Citizen Musk: Will Brazil's ban on X mark a turning point for tech giants? • FRANCE 24 English

first the arrest of telegram founder pavl durov now the ban on Twitter in Brazil after years of making outrage and tribalism their business model are Tech Titans getting their come upin will ask about the almighty showdown between the billionaire owner of the social medium now known as X and the Chief Justice of Brazil's Supreme Court who's extended that ban to VPN systems that try to flout uh the ruling Alexander Morris just notched an important win what with musk's Starling satellite system relenting on initial plans to defy the Twitter ban in Brazil there's the broader question

of how to make a digital Public Square that extends Beyond just Echo Chambers without pedling hate and disinformation musk's own timelines become the bullhorn of a billionaire Tycoon who these days targets taxes and immigrants Donald Trump's now promised him a role auditing the US government if the Republicans uh win in November in an age where so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few what are the limits to one man's powers today in the France 24 debate uh Brazil taking on Elon Musk and joining us from Rio de Janeiro journalist Laura Martin's editor

of it Forum thank you for being with us hi guys Tech entrepreneur TK Crim the found found ER of fintech company cybernetica is with us I'm so sorry to interrupt but I'm not hearing you you're not hearing us okay we'll try to uh to reconnect them with uh uh to to make sure that that is that is fixed ASAP Jerome barier is adviser to tech consultants convergence thank you for being with us pleasure to be with you and fromi on the northwest Britany coast of France a member of several Blue Ribbon panels on Tech regulation

here in France valer L Ben Abu law professor at the University of versil welcome to the show if you're on the go by the way you can listen like And subscribe to the France 24 debate wherever podcasts are streamed with starlinks Assets in Brazil Frozen Elon Musk reversing course in the last 24 hours taking uh X formerly Twitter off his satellite service there but if he's lost one battle he's still fighting the war calling on Brazilians for instance to Mar this coming Saturday in Independence Day protests Charlotte Hughes has more on this showdown with more

than 20 million users it's X's sixth biggest Market globally according to statista but in Brazil the platform formerly known as Twitter has not been available for several days after a ban ordered by Justice Alexandro de moras a move strongly denounced by billionaire Elon Musk the owner of the social network free speech is the Bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes morice whose supporters view him as a leading figure in the defense of democracy described musk as an outlaw who enabled the quote massive spread of disinformation this

platform allows the mass dissemination of fake news hate speech and attacks on the rule of law this violates voters Freedom of Choice by distancing them from credible information Brazil's president Lula voiced support for the jud's decision saying it may have sent a quote signal that the world is not obliged to put up with musk's far-right ideology just because he is rich in the wake of the January the 8th 2023 riots which saw tens of thousands of bolsonaro supporters storm institutions including Congress Moray began ordering platforms to take down posts by those he accused of spreading

disinformation and posing a threat to democracy measures that on musk refused to take resulting in court findes that X has yet to pay maice later gave x a c off date for appointing a new legal representative in Brazil ordering the ban when the platform missed the deadline a ban upheld by a Supreme Court's panel on Monday it's to remain in place until the platform names a new legal representative and pays outstanding fines D Kim you surprised by this ban the you mean the Twitter and in Brazil not really I've mean historically uh Brazil has been

very protective uh for example when you born to sell computers in Brazil most of the part have to be down inhouse so uh what we're looking right now is is very interesting you know we you know the theory of the splinternet the idea that we have an part of the internet that is Us control and the other part that is China is controlled with Tik Tok but now you can see there's a new rise of unaligned countries look at what happened in India who decided to block Tik Tok and if you look at Brazil right

now as well trying to emerge and say well you know what we will have our own rules and you will follow our rules so you can see that in some ways what we see in India and in Brazil is what the Europe is not able to do for the moment it's being tough on the rules if you want to operate in our country these are the rules and you have to follow them uh these are the rules are these rules rules of regulation or is it as Elon Musk says a political Vendetta I think what's

funny is when it's very selective some countries you know uh uh Elon Musk has a lot of ties with China because of the Tesla so some countries ask him for favors is quite obedient and some countries are not seen as you know uh real countries for him so what we're seeing here is a lesson that basically uh the internet is is not a global thing anymore it's been fragmented and we're going to to see different regions like if you look at the EU right now you have to follow the EU rules like the gdpr the

