Musk Has Defended His Right-Wing Bro in Brazil, Not Free Speech
He sticks up for this right when it suits his ideological purpose and caves when it doesn't
Elon Musk, the U.S. tech magnate and world’s richest man, regularly presents himself as one of society’s greatest champions of free speech. When he bought Twitter two years ago, he promised to reconfigure the social media behemoth so that it reflects his “free speech absolutism.” But the billionaire businessman, who was Donald Trump’s second-biggest financial backer during the 2024 election and whom Trump has now anointed his government efficiency czar, has a selective commitment to “free speech,” invoking it only when it advances his anti-left crusade and abandoning it when it doesn’t. On X, his rebrand of Twitter, he has suppressed benign terms used by political outgroups, banned accounts critical of him or his companies, and petitioned the state to take punitive action against organizations for their constitutionally-protected speech.
But Musk’s cynicism about free speech is evident even in the event he’s gotten the most credit for: his protracted international standoff with Brazilian authorities, particularly Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. After first flouting de Moraes’ orders and getting X suspended, Musk finally capitulated.
But the backstory of the faceoff reveals that Musk’s non-compliance was fundamentally about backing ideological allies in Brazil. De Moraes, a heavy-handed judge willing to go to great lengths to protect the integrity of Brazilian elections, deserves some blame in the saga, but Musk’s defiance ultimately had little to do with defending the free speech rights of ordinary Brazilians.
X’d Out in Brazil
In 2019, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” became president of Brazil. While in office, Bolsonaro mobilized an online network of activists, donors, and fellow politicians loyal to his cause—whom de Moraes has dubbed “digital militias.” In 2022, an election year in Brazil, de Moraes was elected to head the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE), the highest legal authority on electoral proceedings in the country, whose aim is to fight disinformation and ensure election integrity. De Moraes issued judicial orders to social platforms to suspend particular accounts the courts determined were in serious breach of Brazilian election rules.
In April of this year, Musk publicly hit out at Brazil’s—and, specifically, de Moraes’—suspension orders. He also reinstated accounts ordered taken down by courts. He took to X to encourage Brazilians to download a virtual private network (VPN) to access the platform in the event that authorities shut it down.
In light of such blatant flouting, de Moraes added X to the “digital militias” investigations and Musk, personally, to an inquiry probing obstruction of justice, involvement in a criminal organization, and incitement to crime. Musk was informed X would be fined for each day the company remained in violation of a prior court order, and that authorities may arrest its personnel in Brazil.
Musk threatened to dissolve X’s administrative presence in Brazil by closing its office, withdrawing all company staff, and leaving X without any legal representative in the country. In Brazil, social media platforms are required by law to have a legal representative on site to interface with authorities; otherwise, they can’t operate in Brazil. On Aug. 28, de Moraes issued a 24-hour deadline to Musk to name a legal representative or risk having his platform blocked across the whole of Brazil. After tolerating two days of Musk publicly ridiculing the deadline—and de Moraes personally—Brazil’s internet service providers fulfilled a legal order to block access to X in the country.
X’s legal status was finally restored in October after Musk agreed to pay a fine of 28 million reais (around $5 million), appoint a legal representative in Brazil, and comply with the court’s ruling to suspend accounts found to have spread misinformation.
This saga was entirely avoidable. Brazilian electoral authorities weren’t asking Musk to do anything contrary to how Musk himself has articulated X would operate throughout the world. He has a standing policy that he would “hew” to a nation’s free speech laws, something that he reaffirmed last year when he told India Today, an Indian network: “Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments. … The best we can do is really to hew close to the law in any given country, but it’s impossible for us to do more than that or we will be blocked and our people will be arrested.”
Subsequently, when at the behest of Indian strongman Narendra Modi X took down accounts of disaffected farmers marching in New Delhi, the platform’s global affairs department reiterated Musk’s sentiment:
The Indian government has issued executive orders requiring X to act on specific accounts and posts, subject to potential penalties including significant fines and imprisonment. In compliance with the orders, we will withhold these accounts and posts in India alone; however, we disagree with these actions and maintain that freedom of expression should extend to these posts.
Previously, Musk had also capitulated to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s moderation order. As in India’s case, X’s global affairs account justified its actions, noting: “In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.”
Yet, in response to Brazil’s very similar orders, Musk went on the warpath. Why the differential approach?
