Thousands of protesters in yellow T-shirts descended on central Sao Paulo on Saturday to demand the impeachment of Alexandre De Moraes.
So what? This is only partly about Moraes. It’s mainly about
- Elon Musk, and whether he’s too powerful to be taken on by nation states; and
- X, and whether it can be held responsible for the fictions it promotes.
Forget the might of the US Congress and the idea of the EU as a regulatory superpower. It has fallen to Moraes, a Brazilian supreme court judge, to confront the man who’s turned X into his megaphone.
Moraes has…
- blocked X in Brazil, accusing it of undermining democracy by spreading misinformation;
- frozen the Brazilian assets of Musk’s Starlink network for providing access to X; and
- enraged the Brazilian right, which accuses him of judicial autocracy.
Has he gone too far? Maybe. Moraes’s ban on X is the most serious clash yet between a state and a social media platform. It follows France’s decision to open a criminal investigation into Pavel Durov, the Telegram founder, but the case against X is moving faster and the stakes are higher:
- Last week five fellow supreme court justices affirmed Moraes’s decision to block access to the app for 220 million Brazilians. Anyone trying to get around the ban faces a fine of almost $9,000 a day.
- X is big in Brazil, the platform’s fourth-largest market with around 21 million users.
- Moraes says he’s defending Brazilian democracy. Musk says he’s an “unelected pseudo judge”.
Road to the ban. In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Court granted itself new powers to remove “fake news”. It tapped Moraes to implement them.
He has ordered social networks to remove hundreds of accounts – many linked to right-wing supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.
Democracy through censorship. Brazil faced a torrent of misinformation ahead of presidential elections in 2022, including claims that candidates were satanists and paedophiles. The supreme court strengthened Moraes’s powers even further, forcing social media companies to obey takedown orders within two hours or face potential suspension.
Moraes did much to purge social media of false claims of stolen elections. But his critics said he went too far to fight the far-right. He often sealed takedown orders from public view and failed to explain account suspensions. In one case he ordered federal agents to raid the homes of businessmen who voiced support for a military coup, even though they did so in a private WhatsApp group. In at least five others, he jailed people without trial for social media posts that he said undermined Brazil’s democratic institutions.
X fights back. In April, Moraes placed Musk and X under investigation after X reactivated accounts which the court wanted banned. On X, Musk called Moraes the “unelected dictator of Brazil”.
- 17 August: Musk closes X’s Brazilian office in response to a legal demand to remove at least 19 accounts.
- 27 August: Moraes gives Musk 24 hours to appoint a new X representative for Brazil, calling Musk “an outlaw”.
- 30 August: after receiving no reply, Moraes orders X’s suspension in Brazil. A day later, X goes dark.
A threat to Elon? Yes and no. Brazil contributes only 2 per cent of X’s total revenues, yet Musk can ill afford to lose 20 million X users to new rivals like BlueSky – and he can’t use his Starlink network to let Brazilians circumvent the ban. When Moraes froze Starlink’s Brazilian assets, it agreed to block X.
What next? X is appealing to the full Supreme Court Bench, and public pushback against Moraes is mounting. In May only 14 per cent of Brazilians said the court did a “good” or “excellent” job, down from a third in December 2022.
What’s more… a lot of Brazilians get their news from X. 51 per cent of them don’t back the ban versus 48 per cent who do, and for many in the Amazon, Starlink is their only choice for broadband.
Musk has lost some battles against the strong arm of Brazil’s judiciary. That doesn’t mean he won’t prevail in the end.
Chart of the week