AI act in Brazil you have to follow whatever the Constitution is in the US it's more free you know you have section 230 and and and a bunch of things that allows you to be you know have a certain freedom of speech and in in China basically none of these applications work so you we have a multilateral very uh uh fragmented world at the moment Jeron Barb you just heard tar say that Brazil's doing what the EU can't I agree actually I would say that Brazil is taking the shots for all of us basically because

it's a democratic country may you flaw democracy but it's not a decision by a political government or a government at all like it's not the case inia it was the case like it was the government which blocked tiktock through politically appointed Regulators here is the Supreme Court so I see the surprise because the Brazilian Supreme Court has very important Powers compared to other democracies but the point is that there just saying we have a regulation nationally and you need to obey by it and uh usually the way the debate is shaped around that is quite

interesting moderation uh and content moderation has been a tough question for democracy internationally historically speaking the US and the EU didn't want to discuss about that at the UN or in any inial debate precisely because there is a very thin balance between freedom of speech and protecting citizens right the decision made by Brazil here is first and foremost made because Elon Musk ref refused to comply with some court orders when it came to shutting down some accounts that were proven to spread this information and we only have this ban because Twitter refuses to comply with

the law which supposingly should be the thing that everyone focuses upon like you have a company who says I can decide on myself and I will not obey a democratically elected government and its regulation uh we can now cross to Laura Martins who's in Rio Laura can you hear us okay yeah now it's fine sorry guy I had little so first off let me ask you when you when you try to type in x.com today what are you getting where you are right now uh almost nothing but I really use X on myself and it's

really bad because I just have like the same post for the last five days and it's a m so I'm trying like five days I know 2,000 times to use this application and it's kind of impossible so we are in Brazil kind of like drug adicus without our drugs but yeah yeah it's one of the biggest markets for uh for the social medium formerly known as Twitter uh let me ask you there was also the Supreme Court didn't just put a ban on on Twitter it also put a ban on using vpns uh uh so

to get around the law how's that working oh so yeah this is one of the points that most of lawyers are talking about because it's kind of like uh the basic for all others that yeah the band would needs to be P because we try it before other things on on El and Twitter but the VPN thing it's first it is impossible to talk with our Brazilians and to subal braidan So in theory they are not allowed to put this tax for them and also all VPN tra is encrypted so it's kind of impossible to

really know who is using or not I personally don't know any person but for small um companies uh they are still using X like we have these four big uh telecom companies and it's block it we had a kind of problems with Starling they said they wouldn't be blocking X now they did last night they did but some of Brazilians who use like small telecom companies say that is still available I don't know how how much this is true if it's just like Brazilian saying things on internet to with other thing other people where if

they don't have Twitter where are they saying it uh Instagram and blue sky blue sky is getting re healed in Brazil after Twitter is gone which kind of uh interesting because Blue Sky doesn't have uh J representative in Brazil so he's like okay YX cannot be in Brazil without that but Blue Sky can do it but uh in in presum it's just because blue sky is prism and they don't have any problems with the law in Brazil so probably the Supreme Court in the next months if this is really been a a really big platform

in Brazil that you ask the same for blue sky or any other platform that try to come after Twitter and one final question on this Laura what are people saying about uh Elon Musk calling on people to come out and demonstrate Saturday on Independence Day oh yeah we have I guess our word kind of now is the same political issues about the right wings and we have the left so people who he from the right wings that really supporting actually I was talking with a lot of researchers in Brazil and they are talking about Al

being an activist for right Wings in Brazil and all of the world so yeah for people who really supports this poal is like one moment to try to say that we are dictator or this is something that did alone but for the other half is just like yeah this is the law we tried to talk with Elon Musk before he didn't want to do what Brazil needs to so yeah we need to band then so it's kind of half and half kind of half and half according to what your political lead mean is we have

