“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
The main difference is that right-wing libertarians perceive censorship as a technological problem while leftists understand it as a social problem. Fediverse software is generally agnostic about censorship. It is a matter of policy left to instance operators. Right-wing libertarians on the other hand will produce the same corporate social structures over and over again and think an algorithm will fix the problem.