First, it’s worth noting a commonality in his three reactions: in each instance, Musk sided with the strongman. He complied with Erdoğan and Modi’s wishes while flouting de Moraes’ orders on Bolsonaro’s behalf. Strikingly, he finessed his commitment to free speech depending on whether it served his broader ideological crusade or not. Since his politics have no meaningful ideological intersection with Modi and Erdoğan’s religious nationalism, he abandoned his free speech cause to appease them. But he sees Bolsonaro, who had previously called Musk a “legend of freedom,” as an ideological ally in the global culture war, a Brazilian facsimile of Trump allied in an ideological crusade against the global left, so he invoked free speech and went to the mat for him.
Musk vs de Moraes
Throughout the standoff between X and Brazil’s election laws and regulations, Musk repeatedly singled out de Moraes for attack and abuse. De Moraes’ ongoing crackdown against Brazil’s worst disinformation spreaders had already earned him a reputation within Bolsonaro’s camp as a partisan censor. But Musk’s ire made de Moraes an international villain among the global far right.
Musk demanded that de Moraes “be impeached for violating his oath of office.” He claimed that the justice had “brazenly and repeatedly betrayed the constitution and people of Brazil.” He called de Moraes the “unelected dictator of Brazil” and “a criminal cosplaying as a judge” and then, as if to merge the two insults, Musk called him “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.” Musk has also routinely mocked de Moraes’ appearance, depicting him as Lord Voldemort and a Sith Lord.
Most alarmingly, Musk has insisted de Moraes belongs in prison. On one occasion, he posted that “there is growing evidence that fake judge [de Moraes] engaged in serious, repeated, deliberate election interference in Brazil’s last presidential election. Under Brazilian law, that would mean up to 20 years in prison.” Musk even crowdsourced his X audience to help him substantiate his allegations: “Anyone with examples or evidence to this effect, please reply to this post.”
While Musk has publicly vilified de Moraes for ideological reasons, there are more substantive criticisms one can lay at the polarizing jurist’s door. The most valid ones have to do with de Moraes’ disregard for transparency. Some targets of his investigations have had to surrender their passports, had their bank accounts frozen, and their social media accounts suspended, all without a public justification for these decisions. Some constitutional law experts in Brazil have been critical of de Moraes’ approach to ensuring election stability.
De Moraes might have even gone too far in personally ordering X’s suspension—though a court majority subsequently did approve that decision. But there is no justification for his extraordinary further step of threatening to fine Brazilians who accessed the site through a VPN upwards of 50,000 reais (close to $10,000) per day. De Moraes also froze assets of Musk’s Starlink company and threatened to use them to pay for the financial penalties levied on X, even though the two companies are operationally independent. The president of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s Parliament, criticized this legal maneuver as endangering Brazil’s reputation as a secure country for foreign investments.
Arguably, de Moraes is a zealous advocate for free and fair elections who went too aggressively after those cited for violation of electoral law and regulations. But his cause is far more understandable than that of Modi or Erdoğan’s, whose suppression of critics and dissidents had no redeeming purpose. Moreover, de Moraes’ crusade makes more sense in light of Brazil’s history and its recent politics.
Courting Democracy
The Brazilian republic has suffered from rampant electoral fraud since its founding in 1888. The rural elites that ran the country since its independence in 1822 from Portuguese rule used their money, political influence, and even brute force to ensure that their preferred candidates won—a process known as voto de cabresto, or vote corralling. In the 1920s, when the Great Depression—which wasn’t localized to the U.S. but had international reverberations—hit Brazil, it led to a wave of popular unrest. The fraudulent presidential election of 1930 triggered a military coup led by Getúlio Vargas, who reversed Brazil’s fledgling democratic gains. When Vargas was deposed in 1945 by a group of military officers who restored democracy, they sought to prevent a restoration of oligarchic rule. They established TSE, the election tribunal that de Moraes helmed for much of the last two years and made it a non-partisan institution to manage and supervise Brazil’s democratic elections. It quickly became an integral part of Brazilian democracy.
During Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, executive decrees steadily eroded Brazilian democracy and the TSE’s authority was significantly curtailed. After a gradual restoration of democracy that culminated in a Constitutional Assembly being called in 1986 to revivify Brazil’s institutions, the resulting 1988 Constitution consolidated the TSE’s role as Brazil’s official, centralized institution for electoral adjudication, granting it much broader powers.