valer Babu with us as well uh first of all your reaction to what's happening in Brazil and in particular this this also this ban on vpns um okay do you hear me okay fine uh yeah well uh it's it's it's a huge shock at first s that that a um a country like Brazil stand for Banning uh a social media but uh there has been as it has been said a lot of warning before this decision and ilam M decided not to to to consider that that that the the the network was infringing the law

so I'm not so surprised that at the end of the day uh the Supreme Court decid to say you have to respect the because you had several means of um of complying to our requirement and you decided to ignore each of them therefore uh it's it's a it's something that may be uh spectacular but at the end of the day it's a a country that tried to respect its own sovereignity and rules on uh that should be applicable on it territory um the the problem is that with Elon Musk uh and the So-Cal libertarian way

of thinking um uh freedom of speech has no limit but also uh the incomes of X has no limit so we we clearly know that uh the freedom of expression argument is been used again and again by te giant to Foster their business so we shall not be too naive about that which is uh uh it's not only uh defending the freedom of speech it's OS it's it's defending its own business t let me bring in t on this when when when you think back to the early days of the internet uh this this you

know making profits in the name of absolute freedom of speech was that the original did you see that that that's what would come down the pipeline I don't think so I think the uh the internet has changed a lot I I think it's more about first of all there's a difference between between freedom of speech being able to say something and freedom of reach the fact that someone with some toxic uh uh content would be exposed to millions of people sometime the toxic person being Elon Musk himself with like I don't know how many uh

hundreds of millions of followers but what I think is interesting is in the very early days of the internet these platform communication platform used to be open they were open protocols they were not even sold you could use IRC was and and things like that and suddenly after decades we started having privatized I mean I think it started with uh icq and uh AOL and then Microsoft and then Facebook and now these are privatized personal communication it means that your personal communication are privatized and I think when you look at what happened with the telegram

story it's fascinating at many levels but it it summarized exactly the problem we have today there's kind of three type of layers the first one is the geopolitical one uh you know access to the information that intelligence from every country wants to know what the Russian or the the Ukrainian Etc so that's one layer the second one is of course every government is trying to seduce uh every players every time Elon Musk comes here it's like a dignitary is received with all the honors and trying to make to to have them as but as as

as much as they were like State uh uh personalities and the last one is very interesting is the question of of moderation it's it's less a free speech question than a moderation question when you look at telegram imagine if each of us uh 40 people we bring our friends we 40 40 people in this room and we want we will manage 900 million people it's impossible and what uh Elon Musk did just after buying Twitter he said oh you know what moderation cost too much let's get rid of the people I think Twitter was not

perfect but had an incredibly strong team and found the right balance uh and and the problem is you cannot operate uh country I would say continent size uh you know a number of people with very limited resources and that's the problem I think and you mentioned ear J barier how Twitter's founder Jack dorsy he's now got his own uh social media app called Blue Sky he claims that there's been half a million new users in Brazil in the first 48 Hours uh since the ban but then you heard Laura say how they don't even have

a legal presence in Brazil so it's just the same problem whatever the comp whatever the the the the social media platform is I mean for sure every single social media that actually have a conation uh problem with a different governments the question is how they do implement it and you also have a very huge difference according to the size of the number of user per platform so the priority for Brazil at the moment is to regulate Twitter is the same for the other platforms what we could say about blue sky is that when Jack dorsy

founded and handled Twitter which was still Twitter at the time um Twitter was actually the the best student when it come to content moderation they had a very careful approach to cont moderation they put a lot of um regulations and procedures internally they actually themselves acknowledg the problems they had especially the fact that for Content moderation you need to have moderator in every single languages uh but the reality is that Twitter and it's even more now that they fired a lot of the people in the cont moderation team mostly moderated content in English which presents

significant risk for a lot of like non-english languages especially for instance in territories where there were high intensity conflict so this is a problem for every single platform the question is how do they react and to my best knowledge the difference you have with the different platforms I mean with X that is Led at the moment by Elon Musk that you can actually see because I also working on outer space with the companies that musk lead is that he has a very conflicting uh Behavior towards government and government authorities and the idea that government is

