Musk sticks up for his rightwing buddies, not free speech

For strongmen, everything. For his enemies, the law.

(Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty)

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As of this writing Brazil’s 215 million citizens cannot access X (or “twitter” as we’ll call it). And yet, they are still living in the dumbest timeline.

Elon Musk, the world’s foremost “free speech absolutist,” has picked a fight with the Brazilian government over its demand that he censor rightwing misinformation. It’s a classic situation of “why can’t they both lose?” But right now, the only ones losing are the Brazilian people.

The saga began with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a rightwing conservative who lost his bid for reelection in 2022 to leftwing politician Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On January 8 of last year, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed Congress and the Supreme Court in a failed attempt to keep him in power.

The reaction of the Brazilian government to January 8 stands in stark contrast to official reaction to January 6 in the US. In Brazil, hundreds of people were immediately arrested, including some senior government officials. Bolsonaro was barred from running for office again. And Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes led an operation that was both investigatory and preventative. In short, they wanted to figure out why their government had been attacked, and they wanted to make damn sure that it never happened again.

To that end, Judge de Moraes sought to banish rightwing incitement, the so-called “digital militias,” from social media. In sealed rulings, he ordered Meta, Instagram, and Telegram to remove posts and users who flogged misinformation about the attack on government and advocated for Bolonsaro’s return.

Meanwhile, Bolsonaro fled to Florida, where he launched a second act as hero of the American right. The Brazilian leader spews the same jingoistic populism, fueled by hatred of minorities and LGBTQ+ people, that animates Trumpism. He even consulted Steve Bannon on his 2018 campaign. And perhaps most importantly, he reinforces their bedrock belief that election fraud is rampant.

As former congressman and current Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes told CNN, “The way his narrative is built, to a large extent, as a copy or a mirror image of the narrative that they have in the US is very useful in the sense of showing people this is happening in other places, too. This proves the whole idea that there is a global conspiracy, a global leftwing conspiracy to keep us, the people who represent the real people, out of power.”

Elon Musk tries to dismantle the foundations of US democracy

A limited view of free speech absolutism

In 2022, when he was still in office, Bolsonaro awarded a prestigious national medal to Musk. Whether because of flattery or Musk’s political alignment with the fringiest figures on the American right, the omnipresent CEO is now firmly in Bolsonaro’s camp and lending his megaphone to Bolsonaro’s supporters, who hope to stage a comeback for their leader.

In April, egged on by rightwing hack Michael Shellenberger, Musk announced that he was reinstating all the accounts Judge Moraes had ordered the company to ban.

“We are lifting all restrictions. This judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees and cut off access to 𝕏 in Brazil,” he tweeted. “As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit.”

House Republicans chimed in with their support for the supposed free speech warrior, publishing a staff report entitled, "The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration's Silence: The Case of Brazil." 

“The report exposes Brazil's censorship campaign and presents a startling case study of how a government can justify censorship in the name of stopping so-called ‘hate’ speech and the ‘subversion’ of ‘order,’” the House Judiciary Committee announced righteously. Then they went back to slobbering over Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, whose manly Christian virtues include ruthless press censorship laws.

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And of course censorship is wrong — even censorship instituted to protect civil society from very dangerous people. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick wrote in piece excoriating American liberals for celebrating Judge de Moraes fight with Musk, “Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s a good thing when political leaders go around calling for the arresting or punishing of people for their speech, even when that speech is terrible.”

At the same time, we should take Musk’s supposed altruism with a $44 billion grain of salt. Musk famously caved to the Indian government’s demands that it censor opposition politicians after a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"If we don't obey local government laws, we will get shut down so the best we can do is to hew close to the law in any given country, but it is impossible for us to do more than that or we'll be blocked and our people will be arrested," he said in 2023.

Twitter also censored content at the behest of a Turkish court before that country’s elections last year.

And of course Musk has deplatformed Americans, including the founder of this website, for speech which was entirely legal.

The upsides (and downsides) of angering one of the world's richest men

Musk has also filed lawsuits punishing his critics for true statements and sued advertisers for exercising their free speech rights to disassociate from his company. Clearly Musk’s free speech absolutism is absolutely situational.

The Musk mind virus

After Musk reversed course and brought back the banned accounts in defiance of the court’s order, Judge de Moraes announced an investigation into Musk personally for incitement and disinformation. Most of twitter’s staff in Brazil (and everywhere else) had already been fired, but Musk responded by pulling the last of the company’s employees out of the country, essentially depriving the court of a local agent, in violation of Brazil’s laws regulating internet companies.

The dispute continued to snowball, with Musk growing ever more deranged in his responses.

“One day, @Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words,” he tweeted late last month, over an AI image of the judge handcuffed behind bars.

The next day he posted that, “This guy @Alexandre is an outright criminal of the worst kind, masquerading as a judge.”

Meanwhile, as the fines continued to pile up against twitter, Judge de Moraes froze the assets of Starlink, the satellite internet provider affiliated with Musk’s company SpaceX, which claims to have 250,000 subscribers in Brazil.

The judge subsequently banned twitter nationwide, cutting off access for the reported 40 million active users in the country. The order was sweeping and draconian, barring Apple and Google from selling the virtual private networks Brazilians might use to get around the ruling, and even threatening to fine individuals up to $9,000 if they used a VPN to evade the restriction. The Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on twitter, although the VPN restrictions appear to have been pared back.

“The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes [agenda] just because he is rich,” President da Silva told CNN’s Brazilian affiliate.

But even as twitter stopped working in the country, some Brazilians were still able to access it — particularly customers of Starlink, which initially promised to fight the ban in court. But within 24 hours, it, too, was blocking the platform.

Musk has now descended into a sputtering rage.

“Unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of 𝕏 and SpaceX, we will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too,” he tweeted on September 2. “Hope Lula enjoys flying commercial.”

Musk was commenting on a story about the US government seizing a plane which was titled in the name of a private individual for the purposes of evading sanctions on the Venezuelan government — the idea being that if the government can do that, it can also seize Lula’s plane for how he’s treating Musk.

There are a whole bunch of complex international law reasons why twitter’s dispute with the Brazilian government is not going to result in the seizure of Lula’s official plane — not even if Musk takes his case to the friendliest judge in Texas. But top among them is that Elon Musk is not the American government. The world’s most thin-skinned tycoon doesn’t get to tell Uncle Sam to go steal stuff from foreign leaders just because they did something to piss him off.

And that, at bottom, is the problem — Musk thinks his interest and America’s interest are one. He sees no contradiction in howling about government censorship because twitter blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story for a day and using the platform which he owns to amplify Republican voices and promote the election of Republicans. He’s delighted to lend his megaphone — algorithmically juiced to ensure that his every thought lands at the top of the feed — to Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and any other right-winger willing to suck up to him.

Josh Marshall on how the "liberal media" works against Dems

Elon doesn’t stick up for for free speech — he sticks up for his rightwing buddies. He’ll force a showdown with a foreign government that cuts millions of people off from social media because someone dared to tell him “no.” He thinks he’s bigger than Brazil and doesn’t have to follow its rules if it wants to play in his sandbox. And he’s shown an almost equal disregard for US laws as well.

It’s fundamentally dangerous to have someone in charge of so much of the infrastructure of public speech and our national defense — particularly when that person thinks he’s not bound by any nation’s strictures. Also, yes, censorship is bad. Two things can be true at once, and they both are.

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