By On Fire: The Global War Against Free Speech
X, formerly Twitter, is now banned in Brazil. As of last Friday, the Elon Musk–owned platform is no longer accessible in the largest country in South America. And if any of the 22 million Brazilians with X accounts are caught attempting to log in via a VPN, they face fines of $8,900 per day.
This crushing blow to free speech has been met with universal condemnation here in the United States. In a White House statement, Joe Biden denounced the clampdown on the U.S.-owned platform as an illiberal and unjustified attack on a sacred freedom. America’s leading liberal newspapers issued full-throated denunciations of the move, warning that a once healthy liberal democracy had taken a big step toward autocracy. Large crowds gathered outside the Brazilian embassy to express their disapproval.
Just kidding.
Joe Biden hasn’t said anything about what’s happening in Brazil. (Not that he says or does much about anything these days.) The editorial boards at The New York Times and The Washington Post have been quiet. Crickets too from once-proud institutions like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and PEN, places nominally committed to protecting free-speech rights.
The silence from right-thinking Americans has been deafening. But to anyone who has followed debates about free expression over the last decade or so, entirely unsurprising.
The legal fight that culminated in Brazil’s Twitter block started with an initiative to clamp down on the kind of right-wing fake news that the American elite has been fretting about since 2016. Alexandre de Moraes, the controversial Brazilian judge leading the censorship push, was granted sweeping powers to order platforms to ban users ahead of the 2022 Brazilian election as part of an effort to combat hate speech and misinformation.
Under Elon Musk’s ownership, X has ignored such orders—which included requests to ban prominent conservatives and sitting lawmakers. And the ever-escalating standoff between Brazil and Musk has now culminated in a shutdown of the platform.
This is the latest reminder that you don’t need to agree with Musk on much to be grateful that maybe the most important speech platform in the world is in the hands of a free-speech absolutist—and the rare billionaire willing to use his fuck-you money. Brazil’s war on Musk is total: de Moraes has frozen the bank accounts of Starlink, Musk’s satellite-internet company. And all of this has been cheered on by Brazilian president Lula da Silva, who said Monday that “the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s far-right ideology just because he is rich.”
It’s easy for Americans to point at what’s going on in Brazil—if they’ve heard the news—and think it’s a bad thing that’s happening far away. But the logic of Brazil’s new censorship is in line with what many in America’s ruling class wish they could do here. Many are too polite to say as much. But occasionally the mask slips.
Take former Labor Secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich. Writing in The Guardian over the weekend, he called on “regulators around the world” to “threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Or Jay Graber, the CEO of BlueSky, a competitor to Twitter popular among the type of people who think Elon Musk is a grave threat to democracy. Graber applauded Brazil’s decision to shut down her platform’s main competitor. “Good job Brazil, you made the right choice,” she enthused.
Or vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, according to whom “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.”
He’s wrong, thankfully. But his mistake is a revealing one, and typical of the mindset according to which the Brazil news is no concern of ours. After all, “combating misinformation” is exactly what bien-pensant Americans—whether politicians, academics, or (most outrageously of all) journalists—have been calling for for almost a decade now.
It was also the rationale for the Biden administration’s pressure campaign on social media platforms during the pandemic—a pressure campaign that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a letter to Congress last week, and that Abigail Shrier writes about today in our pages. “Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.” Zuckerberg added: “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”
Brazil is not the only new front in the global fight for free speech, as Matt Taibbi explains today on Honestly. In Britain, already home to extensive hate speech legislation and Orwellian “non-crime hate incidents,” the new Labour government is planning a crackdown on those pushing “harmful or hateful beliefs” and considering classifying misogynistic speech as “extremism.”
And in France, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France last week has many sounding the alarm about increasing state interference with online speech. Durov has been charged with an alarming list of crimes, including the distribution of child pornography, with French prosecutors arguing that Durov is complicit in criminality that took place on his platform.
It is a complicated case, and many details remain unclear, but, as Andrey Mir writes for The Free Press today, Durov’s arrest after “failing to cooperate with authorities,” like the crackdown in Brazil, is a sign that the anarchic phase of life online may be drawing to a close. “Institutional control over the public sphere and people’s lives was shattered by the initial spread of the internet,” writes Andrey. “The Durov arrest signals that the state is tightening its grip.” Unfortunately, it is far from the only signal.
Today in The Free Press, three dispatches from the new war for free speech.
First, on the latest episode of Honestly, Michael Moynihan talks to one of the journalists who has covered this subject most relentlessly: Matt Taibbi. Click below to listen to their conversation, or find it on the Honestly feed wherever you get your podcasts.
Second, Free Press columnist Abigail Shrier examines what a Kamala Harris administration might mean for free expression. (Hint: Nothing good.)
