When tech titans run into trouble with governments, they make impassioned claims about being defenders of free-speech and Musk is no different. Time and again, the billionaire has claimed he is a “free speech absolutist” – but feelings are not facts, and Musk’s self-assessment is far from accurate. Since he took over X (formerly, Twitter), Musk has capitulated 80% of the time when asked by different governments to take down tweets, block accounts and suspend users. Musk has also cooperated in stifling free speech with right-wing governments in India under PM Narendra Modi and in Turkey under Erdogan — so what is the real reason he is suddenly championing free speech in Brazil? 

CONTEXT

The struggle between the right to free speech and curbing disinformation has a long history in Brazil, which has the world’s fifth largest digital population. 

As early as 2015, Brazil’s government has, on separate occasions, arrested employees from Facebook and shut down WhatsApp for not complying with government orders quickly enough. Then in 2018, Brazil’s government handed its police force the power to police social media platforms.

In 2021, the “fake news law” in Brazil mandated that social media services reveal the identities and personal details of users who shared anything decreed to be fake news or which threatened national security in any way. It also granted the government the power to shut down dissenting voices in any part of the internet.  And in 2022, before the election between Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s government granted itself further censorship powers to curb the use of disinformation during election campaigns.

ENTER ELON MUSK

Much of Musk’s ire at present is directed towards one particular judge in Brazil, Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who has been described by the Brazilian press as “the defender of democracy” and “Xandão,” Portuguese for “Big Alex”, for his wide-ranging investigations and quick prosecution of those he deems to be a threat to Brazil’s institutions. 

Musk and de Moraes began to butt heads soon after far-right supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brazil this January. De Moraes asked X to purge far-right voices linked to the uprising, and Musk, who has frequently aligned himself with right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, accused de Moraes of censorship and stifling free speech. 

Last month, on Thursday, August 5, Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline from the Supreme Court to name a new legal representative for X, after the platform’s local office in Brazil was closed down mid-August. 

Soon after, de Moraes accused Musk of treating X like a “land without a law”, a place where misinformation, hate speech and propaganda thrive with no repercussions. Musk has responded with a characteristic tantrum (mantrum?) on X — he posted an AI-generated image of de Moraes behind bars, another image of a dog’s scrotum and called the judge “Voldemort”.

MUTUAL HYPOCRISY

Both free speech and democracy deserve better advocates in Brazil. While de Moraes is widely considered to be the man who saved Brazil’s democracy from the far right, disinformation and electoral interference, his unquestioned authority is cause for concern. Meanwhile, Musk’s haste in obeying right-wing governments in countries like India completely contradict his claims of being a “free speech absolutist”.

According to the New York Times, de Moraes has “jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal…His orders to ban prominent voices online have proliferated, and now he has the man accused of fanning Brazil’s extremist flames, Bolsonaro, in his cross hairs. Last week, de Moraes included Bolsonaro in a federal investigation of the riot, which he is overseeing, suggesting that the former president inspired the violence.”

A report from Rest of World says Musk has complied with 80% of the requests from governments to take down tweets — this is a 30% increase over what X (then Twitter) agreed to under previous leadership.

In India for instance, X blocked posts by journalists, celebrities and publications at the behest of the Modi government. The platform not only geo-blocked tweets in regions the government claimed social media was sparking public unrest during the farmer protests, but also globally banned accounts tweeting about the riots, including those of Canadian MP Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur.

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