In a stunning victory for the typewriter lobby and anyone who remembers when the internet was just people arguing in forums, Brazil’s data protection agency has ordered Discord to suspend livestreaming capabilities across the country. The decision marks a historic moment: the first time a major nation has essentially declared that watching someone play video games in real time constitutes a public health emergency.
Discord, naturally, responded with the corporate equivalent of a confused shrug. The platform told the BBC it was “thoughtfully reviewing” the order while remaining “committed to user safety”—which is what every company says when they have absolutely no idea what just happened to them.
But here’s where it gets good. Brazil’s move has inadvertently created the conditions for a renaissance of text-based communication, that ancient art form where humans actually had to construct sentences before hitting send. No more infinite scrolling through someone’s Twitch stream at 3 a.m. Instead: the return of the Discord text channel, where conversations unfold like they did in 2015, with actual punctuation and the occasional paragraph break.
The broader absurdity is irresistible. Brazil has essentially decided that livestreaming is too dangerous for its citizens, yet somehow traditional messaging—where people can say literally anything to each other without a camera—remains perfectly fine. It’s as if the government looked at the problem of excessive screen time and concluded that the solution was to make sure people stare at their phones reading text instead of watching video. Mission accomplished.
Discord’s compliance team is probably still trying to figure out which part of their terms of service covers “we got banned by an entire country for letting people broadcast themselves.”