legit so we have for instance breaking news out of California um and he Twitter X has won an appealed to partially block a law in California that requires social media companies to publish their policies for combating disinformation well I didn't read the decision so I can't come out any further but like this is a good point that was mentioned also by Tariq internet is global and the the inspiration of the founders of the internet was to have a a free space that connects everyone worldwide without government intervention and Without Borders the reality is that each

government is legitimate to regulate its own sphere and the problems you have and you have a lot of this ISU at the UN is how do you ensure that you have a minimum understanding between government ments for um virtual space that is basically Global in which it's very difficult to have a border but you actually need to have that so in the US this decision may be not surprising considering the very large uh conception of free speech that the United States have there is the first amendment it's very difficult to regulate it uh Brazil has

a different approach that also comes from a more like I would say Latin Traditions when it comes to regulation that you also have in France and Laura Martins you in Brazil you have the same problem on that first amendment issue that we have here here in Europe which is we don't have the same kind of view to uh uh what people can say or or or not say and yet there's a sort of Americanization you could say of the way we look at public discourse ever since social media Rose is it the same where you

are yeah exactly uh we think more like you guys we cannot Freedom or is not about just talking whatever you want you need to be responsible for something bad you say or try to do with someone but I guess El's problem is not like that trying to go deeper um he gonna go back with Twitter in Brazil and I don't know one day he just needed to pay it and put on a lower right but he's not doing it we are like five days without the the platform and what I think we should be thinking

about like why it's not so much money it's not so hard to trial over in in Brazil so why he's trying to put so bad in the Brazilian democracy he's trying to avoid Brazil government he's trying to be like an influencer for the right wings so right now what I'm thinking is just like why and what he wants with that you know we have a starlink in Brazil as well so it's kind of like other business or he's just trying to put Twitter in front of all I have no idea but I guess it's more

than just being about Freedom or this banishment yes the Starling satellite system which arguably Tai clim for in terms of geopolitics is much more important than Tesla or SpaceX because you know for instance we've seen it in the war between Russia and Ukraine uh the uh us defense department has had to sometimes tread cautiously when they dealt with Elon mus mus yes in the meantime we don't really know because obviously um Elon Musk is uh attached to contract with the defense and also this the government because he cannot launch a rocket without the government approval

so they need they on very you know very U specific ground but what is what is interesting is that I I believe that in some ways uh the reason Europe is maybe weaker than let's say Brazil or other countries is that we need space 6 right now for our space program they are going to help us because we didn't invest in our Vector of growth this is because at the end of the day you can look at this for different perspective uh what we see in Europe and is that we haven't we used to be

the leaders in communication I mean in the '90s France was building one mobile phone out of three in the world and now we build none uh we decided to Outsource these Technologies and these Technologies our core are are the way we create growth and value so in some ways we're a little bit of prisoner of that we are renting other people technology so they have us sometime a say or a Caprice and we have to to deal with it I mean I would just say the way Elon Musk responded to TI Bron on Twitter something

I wouldn't internal markets commissioner of the EU yes absolutely I wouldn't I wouldn't repeat it here it's it's unbelievable how disrespectful but in the same way they say well you need our tools so I will do the way I want is jome Barb is that true I mean I know that the next generation of Aran Rockets is now available so how dependent is Europe on Elon Musk well unfortunately there's a lot of actors in the space sector who are quite dependent uh Space X of course is a huge success for the United States and I

would also emphasize that we often say it's it's a musk success story so Space X is also the result of a policy by the United States which is very important we are dependent Ian sex uh 6 is now existing uh but in terms of like number of launches we will need to send a few of the satellites for the iris Square constellation which is the constellation that Europe wants to build on the same model than stalling we will need to use uh SpaceX to launch it and there is another issue which is also bringing us

