Censorship Crosses the Pond as Brazil Bans X
Jarrett Stepman /
The censorship regime that threatens Europe has crossed the Atlantic and has landed in the New World.
Brazil became the latest example of a reputed “democracy” opting for a totalitarian evisceration of free speech in the name of combating “misinformation.”
On Saturday, a Brazilian court ruled that the social media platform X would be banned from the country and that anyone caught using a VPN—a virtual private network—to access the website would be fined the equivalent of $9,000. That’s around the average annual income in Brazil, according to some estimates.
On Monday, the country’s highest court unanimously upheld the decision. The one judge who opposed the fine said that people who go on X shouldn’t be punished unless they promote “racism, fascism, or Nazism, obstruct criminal investigations, or incite crimes in general.”
Notice: No mention of socialism or communism. The Left will always oh-so-nobly protect unlimited free speech for communists, of course.
X Chairman Elon Musk countered Brazil’s ban by making his satellite internet constellation Starlink free to users in Brazil, but now Brazil’s government is threatening that, as well.
Did we see any outrage from the Biden administration or the corporate media over this obvious attack on an American company and free speech? Nope. What we got from the White House were crickets, and the corporate media have been doing their best to spin this into a mere regulatory technicality that’s mostly a good thing.
Nothing would have happened to X if it had just complied with the Brazilian government, they say.
That’s notable, given that so many media commentators warned that the previous right-wing Brazilian administration was going to be authoritarian. Now that the new left-wing Brazilian government has trampled on free speech in a direct way, they suddenly find the whole authoritarian thing kind of neat.
Whatever spin they put on this, what happened in Brazil is a serious threat to freedom.
It’s a disturbing and predictable continuation of a larger battle taking place over speech in the free world. As institutions and governments now largely captured by left-wing ideology lose credibility, and various “populist” movements threaten to take power, Western regimes are increasingly willing to use government force to cut them off at the knees.
It’s interesting how this came to be.
Big Tech was once sold by the Left as a totally benign collective institution that was meant to bring the whole world together in a great global exchange of ideas and friendship. That never really happened.
It turns out that binding the whole world together means that we recognize each other’s differences just as much or more than our similarities. Hence, conflict.
I do really get the feeling that some of the Left’s early Big Tech proponents really did think that globalized communications would turn everyone into a generic Western liberal.
When those platforms became conduits for ideas and political movements they didn’t like, the self-proclaimed proponents of tolerance did what they’re wont to do when their utopian ideas get stymied by reality: They turned to censorship and force.
They are increasingly comfortable using government power to threaten and pressure social media platforms to censor “misinformation”—which all too often is simply information or opinions they dislike. They do this, laughably, in the name of “our democracy.”
At one time, much of Big Tech was happy to oblige the whims of petty bureaucrats and censorious left-wing governments. They did so freely. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Big Tech and Big Government largely worked hand in hand.
But the landscape has changed a bit in the past few years after the remarkable acquisition of Twitter, now X, by Musk.
Social media technologies have always provided an opening to step around traditional media institutions. The Left now wants to put the genie back in the bottle with censorship.
Losing X to someone who wasn’t entirely on board with their ideas was seen as an existential threat. It didn’t even have to be a conservative or someone on the Right.
Initially, they just flew into hysterics about how Musk’s takeover was a threat to democracy, but now they are mobilizing and encouraging governments to ruthlessly crack down on powerful platforms that won’t bend over backwards to their demands.
Many on the Left are celebrating what’s happened to X in Brazil and are demanding other governments do the same, or worse.
Former President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, Robert Reich, even wrote that Musk should be arrested—just as the CEO of Telegram was in France—if he doesn’t crack down on speech on his platform.
As I noted in a previous piece about the growing power of the censorship regimes in Europe, don’t count on the United States being immune to that temptation. Yes, we have the First Amendment. We also have a lot of people in the media and in high places in this country who would like nothing more than to see our old Constitution be dissolved.
Vice President Kamala Harris said in 2019 that then-President Donald Trump should be censored by X. Are we to believe that she wouldn’t want to censor him in 2024?
The existential threat to democracy isn’t coming from Musk, or X, or some anonymous social media accounts. It’s coming from unaccountable government bureaucracies and politicians who want to commandeer tech platforms to do their bidding—or else.
It’s coming from the institutional powers that think you can’t handle the truth, can’t handle information that goes against their narrative about how the world should be.
As power slips ever so slightly from their hands, they are now showing their teeth and will do increasingly illiberal things to ensure that the Left remains in control, forever.