In this free speech fight, Musk’s X has marked the right position

When it comes to free expression, Elon Musk tends to talk the talk more ably than he walks the walk. In his latest public tussle on the subject, however, he’s managing to do both. The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is correct when he says a Brazilian jurist’s move to unilaterally prohibit X, which he owns, from operating in the country is an assault on internet speech around the world.

Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has been on a quest to clean up online disinformation for years, having ordered platforms to remove reams of posts that he has declared threatening to democracy. The effort garnered praise from left of center commentators during the latter stages of right-wing populist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s term, as the then-incumbent and his supporters threatened not to accept the results if they lost the 2022 election. And, indeed, yanking down lies with the potential to distort the vote or inspire violence may be the responsible thing for platforms such as X to do in certain limited circumstances. But it is beyond irresponsible for the government to make such calls. The story in Brazil has shown why.

Mr. Moraes’s takedown campaign might have been effective in combating right-wing conspiracy theories, but at a substantial cost to free expression — with mandates for removals and even arrest warrants often issued under seal and with scant reasoning to support them. The recent move against X is both more of the same and just plain more: After X ignored the court’s orders to block more than 140 accounts, the justice warned he would arrest its legal representative in Brazil. That prompted Mr. Musk to remove X’s team from the country. That lack of a physical presence, in turn, led Mr. Moraes to instruct that X be blocked for all 220 million Brazilians — who, he said, could face fines of almost $9,000 a day if they tried to circumvent the restriction.

If this sounds authoritarian, it is. Whatever the threat to democracy that the accounts Mr. Moraes wanted gone might have posed, the threat from one government official limiting the speech of 220 million people is greater. Taken together with Mr. Moraes’s choice to freeze the assets of internet-provider Starlink, a separate company of Mr. Musk’s, this move aligns Brazil not with the free world but with the likes of China and Russia.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/04/elon-musk-x-brazil-judge-speech/

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