Brazil: How Brazil’s experiment against fake news led to X’s ban

As Brazil fought with an avalanche of online misinformation Around the 2022 presidential elections, the country Supreme Court He made an unusual and fateful decision: he gave a judge broad powers to order social networks to remove content that he believed to be threatening democracy.

That justice, Alexandre de Moraeshas since carried out an aggressive campaign to clean up the country. Internetforcing social media networks to remove thousands of posts, often giving them just hours to comply.

It has been one of the most comprehensive – and in some ways, most effective – efforts to combat the scourge of internet falsehoods. When its online offensive helped quell far-right attempts to overturn Brazil’s election, academics and commentators wondered whether the country had found a possible solution to one of modern democracy’s most vexing problems.

On Friday, De Moraes blocked the social network X across Brazil because its owner, Elon Musk, had ignored his court orders to delete accounts and then closed X’s office in Brazil. As part of the blocking order, the judge said internet users who tried to circumvent his order to continue using X could be fined nearly $9,000 a day, or more than the average Brazilian earns in a year.

It was the judge’s boldest move yet, and left even many of his defenders worried that Brazil’s experiment had gone too far.

“I was someone who was very much on their side,” said David Nemer, a Brazilian-born media professor who has studied his country’s approach to disinformation at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

“But when we saw Decision X, we thought, ‘What the hell? This is too much,’” he said, using an expletive. “It was a warning to all of us.” Brazil’s years-long struggle against the internet’s destructive effect on politics, culminating in the current X blackout, shows the dangers for a nation in deciding what can be said online. Do too little and online conversations are allowed to undermine democracy; do too much and citizens’ freedom of expression is restricted.

Other governments around the world are likely watching as they debate whether to engage in the tricky business of policing free speech or leave it to increasingly powerful tech companies that rarely share a country’s political interests.

For a long time, the US stayed out of the debate, letting tech companies police themselves and each other. But this year it changed its stance and passed a law to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer due to concerns about its parent company’s ties to China. TikTok has filed a lawsuit to challenge the law as unconstitutional.

The European Union passed sweeping legislation in 2022 requiring social media networks to comply with specific rules on what can be posted on their sites. And just days ago, France charged Pavel Durov, the Russian-born entrepreneur who founded the messaging service Telegram, with a wide range of crimes for failing to prevent illicit activity on the app.

But few democratic governments have taken such drastic measures as Brazil’s suspension of X and its threat of fines against those who continue to use it.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the move “absurd and dangerous.”

“What is really disturbing is that, increasingly, non-democratic governments can turn to democratic ones to justify their actions,” he said. “Where there are more limited ways to address privacy or disinformation concerns, governments should use those more limited means.”

Carlos Affonso Souza, a professor of internet law in Brazil, called the order “the most extreme judicial decision by a Brazilian court in 30 years of internet law,” but added that Brazil had to take some action after Musk so publicly and explicitly disobeyed multiple court orders.

“It is not up to the company to decide whether a court decision is appropriate or not,” Souza said. “The company should file a complaint in a court proceeding, not simply decide not to comply.”

Fábio de Sá e Silva, a professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the order was a powerful rebuke to multinational technology companies that sometimes consider themselves above the laws of nations, especially poorer ones.

“The world is now looking at Brazil and seeing that things are being done there to counter climate change,” said de Sá e Silva. “That could encourage other countries to do the same.”

There were signs that even De Moraes believed he had gone too far. On Friday, he ordered Apple and Google to prevent downloads of apps that offer virtual private networks (VPNs), software that can make a user’s internet traffic appear to come from another country. VPNs are commonly used for privacy and cybersecurity, but they can also be used to bypass blocks against certain websites or apps.

The move against VPN apps sparked a swift backlash across Brazil, and three hours later, de Moraes amended the order to drop his lawsuit against Apple and Google.

But De Moraes maintained the threat of fining anyone who continued to use X in Brazil through a VPN. That measure “is absolutely authoritarian and there is no explicit legal provision that allows it,” said Thiago Amparo, a prominent Brazilian lawyer and newspaper columnist who has supported De Moraes.

The president of the Brazilian Bar Association said Friday that the organization will ask the Supreme Court to review the measure on fines.

Support for De Moraes in Brazil has waned as the country has moved past the heightened tensions of the 2022 election. At the time, then-President Jair Bolsonaro was using social media to sow doubt about the integrity of Brazil’s voting systems, despite a lack of evidence, and De Moraes was ordering social media sites to remove some of his posts.

Following Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat, thousands of his supporters blocked roads, camped outside military bases and eventually stormed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court in an attempt to provoke a military coup. De Moraes responded by ordering social media to block dozens of prominent accounts that questioned the vote or sympathized with the attempted insurrection, including some belonging to federal lawmakers.

But since then, as the political temperature has cooled, De Moraes has continued to issue court orders to social media sites to remove accounts. The orders are secret and lack explanations for how a particular account has broken the law, according to leaked copies of the orders.

“Moraes’ actions were very legitimized by the need to protect the Constitution,” said Mariana Valente, a lawyer and director of the Brazilian think tank InternetLab. “But there is obviously concern that this will continue.”

She said Brazil’s Supreme Court should soon decide on De Moraes’ order to block X. “That is essential to create legitimacy for a decision that is very extreme,” she said.

De Moraes has continued to use the threat to democracy as justification for his actions. In his order on Friday, he said Musk’s refusal to comply with orders to suspend accounts “poses an extremely serious risk to the October municipal elections” in Brazil.

De Moraes has “established a state of emergency,” Nemer said. “But it is a permanent state of emergency, and that is not good for any type of democracy.”