back to the idea of Twitter and x and how Europe can regulate companies that are headquartered abroad uh there is a European space law in discussion and the big question for Europe is do we put Market access measures which would say we forbid to any company even ated abroad that would not respect all requirements to operate within the EU which would mean that if starlink do not comply with for instance space the bris mitigation rules that Europe set they wouldn't be okay but then I'm on musk I say fine you can't use our system yes

but the point is that he can do that because financially speaking for styling it could work actually because they have a lot of Defense contract and there are a lot of other countries that uses it but for a lot of companies for instance Twitter uh Twitter is already not financially sustainable actually uh and if they couldn't operate in Europe anymore I am not sure the company could last for a very long time which is also the issue with Brazil musk is very good to shape the debate saying that actually governments depend on them because they

couldn't work with a Twitter actually if governance were like okay you want to leave us leave us the point is that governance will last the company needs a market speaking of how much Elon Musk can influence the conversation ation back in 2016 it was musk's co-founder at PayPal Peter teal who helped Donald Trump win the White House and while te is yet to commit this time directly to Trump musk's pledge to pour $45 million into the republican nominees campaign for US president Trump who's lavished Praise on musk even tipped him to be part of a

panel to audit the federal government the latter tweeting in the last day uh uh that I can't wait there's a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that uh needs to uh uh go uh valer lbab simple question how powerful is Elon Musk well I don't know actually I think the guy um as a um a filling of power which is uh limited but uh there is also the reality of of the market I mean uh when in it bought uh Twitter at the first time the the all the company that were uh U

feeding the the the gross re Revenue uh decided to take a step and decide uh and and and think about their announcement and um come pain on X because of the lack of moderation that was uh mentioned so I think that there is also this kind of pragmatic uh uh Dimension which is it's it's it's a businessman and uh it should take into account the fact that IR runs a service that needs uh that need people to feed with money and I know he has other company and it's a it's mix and then a cross

possibility for him to sustain each of his stalling and Tesla and so on but still uh if if it's not sustainable anymore because people become aware of the lack of moderation and the risk for them to uh to have their uh trademarks um um terish punished by by the fact that that some horrible things are said on Twitter they begin to to make a sa and behind and try maybe to find other ways to communicate uh I I'm I'm quite surprised that uh uh the political person also the journalist keep on being so present on

X while there are other social medias there are other ways of communicating that are not requiring to give money and data to Al on L we also need as Citizens to decide not to be part of the of this Network anymore for example I'm not on I'm not on X anymore uh because I decided not to and it's something that is quite easy that that that brings up an important Point what you're saying uh I I want to ask several of the panelists about this because uh uh well uh our show we're on we're on

X we're on Twitter because we want to reach a wide audience and not just speak to an echo chamber uh so tarim is that the right thing to do or should we be going elsewhere it's a good question I think um there's not a lot of choice uh it's a lot of the social network are organized by demographics that's uh at least uh that's how they started Tik Tok was targeting the super young Snapchat the teenage Instagram the the Millennials and Facebook uh uh older and in some ways X is an interesting thing because we

it's a fantastic tool to access the news um because we can if you follow the right people you can have access to an incredible amount of information but now it's it's disturbed because you also get all the unwanted you know uh retweets and information and it plays on on this but it's it's an eoch chamber but it's also a very limited EO chamber because then it it a lot of people uh know what's going on on Twitter because the media actually post what uh what happens there and I think it's the the the we are

all exhausted I think it's after years of you know high intensity we're starting to understand that these tools are are also toxic so we use them less we're be becoming more um I would say conscious about their limitations and one of the things that we didn't talk about is the reason uh Elon Musk needs uh Brazil in needs Portugues language because right now the value of Twitter is as a social network uh close to zero because a lot of The Advertiser have left the company but as an AI data Gathering tool it has or holds

a potential enormous value and uh he started investing a lot of money into chips he's got his own models is's trying to figure out how to create an artificial intelligence that can you know uh work on his way and he needs a lot of data and and by the way he's just agreed in the last 24 hours to comply with European rules when it comes to uh to Gathering data for in basically hoovering up the our personal data for AI yeah but the thing is the it's the beauty of of of AI is that you