Since that time, the TSE has remained the most authoritative body on electoral laws and processes in Brazil—more powerful even than its American counterpart, the Federal Electoral Commission. The TSE acts as an ultimate, centralized arbiter of electoral disputes, working to uphold electoral laws and minimizing threats to Brazil’s democratic process.
The Bolsonaro Effect
The TSE faced its toughest challenge in recent memory in 2023, after Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection. Brazil’s far right attempted a coup in Brasília, the nation’s capital, with the intent of overturning the election results and returning Bolsonaro to power. That event is the backdrop for the TSE’s heightened digital vigilance and its efforts to ensure free and fair elections.
After losing the last election to Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro followed Trump’s 2020 post-election playbook to a tee. Bolsonaro had already mobilized his “digital militias” to spread political disinformation. He had funneled public funds to pay for their services, and used the network to repeatedly cast doubt on Brazil’s electoral system. But then, just as Trump did in the U.S., Bolsonaro pre-amplified the narrative that the election would be stolen, and even invited ambassadors from various countries to his residence to denounce the failures of the system in anticipation of a “stolen election” narrative.
Both before the election and after he lost, Bolsonaro cast doubt on Brazil’s election integrity. Bolsonaristas alleged that electronic voting machines were unreliable and easily hackable. Never mind that TSE has a two-decade long record of presiding over free, fair, and orderly elections with these very voting machines—without any evidence of fraud. In each electoral cycle, the machines undergo a series of security tests and “hackathons” to improve their security. Moreover, during voting, each voter is required to confirm his or her identity and voter registration through a biometric scan. Also, the machines are not even connected to the internet, so their control systems are inaccessible. All in all, election experts consider the voting machines far more reliable than the old paper ballot system.
Yet none of this mattered to Bolsonaro and his far-right populist supporters for whom assailing the integrity of his country’s elections was just part and parcel of a winning electoral strategy.
When Bolsonaro lost in 2022, his supporters stormed Brazil’s Palácio do Planalto (presidential palace), Palácio do Congresso Nacional (National Congress building), and Palácio do Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Court building). Caravans with thousands of Bolsonaristas arrived in the capital. Dressed in Brazil’s flag colors, they marched and called for a military intervention to restore Bolsonaro to power. The enraged mob breached security, invaded the buildings, and wreaked havoc for hours. Insurrectionists burned copies of the Brazilian Constitution, destroyed ancient memorabilia, and pillaged the nation’s power centers in a chaotic attack against Brazilian democracy.
(Several months after the Jan. 8 insurrection, Bolsonaro was officially barred from running for office until 2030—although technically for his election-undermining actions prior to the attack in Brasília. That is more than what the U.S. managed to do against Trump.)
Ideology Over Law
Brazil’s approach to dealing with election misinformation does run afoul of the American understanding of free speech, but the country is also trying to get a grip on a genuine problem. One can reasonably question how it is balancing these competing concerns—but that was not what Musk was doing. He wanted to help his right-wing pal Bolsonaro by, if necessary, publicly clashing with the former president’s nemesis. Freedom of speech was just a pretext.
Musk “hews” to the law of the land when he doesn’t have an ideological axe to grind with the regime in power, no matter how authoritarian, and “hews” to free speech when he does. De Moraes, a duly appointed judge, asked Musk to take down election misinformation not because he had anything against Musk or X but because he thought that is what was necessary to maintain election integrity. But Musk saw an opportunity for grandstanding by flouting Brazilian law to advance his own crusade. The resulting escalation is unfortunate but the only thing it decisively proves is that Musk is a good pal of kindred strongmen, not a hero of free speech.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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Excellent article.
More of this please. The antisocial media is not a necessary or vital organ or vehicle for "free speech" and should be regulated by a heavy hand. Especially those that offer themselves as "free" and whose revenue streams are entirely dependent on antisocial behavior being rewarded.
The first bar should be subscription fees. Those antisocial media platforms that require a significant fee for service" should be unregulated just like newspapers and cable outlets. Corporate media would operate as now with the free market, and legal liability for defamation to which they are subject today. The free ones should be treated with the same regulatory scheme as broadcast television airwaves. The same with podcasts. And everything that goes over the internet. The dark web should be ruthlessly suppressed. The internet should be vulnerable to the laws of libel, slander and defamation and everything that is posted on the web should be traceable to any owners and users.
Oh, yes, the government should be outlawed from using antisocial media except for emergency purposes like tornado warnings, flood warnings, and the like. Including the President of the United States.