Unexpected retreat

The social media platform X went dark in Brazil for over a month last fall amid a fight over censorship that pitted the world’s best-known free speech advocate against a thin-skinned Supreme Court justice determined to silence online dissent.

The standoff ended in a surprise loss for Elon Musk, who finally agreed to block posts flagged as problematic by government censors. His decision has huge ramifications for Brazilians, who relied on the platform to share news with each other in one of the world’s largest democracies. Now, in the name of defending political freedom from the evils of “misinformation,” they must choose their words carefully.

Tiago Albrecht is a council member in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. He is one of an estimated 40 million Brazilians who use X. He follows events in Porto Alegre on local media, but he relies heavily on X, formerly known as Twitter, to help him stay abreast of events in other parts of Brazil. “I go straight to Twitter, because it’s going to be faster and sharper,” he said.

Although he missed X while it was down, he supported Musk’s initial decision to cease operations rather than comply with the government’s demands. Albrecht was on his way to an event for his reelection campaign when a friend messaged him the news that X had caved. “It was a plot twist,” Albrecht said. “I was not expecting Elon Musk to sort of bow down.”

The roots of the showdown go back to two significant events in 2019. First, the Brazilian Supreme Court committed a massive power grab after online magazine Crusoé published a story linking the wife of the chief justice to a corruption scandal. The court granted itself authority to carry out criminal investigations into “fake news,” defamation, slander, and threats against the honor of the court. It put Justice Alexandre de Moraes in charge of these investigations. A former prosecutor, de Moraes undertook the role with enthusiasm. He opened an investigation into Crusoé. That investigation, still ongoing, has had a chilling effect on journalists across the country.

Also in 2019, the Supreme Court released Brazil’s former left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on a technicality. He’d been sentenced to 12 years for corruption. The release of “Lula”—as he is universally known—unleashed censorship on a whole new level.

In 2022, Lula ran for the presidency against incumbent right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro and won the vote by less than 2 percentage points. During the election campaign, de Moraes served as president of Brazil’s electoral court. The presidency of that court is determined by a rotation system and his selection was coincidental, but de Moraes seized the opportunity to harness the power of censorship to help Lula’s campaign.

De Moraes ordered social media platforms to remove references to Lula’s criminal conviction on the grounds that his conviction was vacated and under Brazilian law he remained innocent until proven guilty. Gabriel de Arruda Castro, a Brazilian journalist, noted the irony of not being allowed to state simple facts: “You could not say that he is a former inmate, even though he is literally a former inmate.” De Moraes also ordered platforms to censor posts suggesting Lula would legalize abortion, even though Lula made comments to that effect and his party’s platform is pro-abortion. The idea of legalizing abortion is anathema to Brazil’s majority pro-life population. Discussions of Lula’s friendships with communist leaders in other Latin American countries also weren’t allowed. But social media bans weren’t the worst punishment de Moraes meted out. He ordered at least five people sent to prison for their posts.

JOURNALIST MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER exposed some of de Moraes’ actions after he got access to Twitter’s internal communications and documents from Elon Musk. Shellenberger’s reporting in what became known as “The Twitter Files Brazil” revealed that de Moraes had demanded private information for accounts using certain hashtags. He also sent secret court orders demanding Twitter censor and ban accounts. Twitter staff in Brazil pushed back, even though other social media platforms complied.

Shellenberger likened the effort to silencing all dissent.

“De Moraes had been demanding the banning of journalists and policymakers, not just censoring, but literally banning them from not just one, but all of the platforms,” Shellenberger told me. “Basically trying to ‘de person’ is the only way to say it. Completely ruin the careers of journalists and politicians that you didn’t like.”

After Shellenberger published his report in April 2024, Brazilian authorities placed him and Musk under criminal investigation.

Tensions between X and de Moraes reached a head four months later. The company announced on Aug. 17 it would close its operations in Brazil “to protect the safety” of its staff. On Aug. 30, de Moraes ordered Brazilian internet providers to block all access to X. Any Brazilian caught logging into X with a virtual private network (VPN) faced fines of around $9,000 a day. The standoff between X and de Moraes appeared to reach a stalemate, until X made a surprise U-turn and agreed to pay fines and enforce de Moraes’ ­censorship orders.

De Moraes’ power grabs have not gone unnoticed internationally. The New York Times published a story on de Moraes titled “He Is Brazil’s Defender of Democracy. Is He Actually Good for Democracy?” Shellenberger thinks even those who like what de Moraes has accomplished are growing “embarrassed” by his overt, heavy-handed tactics.

But Shellenberger also warns that the focus on de Moraes distracts from a broader pattern of censorship. His reporting uncovered what he calls the “Brazilian censorship industrial complex.” It consists of a sprawling network that includes the Brazilian government, the American FBI and Department of Homeland Security, and European government agencies. The Brazilian censorship industrial complex also includes several nongovernmental agencies that receive funding from international sources like the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. These groups focus on developing technological tools for censorship and pressuring advertisers not to support platforms that don’t censor. “We find a lot of interaction between government employees in the U.S., Brazil, Europe, and these NGOs,” Shellenberger said, noting that Lula and his followers support censorship. If de Moraes didn’t order the censoring, someone else would.

A few days after news broke that X would comply with de Moraes’ demands, Albrecht was finally able to log in to his account again. The first thing he posted was a denunciation of de Moraes: “[He] should have already been impeached and, perhaps, subject to criminal proceedings!!”

Albrecht says many of his Brazilian friends are disappointed that X seems to have surrendered. But he remains optimistic. “Maybe Elon Musk thought, ‘OK, I will pay those fines to permit that people can have access to Twitter and people can keep fighting against Alexandre de Moraes,’” Albrecht said. “So maybe it’s like a strategic retreat.”