RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A Brazilian judge ordered the arrest of the head of Google’s operations in Brazil for failure to remove YouTube videos that attacked a mayoral candidate, which runs counter to the South American nation’s strict pre-vote electoral laws. Google said in a Tuesday statement that it rejected the decision by Judge Flavio Peren of Mato Grosso do Sul state, which also included an order to remove the two videos in question and a statewide, 24-hour suspension of Google and You Tube.
“Google is appealing the decision that ordered the removal of the YouTube video because, in being a platform, Google is not responsible for the content posted on its site,” the company said in an emailed statement from Sao Paulo.
[Judge Peren] also ordered a statewide, 24-hour suspension of Google and it’s video sharing web site (Youtube).
MrMary Weighs In
Freedom of speech is an incredible thing it is always interesting to see how freedom of speech blossoms when it gets exported and planted in other places. This is clear proof that technology comes with the culture of its creator. We often take that for granted. Sometimes of course it changes its gets modified to the culture.
This relationship between technology and culture beings me back to some quotes by Jean Baudrillard:
We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.”
― Jean Baudrillard, America
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