Brazil’s Justice Alexandre de Moraes, on behalf of the country’s Supreme Court, has fully suspended X in Latin America’s largest economy, blocking roughly forty million users. He has also announced a penalty of US$8,900 a day for those Brazilians who are caught using a virtual private network (VPN) to get around the ban. That’s more than an average yearly salary.

“This is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform. I wish it did not have to come to this – it breaks my heart,” X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said Friday night, adding that Brazil is failing to uphold its constitution’s pledge to forbid censorship.

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote.

Gabriela Sá Pessoa and Mauricio Savarese, “Brazil Blocks Musk’s X After Company Refuses to Comply Amid Feud With Judge,” Time, August 21, 2024

Musk’s Starlink (affordable internet) has also had its finances frozen.

The original long-running issue has been described as a crusade against “disinformation.” X is already banned in Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan.

An international trend

The Supreme Court’s ruling seems to be part of an international trend toward attempted government control of the news stream: Germany is censoring a podcast that misgenders a trans activist, under threat of a huge fine or prison. France recently arrested the CEO of Telegram (a Facebook rival) for lack of co-operation. Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor, argued at The Guardian last week for threatening X CEO Elon Musk’s arrest because of lack of co-operation with official censorship. Britain has started jailing people for, essentially, mean tweets. Canada is preparing pre-crime legislation for that purpose. Turkey blocked Instagram for nine days recently for unclear reasons.

On the ground in Brazil

We contacted Brazilian reader Enezio E. de Almeida Filho, asking how the ruling affected him. We offered to quote him anonymously but he replied,

You may mention me by name, because to resist is to exist. I resisted the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 1960s, and I will resist the dictatorship of a judge in 2024.

Millions of Brazilians are aware of this. Do we care? Yes, we will protest on Paulista Avenue in Sao Paulo on Sep. 7, our Independence Day. We will demand the impeachment of Alexandre de Moraes. We are expecting more than 2 million people to protest peacefully. We will protest in all major Brazilian cities wearing yellow and blue – we are called “sunflowers”.

Our present government is leftist (I consider it to be communist) and its stance favors this judge’s illegal actions. The media — you won’t believe it — mainstream media favors it even knowing that censorship will reach them.

Mind Matters News certainly believes the part about mainstream media supporting the X shutdown. The legacy media were slow, at best, to catch on to the internet and mostly unwilling to catch up. For them, state censorship — and increasingly, subsidy — is a lifeline. The fact that X is rapidly developing into a new type of major news source makes it a bigger threat than some new media might be.

A thought for the September 7 rally

Political scientist Peter Berkowitz warns that the claim that free speech is good for “democracy” — in isolation — conceals a hidden peril. He writes, “Protecting free speech solely because it is good for democracy invites the curtailment of this utterance or that publication on the grounds that it undermines democracy.”

Indeed. Just about every tinpot dictator on the planet wants to stamp out our right to hear alternative voices in order to protect “democracy”/“our democracy”/“our hardwon democracy” … or whatever they’re calling it now. We need rather to insist, Berkowitz says, that “speaking freely is inseparable from our humanity.” (emphasis added)

Politics, however important, is secondary to that.

You may also wish to read:

Does Zuckerberg really regret all the Facebook news censorship? He says he does. But is it too late to roll back government interference in news dissemination? His letter to the House Committee, strategically or otherwise, doesn’t say whether Meta would have made the same decisions without government pressure.

and

As trust in media declines, media seek allies in government. The internet crashes the cost of almost every factor except time so more and more independent sources are jumping in. Legacy media want something DONE about bottom-up news media that are an existential threat to traditional top-down media.