot in political discourse as in the comment you replied to, but it is well-defined.
Measure legislative independence, frequency of regime changes, election margins, concentrations of executive authority and so on. Sure, it's a 'political opinion' that nobody is so cool they are naturally re-elected over and over with 97%+ majorities, but you can certainly measure the number of standard deviations in election results.
This book is readable and essays a rigorous approach to the topic, albeit within an existing political science/international relations framework whose axioms are not universally agreed upon.
Most of these things cannot be "measured", and weighing them to produce some kind of aggregate score is inherently a biased process. There isn't any remotely agreed upon method to determine what constitutes an authoritarian government (or even where a specific government falls on a scale between authoritarian and democracy, when compared to others).
In some aspects, Switzerland is more authoritarian than Saudi Arabia. For example, in Switzerland there are strict building codes everywhere that restrict what kind of house you are allowed to build for yourself; in most of Saudi Arabia, you can build your house however you want. The very idea of a scale that somehow "measures" such things, and adequately incorporates them into a coherent picture of the whole, is absurd.
Any evaluation process is subject to accusations of bias, including yours above:
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?"
Instead of just nay-saying and trying to redirect the argument, you could try engaging with the question of what a dictatorship is as a political structure. Or not, as you prefer.
Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content.
When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.
Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.
A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
Sorry, but if one is directly stating nazi ideals, symbols, denying the ocurrence of hate crimes, spreading information on how to create weapons and more effectively invade schools to "go for the high score", one isn't a gay rights activist. It's a nazi.
It's not a situation where people who just didn't get enough information (or downright wackos) can try and relativize the contents. It's quite, quite clear.
Assuming good faith, most developed countries have hate (and similar) speech laws, with Nazism being explicitly banned in most (all? maybe Spain/Portugal/Switzerland are exceptions) of Europe. Same goes for antisemitism, or in general racial/religious hatred/discrimination to various extents. It's not a slippery slope "oh what will they ban next", it's "this kind of thing has proven itself to be extremely dangerous and is detrimental to everyone, hence it's banned". And it has been for decades, and nobody has just added gay activists, including in very anti-LGBTQ countries like Poland.
You might also want to look up the paradox of tolerance, it's a fun read.
"""In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."""
The threshold can be as high as 'would society collapse if these people are tolerated', and not as low as 'they're intolerant, so I don't have to tolerate them'.
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf