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.
By the Editorial Board
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.
None of this is to say that Mr. Musk has pursued his goals through the most practical means, or even the most principled ones. His own posts are regularly gratuitous and inflammatory, including his recent reposting of a declaration that the U.S. government ought to be made up exclusively of “high[-testosterone] alpha males.” He doesn’t consistently go after online lies but rather sporadically spreads them. Just this week, he promoted Tucker Carlson’s interview with a historian who traffics in apologetics for Hitler. Meanwhile, Mr. Musk bizarrely cracked down on the term “cisgender.”
When it comes to heeding speech-control rules of other countries, Mr. Musk’s commitment to unfettered expression has also been inconsistent. Other companies, such as Meta and Google, routinely challenge orders they find objectionable in court — and publish information about their legal salvos. Twitter did the same — when it was Twitter. Now, as X, the company appears to prefer to pick and choose legal stands based on no clear set of values. There’s nary a transparency report to be found, but all signs point to a rise rather than a dip in compliance with state demands. Many of the orders with which X has complied have had little justification apart from preserving leaders’ thin skins: X, for instance, consented to scrub out links in India to a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even in the Brazil case, Mr. Musk didn’t lodge a complaint in any venue. He simply went along with the mandates until, eventually, he didn’t.
For all that, Brazilians shouldn’t have to put up with a government suppressing political viewpoints, however abhorrent a court might think those opinions are. Mr. Musk himself has a right to speak his mind, and to legal due process, notwithstanding Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s demagogic take to the contrary: “The world is not obliged to put up with [Mr. Musk’s] far-right free for all just because he is rich,” he has said. This response reflects badly on the democratic vocation of Mr. da Silva, who was indeed legitimately elected in 2022. And the entire episode is turning into a cautionary tale for democracies that believe the answer to troublesome online expression is to suppress it.
