Brazilians have been locked out of X/Twitter, following unelected supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes’s order for the “immediate and complete suspension” of the social media platform.
De Moraes—like most Western leaders—claims to have been concerned about ‘disinformation’ being shared on the platform. But owner Elon Musk says it’s clear that the ban had been implemented for “political purposes.”
“The Brazilian elites,” added Spiked Online deputy editor Fraser Myers, “loathe X for precisely the same reason as the elites across the rest of the democratic world do … [they] believe that fake news, by boosting populist movements, poses a direct challenge to their rule.”
As if the ruling wasn’t totalitarian enough, de Moraes also said that Brazilians who use virtual private networks (VPNs) in an attempt to get around the ban will face daily fines of 50,000 reais (€8,050). However, one uplifting element of this saga has been the push for people outside of Brazil to change their VPN location to São Paulo so as to “confuse and overwhelm their Stasi”—in the words of Canadian politician and writer Derek Fildebrandt.
Musk appears hopeful that the order is “doomed” in the long run, but commentators have warned that the Brazilian ban is—as Myers put it—“a taste of things to come” for the rest of the world. Myers added that “the global war on free speech online has stepped up a gear.”
As long as the powers-that-be continue to believe that free speech poses an existential threat to their rule, then the methods for curtailing it will surely only get more blunt and more brutal.
It is, of course, telling that there has been no reaction to the ban either from Brussels or the White House.
Author Michael Shellenberger suggested that U.S. President Joe Biden, and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, have failed to denounce the measure “probably because … [they] support the censorship and have been directly funding it for years.”
Shellenberger noted that “it doesn’t matter whether or not you care about Brazil. Its totalitarianism is at risk of spreading around the world.”
The arrest late last month of Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov in Paris, and the new UK Labour government’s interest in clamping down on online ‘disinformation,’ are just two of many recent signs that the right to freedom of speech online is under increasing threat not just in Brazil but across Europe.
