Elon Musk has announced that X (formally Twitter) has decided to close its office in Brazil to protect the safety of its staff.
‘The decision to close the X office in Brazil was difficult but, if we had agreed to Alexandre de Moraes’ (illegal) secret censorship and private information handover demands, there was no way we could explain our actions without being ashamed.’
He also tweeted:
‘Due to demands by ‘Justice’ Alexandre de Moraes in Brazil that would require us to break (in secret) Brazilian, Argentinian, American, and international law, X has no choice but to close our local operations in Brazil. He is an utter disgrace to justice.’
There is a longer explanation posted by X’s ‘Global Government Affairs’ account.
Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders. He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions.
Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard,… pic.twitter.com/Pm2ovyydhE
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 17, 2024
In this post, X alleges that their legal representative in Brazil was threatened with arrest if X failed to comply with censorship orders.
X then made the threat public.
‘The X service remains available to the people of Brazil. We are deeply saddened that we have been forced to make this decision. The responsibility lies solely with Alexandre de Moraes. His actions are incompatible with democratic government. The people of Brazil have a choice to make – democracy or Alexandre de Moraes.’
The community notes against this post are particularly interesting, as they defend Brazil using that old excuse that ‘censorship is totally fine if it is combating illegal activities including hate speech and seditious activity’. In other words, if you get a particular sort of government in charge of your country, political debate and criticism can be re-classified as ‘hate’ or ‘sedition’ and then ‘legally’ censored. We have heard the same thing printed in the pages of left-wing media following recent events in Europe.
This escalation in behaviour from various governments around the world is the reason many people are standing behind Elon Musk and his fight to protect free speech.
As a contrary community note says:
‘Proposed community notes from people claiming that freedom of speech doesn’t apply to offensive or anti-government speech are the reason we can’t have nice things. You’re literally paraphrasing the bad guys from 1984.’
Brazil has been experimenting with severe restrictions on political speech for a while. It has repeatedly attempted to silence journalists, citizens, and political voices. After Elon Musk refused previously to adhere to these demands, the Brazilian Secretary of Digital Polices accused the American platform of having a ‘pathetic attitude’.
Professor Augusto Zimmermann has often written about the terror of the Brazil regime. He wrote:
Few would have imagined that, under his newly installed regime, Brazilians would experience the creation of the first-ever concentration camps in their nation’s history; for the scenes recently observed in that Latin American country are visibly reminiscent of 1930s Germany.
At least 1,200 Brazilians, including the elderly and children, have been arbitrarily detained … meanwhile, the brutal persecution of political dissidents by the newly established regime has already began, with authoritarian judicial officers such Alexandre de Moraes, a Lula supporter, continuing to crackdown on dissenters, rounding up journalists and arresting thousands of protesters, including the elderly and children in makeshift gulags.
As it stands, those in the Brazilian leadership attempting to control speech online accuse the accounts of ‘spreading misinformation and disinformation’ along with undermining faith in the election system. Moraes called these accounts ‘digital militias’, a phrase we’re likely to see imported into the West by censorially-minded politicians.
Sound familiar?
‘Freedom from expression doesn’t mean freedom of aggression. It doesn’t mean the freedom to defend tyranny,’ said Alexandre de Moraes – without a trace of irony.
Brazil is using the excuse of ‘disinformation’ to crack down on political discussion, something Western leaders – such as Australia’s Labor government, the UK Labour government, the Democrat regime in the US, and the European Union – are all experimenting with by implementing various wishy-washy ‘disinformation’ laws or setting up commissions to give themself the appearance of distance from their speech enforcers.
Just like Brazil, these ‘Western’ countries are threatening to crack down on X or even arrest Elon Musk.
X remains the last outpost of free speech in the public forum and it is under attack from fragile democracies and rising dictatorships, all of which are attempting to hide from public criticism under a veil of silence.