Elon’s Standoff With Brazil Reveals Hypocrisy & Overreach By Both Sides

Legal Issues

from the none-of-this-looks-good-for-anyone dept

In the battle between Elon Musk and Brazil, there are no heroes — only two sides engaged in an epic display of hypocrisy and overreach.

You may have heard that Brazil is threatening to ban ExTwitter from the country, possibly by tonight. This comes after Elon said that it was shutting down all operations in Brazil as the judiciary there continued to demand the company remove content that Elon didn’t want to remove. We wrote about some of the backstory in April, when Elon first said he was not going to obey the orders issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

The orders focused on supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a very Trumpian figure. His supporters had tried to pull a similar “storming the Congress” kind of move in January of 2023, which was about as successful as the Trumpian storming of the US Capitol two years earlier. Moraes had ordered both that ExTwitter share information on some users who were talking about the storming of the Brazilian Congress, and that some of the accounts be blocked.

What was less reported was that a few days later, ExTwitter quietly agreed that it would comply with the order. But then… it appears it did not. So, more recently, Moraes suggested that he would order ExTwitter’s legal representative in Brazil to be jailed for failure to comply. This is when Elon said they were pulling all operations out of the country.

Now Moraes has responded by saying that Brazil might just ban all of ExTwitter in the country in response.

None of this is unprecedented. We’ve talked in the past about Brazil arresting Facebook officials because WhatsApp wouldn’t reveal info on certain users (because it couldn’t, due to encryption) and then banning WhatsApp (multiple times). So we’ve seen this before.

Either way, Elon does not seem to be taking it well. He posted an image of Moraes in jail, which I’m sure is not winning him many fans among Moraes’ supporters.

In response, there are reports suggesting that Moraes is also looking to freeze Starlink’s assets in Brazil. Of course, Starlink had just received a bunch of press for how it was being used by remote Amazon tribes.

In discussing this on Bluesky, I suggested that both sides are coming out of this looking extremely badly and got pushback, mainly from Brazilians and some people who dislike Musk.

The main argument is that it’s pretty clear that he is violating Brazilian law. First off, it involves disobeying orders coming from the Brazilian Supreme Court, which people insist must be obeyed. Also, the law in Brazil requires that to operate an internet service, you have to have an employee in the country.

But, here’s the thing: as we’ve argued for years, standing up and fighting back against unjust laws is what standing up for free speech and civil liberties is all about.

For example, lots of countries are now pushing for these laws that require internet companies to have local employees in order to arrest them if the company doesn’t do the government’s bidding. We have long pointed out how dangerous this is, as they are effectively “hostage laws” that enable authoritarian countries to put undue pressure on private companies.

Even if you claim that Brazil is somehow not authoritarian, blessing these kinds of laws enables authoritarian countries to use similar laws in similarly problematic ways. Are you okay with Russia having the same law (it does)? Or India?

Indeed, let’s look at what happened in India under Twitter’s previous regime as a comparison. Remember, Modi’s government had demanded that Twitter remove a bunch of tweets supportive of a massive protest by farmers in that country, and Twitter refused. The Indian government (like Moraes in Brazil) claimed at the time that the protests were threatening the stability of the Indian government.

When Twitter refused to pull down those tweets, the Modi government first threatened to jail Indian Twitter employees. Later, it raided Twitter’s offices in India. India threatened to ban Twitter in the country, and some politicians pushed Indians to move to a local competitor, Koo. Twitter fought back against those demands, and many people cheered them on for standing up for free speech and against undue pressure.

I don’t see how you separate these two stories. If Twitter was right to stand up to India when the Modi government made those demands, shouldn’t it stand up to Brazil when it makes similar demands? Isn’t that standing up for free speech?

The fact that Brazil has a hostage law, or that it has a law saying a single Supreme Court justice can demand content be removed, or that it can block a service entirely, or that same justice can freeze other unrelated assets… those are all bad? Those all seem like unjust powers that shouldn’t be allowed as they can easily be abused. Also, many of the original demands were secret, and if you are going to give a government the power to pull down content, the fact that those orders are secret is very concerning.

At the same time, yes, it appears that Elon is fighting all this in a dumb and antagonistic way. Making use of proper legal process upfront makes a lot more sense. Attacking the judge in question directly seems… unwise?

This is why I was saying that both sides look bad here. Musk also looks bad because of his selectiveness. Remember, he keeps claiming that his definition of free speech is “that which matches the law.”

He literally said it again earlier this week:

He notes that he wants ExTwitter to “support all viewpoints within the bounds of the laws of countries.”

Yet, here, he is against the laws in Brazil. At the very least, this highlights again how even Elon Musk doesn’t agree with Elon Musk’s definition of free speech, because it’s nonsensical. Supporting free speech sometimes means you have to stand up against unjust laws.

And, of course, as a reminder, before Elon took over Twitter (but while he was in a legal fight about it), he accused the company of violating the agreement because of its legal fight against the Modi government over their censorship demands. I know it’s long forgotten now, but one of the excuses Elon used in trying to kill the Twitter deal was that the company was fighting too hard to protect free speech in India.

And then, once he took over, he not only caved immediately to Modi’s demands, he agreed to block the content that the Modi government ordered blocked globally, not just in India.

So Elon isn’t even consistent on this point. He folds to governments when he likes the leadership and fights them when he doesn’t. It’s not a principled stance. It’s a cynical, opportunistic one.

But in the end, both sides look bad here. Elon’s response is childish and inconsistent with his own statements and actions elsewhere. And Brazil’s laws seem unjust, and its enforcement of the law seems extremely out of proportion with the alleged violations.

In the end, the real people who lose out are those in Brazil who have relied on ExTwitter as a useful service.

Filed Under: alexandre de moraes, brazil, elon musk, free speech, hostage employees, hostage laws
Companies: starlink, twitter, x