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Elon Musk clashes with Brazil’s Supreme Court over ‘digital militias’
Insights from WIRED, Folha de São Paulo, The New York Times
The News
Elon Musk is embroiled in an escalating showdown with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge after the X owner refused to comply with an order to block accounts said to spread misinformation on the social media platform.
Brazilian justice Alexandre de Moraes had ordered the blocking of numerous far-right accounts accused of sowing fake news and hate speech, including several linked to supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro that played a role in an uprising in Brasilia in January 2023.
However Musk, a self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist, lifted the account restrictions saying they were unconstitutional, and called on De Moraes to resign.
The judge on Sunday added the tech billionaire to his investigation into “digital militias” and opened a separate obstruction of justice inquiry.
The court had imposed fines of 100,000 reais ($20,000) per account per day if they were reactivated. If X continues to breach the order, it could be blocked in the country.
“We will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit,” Musk wrote on X.
SIGNALS
X has cut election integrity and content moderation teams
Since being acquired by Musk, X, formerly Twitter, has dropped its team that works to prevent disruption to elections, while Bloomberg has reported that it “radically” cut the number of content moderators. “The fact that Elon Musk seems to have disbanded the team that deals with election integrity sends a clear signal that preventing disinformation or maintaining a level of integrity isn’t a priority for X,” a director of a digital marketing agency told The Guardian. In run-up to Brazil’s 2022 election, the team sounded the alarm about a flood of posts spreading misinformation and disinfotmation that went largely ignored.
Brazil court seeks to take on rise in ‘digital militias’
Brazil’s Supreme Court has sought to crack down on what Le Monde described as “battalions of YouTubers, bloggers, bots and other trolls” allegedly organized and financed by business leaders with close ties to former President Jair Bolsonaro.
A New York Times analysis found that organizers of the Jan. 8th 2023 uprising used hashtags designed to evade detection by the authorities. One researcher into digital movements told the NYT that platforms such as Twitter and Telegram were “fundamental not only in the extreme right-wing domestic terrorism [during the uprising], but also in the entire long process of online radicalization over the last 10 years in Brazil.”
Some say judge’s digital crusade is counterproductive
While Brazilian judge De Moraes has proved an effective check on former President Bolsonaro’s attempts to curtail the country’s democratic institutions, some argue his efforts have actually had the opposite effect, The New York Times reported.
In 2022 the judge briefly blocked the Telegram app, which has millions of users in Brazil, after it failed to hand over data on neo-Nazis to the court — although it reversed the ban after the app made changes. One Brazilian columnist said that rather than focus on what she called censorship of speech, the country should combat misinformation by providing “education that enables people to distinguish between qualified and unqualified information.”
