Free Speech

Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe | 9.12.2024 1:00 PM

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Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X?

Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked the site formerly known as Twitter in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban on X with a VPN could get you fined about $9,000 a day, around the average per capita income in Brazil. It happened after Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state had accused of being part of "digital militias" undermining Brazil's democracy.

X's owner Elon Musk has accused the judge of "repeatedly and brazenly" betraying Brazil's constitution, called for his impeachment, and described him as "Brazil's Darth Vader."

The judge has accused Musk of "criminal instrumentalization" of the X platform and frozen the assets of Musk's satellite internet company Starlink in the country.

Joining us today from Brazil to talk about all this, and the intensifying global crackdown on online speech, is Glenn Greenwald. His show System Update airs every weeknight at 7 p.m. ET on Rumble. An archive of all his latest work is available on his Substack.

Zach Weissmueller: Why is the Brazilian government afraid of X.com, Just Asking Questions. I'm Weissmueller, senior producer for Reason, joined by my co-host, Wolfe, Reason associate editor and author of The Reason Roundup. Hey Liz.

Liz Wolfe: Hey, Zach.

Weissmueller: Judge Alexandre de Moraes has blocked X, formerly known as Twitter, in Brazil, where an estimated 40 million people access the site each month. Circumventing the ban with a virtual private network (VPN) could get you fined about $9,000 dollars a day, which is around the average annual income per capita in Brazil. It happened after X's owner Elon Musk reinstated accounts that the Brazilian state has accused of being part of digital militias undermining Brazil's democracy. Musk has accused the judge of repeatedly and brazenly betraying Brazil's constitution, called for his impeachment and described him as Brazil's Darth Vader. The judge has accused Musk of criminal instrumentalization of the X platform and frozen the assets of Musk's satellite internet company Starlink in the country. Joining us today from Brazil to talk about all this and the intensifying global crackdown on online speech is Greenwald. He's a man who needs no introduction to our audience. I'll just say that you can see a show system update every weeknight at 7 p.m. EST on Rumble and see an archive of all his latest work on his Substack. Glenn, thank you for coming on the show.

Glenn Greenwald: Thanks for having me. Great to be with you guys.

Weissmueller: I thought that in order to better understand why this judge has picked a fight with X and Elon Musk, or maybe it's the other way around, it'd be helpful for you to give your take on the tumultuous political events in Brazil that have led to this moment, starting with Jair Bolsonaro losing the presidential election by a fairly narrow margin to Lula de Silva. We've cut together a little montage that features a couple of soundbites from Bolsonaro, these soundbites as we do on this show because we have audio listeners. I've been translated and dubbed using AI from Portuguese to English, but there's some soundbites of Bolsonaro sowing doubts about Brazil's election integrity in the lead up to the vote. And then some footage from January when his supporters breached several government buildings, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Presidential Palace, claiming that the election was fraudulent. Let's roll that to get into this conversation.

Video Clip: "Our system is unauditable. It is not possible to prove whether or not there was fraud in the elections. This system here makes it impossible to establish any relationship or correlation between the voter and their vote. There's the storming of the building, big crowd gathering outside, the overturned tables."

Weissmueller: Obviously Americans will be inclined to draw some parallels to our own situation in 2020 in our minds. But just taking Brazil on its own terms, how do we get from the events of 2022 to an outright ban of a huge platform like X?

Greenwald: Yes, I think the setup explicated very well the key point, which is in many ways what's happening in Brazil is simply a reflection of broader trends both in the West and Western Europe, but also in Canada and the United States, the U.K., this sense that I think emerged primarily after 2016, that western elites can no longer permit a free internet. Because when you allow a free internet, their media outlets cannot monopolize discourse any longer. The propaganda system becomes weakened. I think they were particularly traumatized by the dual events of the U.K. voting to leave the E.U. through the ratification of Brexit followed only three months later by the greatest trauma of the lives of the Western liberal, which is the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump. You can really see immediately following that, the emergence of this new industry called anti disinformation funded by all sorts of western liberal billionaires, the same small handful that fund the projects to censor the internet in the name of Russian influence as well.

