Brazil’s Supreme Court earlier this week upheld a ban on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, as an international battle over free speech appears to be reaching a crescendo.
X’s suspension comes on the heels of a showdown between Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Musk that stretches back to April when Moraes ordered Musk to suspend dozens of accounts accused of sharing “disinformation.” Following the feud, Moraes ordered Musk to be criminally investigated and created a five-member panel to review X’s suspension. That panel voted Monday to uphold the ban on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility,” said Flavio Dino, one of the justices. “The first can’t exist without the second, and vice-versa.”
Similar to many, I’ve watched Brazil’s free speech battle with one eye. But I hadn’t really begun to pay attention until recently when it became apparent Moraes’s effort to kick X out of Brazil was no idle political threat. What I found terrified me.
Moraes ordered X secretly to block accounts of sitting federal lawmakers without even offering a reason, and excerpts from his 51-page ruling suggest the case is politically motivated.
“His opinion does not even try to hide it,” said U.S. attorney Brendan Thomas Carr. “[De Moraes] comes right out and points to Brexit and the 2016 election of President Trump as examples, in his telling, of the types of extreme ‘populist’ outcomes that he is attempting to avoid by imposing a new censorship regime in Brazil ahead the country’s elections later this year.”
Carr, who has served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission since 2017, appears to be correct. Moraes’s legal opinion explicitly states that the suspension was necessary to prevent X from “negatively influencing the electorate in 2024,” which stood to benefit “populist groups.”
Despite the ban on X, many in Brazil continued to tweet via virtual private networks, risking fines and persecution.
“This tweet may cost me almost [$]10,000 USD according to the decision of tyrant Alexandre de Moraes,” posted Marcel van Hattem, a Brazilian journalist, political scientist, and politician. “My dignity is worth much more than that … I will keep tweeting regardless of State persecution or threats.”
Astonishingly, Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which has been in power since 2022, continued to post political messages on X after the platform was banned. However, I suspect the party is not at risk of being fined.
For those who doubt Moraes’s ban is motivated by power, it’s worth pointing out that the judge privately plotted to “get tough” with X as early as March 2023, less than a year after Musk had purchased the platform, and to “have them removed under penalty of a fine.”
Moraes’s order being upheld seems astonishing until one realizes that Dino, who upheld his order, is a longtime communist, which is something I learned after seeing a post by Nikolas Ferreira de Oliveira, a 28-year-old Brazilian politician affiliated with the Liberal Party. Oliveira’s post showed Dino posing for a photo with a young woman to make a hammer and sickle.
I thought perhaps the picture was fake, so I started Googling. It turns out Dino was indeed a longtime communist who won numerous elections while a member of the Communist Party of Brazil. It wasn’t until 2021 that Dino left the Communist Party and joined the Socialist Party, after which he was appointed minister of justice.
Call me naive, but I didn’t know that outside of North Korea and China and perhaps a few other places on the planet, there were communists who held real power. But Dino does, and he’s made it clear he wields power like a communist.
“If you don’t change the terms of use, you will be forced to change them,” he said at one meeting with tech companies.
“We do not want you to become investigated by the federal police,” Dino added later.
Of course, one doesn’t need to be a communist to suppress political speech. Some U.S. presidents and U.S. states flunked the First Amendment test. Yet few have suppressed speech with more zeal than the Marxists whom Dino admires, Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin, who embraced a philosophy built on the idea that actions are justified by the end they seek, not the means they use.
Fortunately, many brave Brazilians have signaled they will not cower before the state’s brute force.
“VPN working,” Mateus Simoes de Almeida, a Brazilian lawyer, professor, and vice-governor of the state of Minas Gerais, posted after the ban. “I never imagined myself practicing and propagating civil disobedience, but censorship cannot be tolerated, ever.”
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As the global war on free speech enters a dark new phase, people in the United States can no longer afford to ignore events in Brazil or take their own rights for granted.
Jon Miltimore is a senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.