gather data in California or somewhere else where the low is easy and then the result of the product will be sold everywhere so you need those Portuguese speakers for his for his you need this Russian speakers that's also by the way potentially the value of telegram is that they gathered so much private conversation that it's an incredible tool for training Ai and the value of you know we need data we're running out of data in 203 so five years from now there's not enough data we're talking about including synthetic data and all these Services have

an enormous amount of private data that's another question question for we have legal expert here uh can we actually use the personal and private data for um you know learn teaching AI how to think and learn that's not a a question there's no doubt in Elon M that this is the value and jome Barb can this be regulated well it is regulated when it comes to data uses in Europe and I always find that I work in politics so I'm very mindful of the wording of every declaration and as you said must agreed to respect

the rules which is certainly like it didn't didn't really ask them like there is a regulation to operate in Europe and you actually need to comply with it to be able to operate that the question if Europe would actually enforce it to the end of it and ban Twitter from existing Europe I don't think so uh because we have much more check in balances that the Brazilian Supreme Court is very strong um but so yes we can regulate it it's not perfect gdpr so the um General uh that regulation yeah regulation of the EU sorry

um already exist we know it's not really implemented to the best of it although it settled a clear framework that is globally and helped a lot of even like big tech companies at of the US to go in that direction you also have a much stronger awareness I would say between users and a lot more NOS that are working to see how they do it all right uh Laura Martins uh for a while again we've been asking about what is the alternative to Twitter uh as the guardian social media critic founds in a recent post

it's not in recent article it's not so easy he quotes someone as saying threads is just deathly dull and he also finds that very often it feels like a bot because people are just basically reposting whatever they put out on uh on on Instagram so uh again it's this question of where do we find that that that Global Town Square where how do you make it so that uh they're not uh hoovering up our private data for profit oh wow this is A1 million dollar question right yeah it is hard you know uh Instagram PRI

threats I don't know more one year or so and I don't know in French but in Brazil is not so big until now even without Twitter for five days blue sky is getting bigger in Brazil but we also had uh one time with who who an Indian uh platform but then when we head back Twitter we're just like okay we are back in Twitter but so I guess would be just with then again if Twitter comes back uh for Brazil and I'm so sorry for always say Twitter not ask but it's kind of hard and

you now to to say x and I agree with then it's it's hard to have one social media that is uh kind of well for all population globally and for all generations they they have all this kind of control so yeah it's not easy I don't know if we can manage to have other platform even if Brazil would be so strong enough to put people from other countries in uh new social media just because we don't have X anymore soab there there was a a big push last year uh towards Mastadon which is this sort

of nonprofit thing that hasn't really uh taken off how do you is it possible to do something that's both open source and not profit and popular and works well H um yeah well uh this is more a technical answer than than a legal answer I have to say um I I I I think that um open source is something that has always been so important for the for the development of Technology but so difficult to implement for end users so we are in this paradoxical situation where we really need to have open format open code

in order to to have a strong and liid Technology but it's always a bit complicated for uh forend users to handle uh those tools uh and then therefore that's why the science of Technology have uh have um captured uh for themselves the the open source value uh whereas privatizing the the end user uh um uh uh instrument uh and and this is complicated and that's why we have some plops I mean uh in these fields whereas it has proven to be more efficient but it's uh the the network effect doesn't work that well because of

the the the difficulty for users to handle this technology it's a kind it's a problem of of literacy of technological literacy uh that we we could not it's just it's just harder it's it's not as seminal when you when you use it it's not as easy uh T yeah you're meaning a m m right I think listen I I think the the the problem in Europe is simply there's threee layers uh to to control your destiny online you have the cloud it's like where the software runs we don't have any players the operating system uh

we don't have any players I tried 10 years ago it was uh very hard to do it in Europe Quant right and no it was it was um it was called Jolly cloud and I did net Vibes the third thing is the alternative for news social media we don't have any of them if you look at China China has built they have several operating system every big company has cloud services and they have Tik Tok uh QQ they have so many others they are in control of a destiny um I disagree with the policies and