This whole industry popped up based on this idea that we can no longer allow an internet to be free because when we do, we get these forces that are directly threatening to the establishment. So if you print anything in Brazil, just go back a little bit from where you began, which was in 2018 when Jair Bolsonaro decided to run for president, nobody took Jair Bolsonaro seriously. He was sort of like, I don't know, the Matt Gage or the Marjorie Taylor Greene of Brazilian politics. He had been a member of Congress for 30 years. He drew a lot of media attention through these outlandish statements that were often very anti-democratic, but he was very good, very charismatic at bringing a lot of attention to himself, but he was always on the fringes of political life. The anti-establishment, anti status quo sentiment in Brazil grew so much that he was able to channel that by presenting himself as the enemy of the establishment.

Very similar to what Trump did that a lot of Western European populist parties are doing. And out of nowhere became president of Brazil. He won by a fairly large margin over the Workers party, which had been Lula de Silva's party that had pretty much dominated Brazilian politics and ruled Brazil since 2002. A lot of what started happening in Brazil in terms of free speech, just like in the United States and Western Europe, was a reaction to a very aggressively anti-establishment movement that had a right-wing populist strain to it, a pretty dominant right-wing populist strain. They were petrified of it because it was absolutely a threat to status quo establishment ruling power. I was somebody who thought that Jair Bolsonaro was incredibly dangerous to Brazilian democracy. I was saying that all the way up until the election.

But after the election, it was very clear that Brazilian institutions were a lot stronger than people thought, were able to make Jair Bolsonaro a very weak candidate, just like I think American institutions made Trump a very weak candidate, really limited what he was able to do versus the sort of stuff he was saying. Very quickly into Bolsonaro's administration, they created through the Supreme Court a criminal investigation called criminal investigation into fake news. It empowered this one single judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who is not a leftist. In fact, he was appointed by this center-right president who preceded Bolsonaro, who became president when they impeached [former President] Dilma Rousseff, who was the left-wing part of Lula's presidency. The entire Brazilian left thought that this was a coup.

They thought that Alexandre de Moraes was this fascist, they called him a fascist, a racist, a white nationalist. All the things that the left calls people and they dislike him. He was very much not a man of the left, but he was kind of a sort of [Senate Minority] Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) figure, very center-right or right-wing, but very pro-establishment. He was very powerful. He was connected to a lot… he was a lawyer. He used to defend a lot of very powerful criminal gangs and the like. Very well-connected to police and the armed agencies. They empowered him to essentially start single-handedly policing the internet to just order people banned from the internet, hosts removed from the internet with a very powerful fine structure and punishment structure for big tech if they failed to do so very quickly within two hours of the order being issued.

It became this censorship mania, as you probably know very well, that when human beings get this censorship power, it's very intoxicating, it's very inebriating, it's incredible power. They were able to start building this idea that the only thing that could save Brazilian democracy was censorship. It just kept growing and growing and growing over the years, Alexandre de Moraes was transformed into the most admired national hero by the Brazilian left. That was just four years earlier, calling him a fascist and a racist and all of that because he was imprisoning, not only censoring, but then began imprisoning their political enemies with no due process. Just through a stroke of a pen became the most powerful judge you can think of in any country in the democratic world anywhere. So with all that adoration and all that encouragement, his power grew.

He had, I think it was a very authoritarian mindset, and he started issuing so many censorship orders that, for example, Rumble, the platform where I have my show on, decided that they could no longer be in Brazil just because they couldn't and wouldn't comply with the avalanche of censorship orders. I'm talking about how they would censor and order removed from the internet elected members of Congress, some of the people with the highest vote total. In the name of democracy, they were kicking off the internet through a stroke of a judge's pen, no trial, no due process, nothing. People who got the biggest votes among the Brazilian people to represent them in the Congress. Rumble is already out of Brazil. If I want to watch my own show when I'm in Brazil or we have to transmit it on Rumble, we have to use a VPN because there's no way to access Rumble in Brazil because of this.

