Roteiro Daniel Fraga

This is Daniel Fraga. Fraga was a Brazilian youtuber who did what few people on this PLANET have ever been able to do:

He told his government to shove it, and actually got away with it -- all while making millions of dollars in the process.

Fraga became celebrated as a hero among some internet circles, and he's still on the run from the authorities to this day, having publicly, hell, GLEEFULLY broken every court order he was handed in a groundbreaking free speech lawsuit regarding whether or not we can make fun of politicians on the internet

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So. What the hell happened?

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So this story is very well known to Brazilian internet users, many of whom have been following it closely for years. I realized the other day that the English-speaking side of the internet has no clue about this unbelieavable saga, so I took it upon myself to educate you guys.

And actually I wouldn't even be all that surprised if some of you thought I'm making this whole thing up

Daniel Fraga started a youtube channel way back in 2010. Now the youtube landscape was pretty different back then.

That is to say, his channel wasn't the home of a well-defined program with a regular upload schedule, a catchy name, fancy intros, nothing of the sort. It didn't resemble what we expect of a youtube channel today in any way.

Instead, Fraga's channel was a depository of expose videos. Even calling his early work "expose" videos is perhaps embellishing it a bit

It was more of a video record of the general state of unkemptness of the city he lived it.

Trash cluttering streets and sidewalks, gradually widening potholes, traffic signs obscured by overgrown vegetation, fires raging out of control in abandoned lots, even whole abandoned cars left to rot under the sun

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In case you didn't get the picture, Brazil is generally an awful place to live in. The sheer incompetence of the public officials tasked with maintaining our cities manifests itself as a perpetual state of urban decay, and that's just one facet of this. Don't get me started on crime or corruption

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(ASSETS FOR REFERENCE)

abandoned car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmTQZkyXnJk

sign covered by plants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHC3JADadO0

fires

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGIhGdQbCZ4

These videos were not even commentary on the situation, really -- they were initially short, often coming up under 30 seconds. It didn't even seem like he intended for them to be consumed by the general public; it served, I assume, as his way to document the sad state of the city he lived in.

Now interestingly, though understated in the general mission of his channel, Fraga didn't outwardly blame the government for these.

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At least, not at first.

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He didn't initially provide much in the way of editorial commentary about what he was seeing. It took him months from starting his channel, after having uploaded dozens of videos, to finally call this what it was -- government ineptitude writ large.

In a video uploaded in April 2010, Fraga directly blamed then Sao Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab for the trash found on sidewalks.

This started a trend. From that point forward, most of Fraga's videos directly blamed city officials, often the mayor himself, right there in the title.

On June 5th 2010, Fraga showed his face for the first time, making his first vlogy-type video, again criticizing the mayor for the all the garbage piling on the streets of Sao Paulo.

Fraga had found his niche. Over the next few months, the vlogger made several videos commenting on social and political issues, almost always coming on the side of "the government is criminally incompetent".

Watching his videos in chronological order as I have for this video, you can noticeably see Fraga's slow transition from simply criticizing government inefficiency, to flat out rejecting its legitimacy.

Fraga was now an outspoken anarchocapitalist.

The vlogger became the center of controversy in 2012, when he made a video criticizing a mayoral candidate in a neighboring city.

This politician had successfully convinced the Brazilian justice system (or a corrupt element favorable to his campaign, anyway) to strong-arm Facebook into taking down memes about himself and his candidacy

I should point out here that free speech isn't really a thing in Brazil as it is in the US. We don't have a legal doctrine like the First Amendment, or several decade's worth of Supreme Court decisions preventing the government from punishing citizens for speaking truth to power.

In Brazil, making fun of a politician can and HAS been interpreted by the courts as libel or slander, as INSANE as that probably sounds to you.

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Take another moment right here to thank your lucky stars you weren't born in Brazil

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So, Fraga did what he did best -- he took everyone involved in that lawsuit to task in a scathing video that went viral in Brazil.

The judge then sued Fraga for defamation, seeking damages and for the video to be removed from Youtube. Fraga posted more videos updating his fans on the situation, urging them to download the original video and upload it to as many platforms as they could.

Fraga added he'd NEVER pay a cent in damages and would never be silent, which the judge now argued was proof of his lack of desire to cooperate with the justice system.

The court then placed a gag order on Fraga, forbidding him from speaking about the case from that point forward, and also imposed a five thousand reais fine, roughly thirteen hundred dollars, for every day his videos stayed up.

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And up they stayed, as I'm sure you expected from this madman this point.

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Fraga REFUSED to step down, and with all his followers helping signal boost the story to an extreme degree, the judge eventually decided it wasn't worth the trouble anymore, and dropped the charges.

Fraga had played chicken with the government, and got away with it. While this was a big win for his cause, he wouldn't always be this lucky.

The vlogger would soon face another lawsuit, much for the same reason of the first -- he criticized a politician who didn't like it.

This time, however, he lost. Actually I can't even call it "losing" exactly -- Fraga, at this point a full blown anarchocapitalist, just didn't even recognize the legitimacy of state courts, and thus simply didn't show up to his hearings.

Fraga absolutely refused to pay damages. He outright taunted the court by saying they'd never see a dime.

When Fraga's bank accounts were eventually seized, law enforcement agents found about 5 bucks there. Turns out, as Daniel explained in yet another video, he expected this move, so he made good on his longtime plan to go all in with bitcoin, leaving only enough in his checking account as was needed to maintain it open as per the bank's terms of service.

It seems Fraga thought it would've been funnier to have the government go through the legal hassle of gaining access to his account, than it would've been for the bank to just notify them the account had been closed altogether.

There's a Joker-like flair to this that I really appreciate.