When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk compares you to Harry Potter’s Voldemort, you know you’ve done something wrong.
On August 31st, Brazil’s highest court announced its decision to ban access to X (formerly known as Twitter) because its CEO – Elon Musk – refused to comply with federal regulations on content moderation.
The decision was led by Alexandre de Moraes, an ex-politician and former president of the Superior Electoral Court who currently serves as a justice on the Supreme Federal Court. Since 2020, he has been doing his best to limit the spread of anti-government content online under the guise of fighting misinformation.
Though there has been no formal response from the Biden Administration, Musk wasted no time in fighting back against this newest attack on free speech.
“We will begin publishing the long list of @Alexandre’s crimes, along with the specific Brazilian laws that he broke tomorrow,” wrote Musk immediately after the ban on X was announced. “Obviously, he does not need to abide by US law, but he does need to abide by his own country’s laws. He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice.”
De Moraes’s crimes include:
- Banning X in Brazil and punishing those who find a way to access the site through VPNs with outrageous fines.
- Censoring Brazilian gospel singer Davi Sacer for reposting information about protests against De Moraes that occurred in New York.
- Censoring elected official Senator Ribeiro Do Val, who threatened to investigate the federal police carrying out De Moraes’s orders.
- Censoring politicians, journalists, and everyday folk for sharing political opinions with which he disagrees.
“Moraes claims that he is protecting democracy, but censoring one side of a political debate is the opposite of democracy,” writes Musk on @AlexandreFiles, a new X account dedicated to exposing what Musk refers to as the “evil deeds of Brazil’s Voldemort.”
Indeed, the lengths to which De Moraes is willing to go in order to silence political speech that is critical of the current government are not representative of democracy, but tyranny.
Brazilian authorities even went so far as to attack Starlink, a Musk-owned company that seeks to provide global internet access through the use of satellites. Under orders from De Moraes, Brazilian law enforcement confiscated cars, aircraft, and equipment and froze Starlink-related bank accounts. They even threatened to block the company’s services to more than a quarter-million Brazilians if Starlink refused to comply with the ban on X.
More often than not, De Moraes’s orders are issued in secret and without justification, at odds with rulings issued by the very court on which he serves, and obeyed without consideration of legal guarantees regarding due process and the right to appeal. His attack against X and Elon Musk has thrust him into the spotlight as more governments become involved in the Free Speech vs. Content Moderation discussion. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Author’s Note: Does the allowance of free speech sometimes produce hateful, harmful, and inaccurate information? Yes. Is the fight to prevent that content from spreading more important than the right to free speech in a democracy? Absolutely not.
Brazil’s Ban on X Ignites Global Free Speech Debate: Elon Musk Takes a Stand
Brazil’s Judicial Authoritarians Ban X, Punish Their Citizens, Threaten American Investors – Where is US Response?
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