Elon got to that same point where X every day was being ordered to censor hundreds and then thousands, not just again of random citizens spreading hate speech anonymously, but prominent elected members of the Brazilian Congress and others. Elon got to the point where he said, "We're not going to comply with this unjust, coercive censorship scheme that itself is illegal." It is for reasons that I could explain, but it has no legal basis. So this judge said when X started not complying with some of these orders, they threatened to arrest the executives of X physically present in Brazil. To protect X employees, Elon closed X's offices in Brazil, so there were no more people they could imprison and then also continue to allow those posts and people to remain on social media. And so Alexandre de Moraes said, "Either within 48 hours you remove every post I've ordered, taken down, and you appoint a Brazilian representative on Brazilian soil to represent X."

Who in their right mind would do that except somebody already serving a life sentence of prison given the threats to imprison him or we're going to ban X from Brazil. When Elon didn't comply, this judge issued not only an order banning X from all of Brazil, and it's now completely unavailable and inaccessible in Brazil unless you use a VPN. He also invented a law. How does a judge invent the law that says it is now illegal to use a VPN to access X, and anyone who does pays the fine that you reference, which is an exorbitant fine from any perspective, $10,000 a day. But from a Brazilian perspective, they're like, "There's 1 percent of the population that could pay that for even a single day." It just shows how extreme I think Brazilian culture is in terms of its abandonment of any belief in free speech. But I think also you see a lot of support for it in the broader West, which may not have gone as far yet as Brazil has gone, but is very much on that same path.

Wolfe: I think all three of us agree that Moraes action was horrifying, right? This sets a terrible precedent, but Glenn, I'm curious about whether you could walk us through what implications this has for separation of powers in Brazil and for rule of law. This strikes me as a huge possible turning point.

Greenwald: It's interesting because when Brazil redemocratized in 1985 and then enacted this constitution in 1989, they wrote this constitution that actually is more robust in its protections than the American constitution on which it in part was modeled. It's a very extensive constitution, but it's very much based on the idea of separation of powers, a balance of power between three branches, the congressional, the judicial, and the executive. The Supreme Court had always been the weakest, the most obscure of the three branches. They just kind of issued technical rulings about the law. But then once the emergence of Bolsonaro happened, all the rules went out the window. Similar to how in the United States, every media outlet changed their ethos, every institution changed how they began functioning with the single-minded goal of stopping Trump. The idea became that, "Look, we have to amass every power we can amass to destroy the Bolsonaro movement, to imprison the leaders, to prevent it from succeeding." And the Supreme Court started to become the most dominant force in the country by far.

They often just legislate overtly from the bench like, "Should marijuana be illegal? Should it be illegal? At what point should abortion should be allowed? Should it be criminalized?" They constantly issue laws that the Congress is starting to get very angry about in terms of the invasion of their authority. The problem is, and it's very hard to explain Brazil to people, but Brazil is a very transactional country politically. The dominant force in Congress are neither left or right. They're these kind of transactional centrists, and as long as their wheels are being greased, they will side with whoever is in power. So Moraes and the Supreme Court have done a good job of neutralizing the Congress. You have angry people in Congress, but that doesn't form a majority. There's a drive to impeach Moraes because he's such a tyrant and exceeding all bounds, but they can't get a majority because the majority of people in Congress are getting what they really want, which are these transactional benefits. They're very much financially driven parties. They'll align with anybody right or left, whoever benefits their immediate interest.

Wolfe: So there's no safeguard on Moraes' power? There's no means of reining it in at this point?

Greenwald: I'll just give you a quick example. About a month and a half ago, we obtained a massive archive of documents from the highest level of Moraes chambers, the WhatsApp conversations of his aides, audios, documents. I was able to get this, and they partnered with the largest newspaper in Brazil, which is Folha de S.Paulo, where I'm a columnist. I've worked with them before. It's like The New York Times of Brazil—the biggest, most mainstream media outlet. Obviously when you go around publishing people's private secrets in a way that makes them look bad, as our reporting was doing, they get pretty angry. I've seen that before in my reporting. Never though, have I seen before the opening by the judge who's the subject of the reporting a criminal investigation that not only named the people they suspect having leaked this information, but also me, the reporters through my work and Folha itself as part of this broad, endless fake news investigation.

There were rumors that the police were going to come to our house, do searches and seizures to find out who our sources are, even though those constitutional protections guarantee sources. None of that has happened yet, although........

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