Socialists should support Brazil's Twitter ban
Socialists should support Brazil's Twitter ban
Judge de Moraes's order is an assertion of the people's sovereignty over capital.
There is some beautiful irony in notorious censor Elon Musk suddenly finding himself silenced at the hands of someone who is even more powerful. Musk, who has spent the last two years systematically censoring and suppressing left critics and dissidents, has now found his site Twitter (aka “X”) banned from the entire nation of Brazil at the order of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The move, predictably, has sparked a whole lot of selective outrage from our free speech absolutists, like Glenn Greenwald:
The very idea that 215 million people in Brazil will be forcibly blocked from reading or using X – unless they know how to use VPNs – illustrates just how extreme these censorship trends are becoming, not only in Brazil, but for governments throughout the ostensibly democratic world…
Note his use of the word “democratic” here, which evidently has nothing to do with a judge exercising the authority vested in him by a democratic government. In this case, the specific issue at stake is Musk’s refusal to name an attorney to represent him before the government amid an ongoing legal struggle over other court orders (and fines). Since Musk refuses to even participate in Brazil’s legal process, the court has understandably declared that he cannot continue to do business in Brazil.
This is, in other words, a row over Brazil’s democratic sovereignty. Which is why some leftists like Paris Marx have suggested that the controversy “isn’t about free speech,” as if it can only be about one or the other. But I disagree: it’s about both. Elon Musk has deliberately created a situation that places the ability of Brazilians to be heard directly at odds with their ability to exercise their democratic authority through the courts. This is a genuine crisis for liberalism, one that pits democracy against what the Soviets called “bourgeois speech rights” — the ability of the rich to exercise speech rights through their control of private property. Something’s got to give.
Musk’s own statement on the controversy makes this contradiction clear:
Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.
Note how he can only defend his position by trying to delegitimize Justice Moraes; Musk knows perfectly well that his appeal to free speech becomes much weaker if we accept the judge’s lawful authority. But despite Musk’s hyperbole (and Greenwald’s political attacks), Moraes is for better and for worse a lawfully appointed judge. The argument is a lot like insisting that a Supreme Court ruling is illegitimate because it was voted on by Clarence Thomas or Neil Gorsuch. Thomas is indeed corrupt and Gorsuch was indeed appointed under dubious circumstances; but within the framework of liberal proceduralism these points are irrelevant until such time as one or both is actually impeached.
That’s why Moraes is correct that Musk’s defiance has to be understood as a defiance of Brazilian sovereignty itself:
Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country.
Even socialists who are sympathetic to free speech rights should be able to appreciate that the stakes here are bigger than speech. If Musk wants to contest court orders through ordinary legal venues he has that right, but this ongoing scofflaw behavior where he refuses to participate in that process has nothing to do with democracy.