Trying to figure out how to monitor online interaction has become one of the primary irritations for a number of countries' authorities. As I've argued a number of times they've had relatively limited success over the last few years due to technological advances as well as having trouble trying to specifically define what hate speech or what misinformation might mean. That hasn't meant they've stopped trying.
There's a couple of Interesting developments with the last couple of attempts on some of these. Specifically, A number of countries have come to the realisation that trying to regulate a company or people in a different country has posed one specific problem. It might be the single biggest one in many respects. Historically there's been no real foundational method of trying to regulate another country's citizens. The internet not being stationed in a single country poses a unique problem on this front.
At the centre of a lot of this has been the attempt to get corporate bosses for online platforms to try and conform to nations local legal codes. Brazil's decision to remove access to X, formerly Twitter, from access to their local market was not so interesting, as a number of countries have been trying, as to how the particulars they ended up going about doing it was.
When trying to control an online platform, someone's ability to log on to it using a VPN stood out as one of the central problems. The European Union has been going around in circles on this one for literally about a decade. Brazil's attempt to try to regulate VPNs could be an interesting case study.
As most bills are being considered in legislative structures there are a number of considerations that are looked at behind public view. One of the biggest screening processes they go through is a legal component where the government looks at the enforcement mechanism and how practical it is that it might work. There's more than a few potential laws that end up dying at this stage. Someone within the enforcement mechanism of the government tells them that it's never going to get the outcome they want.
With this arguing that anyone who tries to use a VPN to get around local regulators and get access to something on the social media site is intriguing because it has for the most part been considered unenforceable and just about anywhere else. And that there's been so much effort to try and figure out how to work through this part leads the question as to whether or not Brazil has come up with some novel concept. That's probably not the most likely.
But it could lead to a question about another possibility.
I'm less likely to think that the government believes they can actually make it work on their own. Instead I'm starting to believe there might be a different and more ominous undertone to how Brazil has approached this issue. If the government can enforce a law on its own it can resort to a different approach that has been used historically.
They might think that they can get neighbours to start squealing on each other. If they think the neighbour is using one and reports them to the authorities, even under somewhat questionable foundations, it could be made to try and score social credit points. For those of you starting to think of communist revolutions that might be one possibility, but there's another that might be even more chilling. This sounds a lot like the pre-runner of the French Revolution when French media outlets started encouraging neighbours to tell the government who wasn't sufficiently revolutionary.
It comes out of the idea that not only do you get an enforcement mechanism that might work, it is great at undermining social cohesion as most try to exert more centralised administration typically try and do.
It also comes with the side benefit: does anyone who dares to try and speak out against the government run into the problem of being snitched on and falling under the same trap. Making an online comment that doesn't go over well could be a precursor.
How this ends up playing out is anybody's guess, but it's interesting to see how much effort the Brazilian government is putting into trying to coordinate the speech restrictions. One would suspect that they believe that they're going to make it work one way or the other.
Terrifying