the way it works but at least they have achieved technical Independence we always believed in Europe that we're going to regulate other people's instead of building our own and we should focus in Europe to build same thing in space same thing in Industries uh we need to invest in building you know building new platforms can take 5 to 10 years but it's absolutely necessary we cannot continue relying on companies that are not only uh not owned by any of us and have allegiance to uh other interest but also are now run by Mad Men and

uh so this is this is a really big question how do we move toward a technical and digital Independence and that means we need to build things the way we think they should be built with have our own values embedded in them right which brings us to France as president uh Elon musk's Showdown with Brazil follows the August 24th arrest of telegram founder pavl durov in Paris French authorities they grew tired of telegram ignoring their calls to cooperate on illegal activity on the platform Emanuel M had courted the Russian born billionaire with a lunch at

the palace and citizenship back in 2018 in the hopes that telegram would relocate to France never happened still on a visit to Serbia last week MCO harbored zero regrets concerning naturalization it's a decision that we made in 2018 if I recall and that I take total responsibility for it was taken in a conscious strategy of allowing women and men whether they are athletes performers entrepreneurs when they make the effort to learn French and develop wealth and Innovation that influences the world and when they ask for it to be given French nationality I did it for

Mr durav who made the effort to learn the French language as I did for Mr Spiegel an American entrepreneur as I did for actors and athletes I think it's good for our country yeah Mr Spiegel the the head of Snapchat um J barier listing to T Crim's call for European entrepreneurship in this in the field of digital technology with the French President says yeah it's we we're trying to instead entice foreigners your thoughts well I can only J T on that in particular as a French citizen working that has worked in government several years I'm

of course biased because it's France long-standing position at the EU um a regulation policy without industrial policy is at least partly fail to to be doomed because at the end of day you don't have the means to implement that nationally so that that's a fact and a very good illustration was that uh at the early days of take over of Twitter which is no x uh and they just shut down the certification process as it was done to replace it by a paying uh Dimension you could have the blue Mark uh there was a lot

of debates among EU officials and governments to say we need to quit the platform because it means that basically everyone paying the $8 fee per month could impersonate uh the the account of a government of a president or someone and after consideration no one left Twitter because there was no other place for government and the EU to go and communicate they just stay here and say okay we are going to negotiate with Twitter to have another way of certify your accounts and that is an the example of what T just said that if you don't

have any alternative you can go is it a turning point though the fact that you've had this showdown in Brazil this showdown in France are things changing I think it is for government's willingness to actually implement the regulation and maybe to go to the conflict with people like on MK in the private sector and to say we have regulations and we are not just going to wait for the White House and the Congress of the United States to decide the regulation that will be Implement on companies however I would be a bit more pessimistic when

it comes to French industrial policy uh in some Fields it's working in outer space some measures have been taken uh when it comes to digital policy it's very difficult for a lot of reasons including for social media you have a Winos lexical effect so you need to have like the larger uh pool of users to be interesting so it's very difficult to enter the field and we I would say we missed the train uh some decades ago already for U for policy Laura Martins a final word on this on uh whether or not this is

a turning point or whether this will all go away and uh Twitter X will be back online soon where you are oh wow uh if it's going back or not I guess we should ask Alan musk if he you if he's trying to just go with the lows the Brazilian lows but yeah I guess it's a turning point uh I don't know how much is is changing globally but I guess this shows for big TX not just for X but for all big TX that Brazil and any other countries uh we don't need them and

we would banish them and do whatever it takes if it's about our laws uh and I guess this is important because people like El mus think that they can just do what whatever they want I'm not sure if I'm so positive about the police the politicals behind this if he's uh losing power of His like increasing his power after that I guess we would see more after uh September 7 and we can talking again but yes I guess it's changing how big TXS are looking for countries especially developing countri that they normally just look for

then is like we can do whatever we want here all right we shall see indeed Laura Martins I want to thank you so much for joining us from Rio valer Babu in Britany tar jome barier thank you for being with us here in the France 24 debate [Music]