Is Brazil's ban of social media platform X legal or political? | Inside Story

social media platform X goes dark in Brazil it failed to comply with a court order to block accounts linked to disinformation owner Elon Musk says it's a Crackdown on Free Speech how much politics is involved and could other countries follow suit this is Inside Story [Music] hello and welcome to the program I'm D nauga social media giant X has been banned in Brazil it's the latest development in a months-long dispute between a Supreme Court judge and Tech billionaire Elon Musk over censorship and disinformation Brazil isn't the first country to restrict access to the platform the ban is reigniting a debate about the role social media plays in politics freedom of speech and the spread of misinformation how should social media Giants be regulated and the censorship being used as a political tool we'll explore these issues on more with our guests in a moment but first this report by Kata Lopez hon like many students 18-year-old Anna gets her news from social media now that X is banned in Brazil she's looking for other platforms people my age aren't really in the habit of watching TV news or reading the news and Twitter or X was a way to get news from around the world so I've lost touch a little with what's happening globally Supreme Court Judge Alexander de Mor says ex-owner Elon Musk failed to comply with an order to suspend accounts linked to spreading disinformation and know the truth even if the truth is unpopular mus called him an evil dictator and accused him of trying to silence dissent and conservative views the billionaire investor has aligned himself with right-wing figures like Brazil's former president T bolsonaro and Donald Trump the current president Luis inas Lula Silva welcomed the ruling saying musk is out of line having a lot of money doesn't allow you to disrespect the Supreme Court Elon musk's an American citizen he's not a citizen of the world he can't offend presidents Congressman the senate or the Supreme Court who does he think he is musk is repeatedly louded in conservative and right-wing circles as a hero of free speech and the role X formerly known as Twitter plays in politics globally is significant the platform has been banned in Pakistan since elections in February with the government citing threats to National Security as a reason in Venezuela Nicolas Maduro shut it down when Nationwide demonstrations broke out in response to his contested election Victory Russia also banned the app after it invaded Ukraine in 2022 and temporary or permanent restrictions have been imposed in several countries including China Iran and Egypt Brazilians have lost access to the platform and can face Hefty fines if they're caught using an encrypted connection when musk closes his office saying he won't comply with court rulings the Judiciary reacts it's not against Elon Musk it's against any company especially the big techs which sometimes feel very comfortable disrespecting court rulings Brazil's ban of the popular social media site highlights the role it and other platforms play in freedom of speech misinformation and politics Kya Lopez Alan Al jazer for insight story okay let's bring in our guest joining us from London is Flora rebella aruni who's a senior adviser on technology and human rights who led research and advocacy projects on the role of disinformation in Brazil's 2022 presidential elections in Newcastle in the UK is Chris stokel Walker who's a technology and digital culture journalist he hosts a podcast called tectonic which looks at freedom of expression online also joining us from London but just off the plane from Brazil is Venus de carvalo who's a reader in Brazilian studies at King's College London and also the founder of the observatory of democracy in Latin America thanks for your time with us on Inside Story um venicius if I may start with you since you're just off the plane in Brazil uh from Brazil how is this being seen over there thank you very much for having me here first of all and yes just coming back from brazila was just there when uh this this order was issued by the Judiciary and it's been quite controversial of course we see a lot of people that supporting this this court order um and also those who are using that mostly uh and especially those that were associate with the the right-wing govern previous government are complaining that this is a sort of transgression of the right of speech and um and also a sort of suspension of democracy in Brazil um I think this is reflecting very well the sort of division that the country seen even before this court order decision so it's just another another part of this game uh of let's say division that the country is leing right now okay Chris the judge accused X of treating The Social Network quote like a No Man's Land a veritable land without law by allowing the massive propagation of misinformation hate speech and anti-democratic attacks but at the same time ex posted that the shutdown by the judge is simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponent opponents I mean is this ultimately down to whether it's a question of uh Free Speech versus sovereignty I think that Elon Musk would would like us to believe that I think that uh many people uh in judiciaries and in governments around the world might be echoing what the Brazilian judge said there although maybe not in quite as strong terms because they try and keep a relatively uh civil relationship I suppose with Elon Musk but yes this is undoubtedly the the kind of area in which musk likes to dabble he knows that it is possible for him to kind of engage with political divides and we've seen in Brazil a huge political divide after the election and he likes to try and decide that he is going to get involved in this on a a sort of social level and so he is seeing this I think as a free speech fight I think that the judge does have however some very legitimate concerns whether we we trust or or not trust the the kind of request and the validity of those requests to take down these things we do know that Elon Musk has decided that he is going to try and flout a lot of these orders and take a grand stand while doing so so I think that we ought to be a little bit concerned about this in terms of well if Elon Musk is doing this and with Twitter and and kind of Brazil is he going to do this with other platforms elsewhere okay uh we'll get to that a little later but let me bring in Flora what's your opinion I mean does this ban on X constitute a violation of spre spe Free Speech uh principles or or not absolutely not um braz is a sovereign country and musk is sitting in this virtual Ivory Tower where he claims that he's entitled to theci side whether to respect or not a Judicial measure from the Supreme Court of the country so it's not a matter of free speech again he's using this um speech to make sure that he engages um you know friendly cohorts in Brazil and abroad to support his illegal actions in Brazil you can surely challenge uh legal de in court and using the judicial uh system to do so H it's entitled is our right but you have to go through the system and right now he's just simply deciding not to respect what are you basing that on Flora so unfortunately uh musk has been doing very public several documents that are confidential between the Supreme Court and acts and for months now musk has been public saying that he will simply not respect judicial measures coming from morai because he believes they are unconstitutional and everybody is entitled again to challenge decisions but then you have to go through the proper Judiciary process to do so and musk is simply deciding to use its own platform its own megaphone to decide whether to comply or not with the laws of a sovereign country and that's the problem you should still even if you don't agree with the decision just use the judicial system around the country so you can then challenge legally those decisions that you think are unfair venicius I see nodding to what Flora has to say I mean the final straw we should mention uh before X's Banning and blocking in Brazil came on Thursday when musk ignored a deadline that was put forward by the Judiciary to name a new legal representative for the country I mean from the moment that X violated that law by not naming a representative wasn't it expected that they would be held accountable for this absolutely and I totally agree with my both colleagues that mentioned said before um I think that we what we have here is just a violation of uh of a Brazilian legal system and decisions of the Judiciary and there are ways that they can um they can go against this this decision but it must observe the legal terms here Elon Musk is not a representative elected by the Brazilian population to to act in the parliament or in the Judiciary to say what is not what is or not uh constitutional in the country um another important aspect here that many people and musk indeed as well was saying that uh Moray was acting monocratic in these decisions but um uh to to support his decision next week I think Monday already the Supreme Court will join together to to vote the morai decision and everything points out that they will support it even considering that a hard decision uh it will be voted by this the the entire uh the entire assemble of Judges the 12 judges of the Supreme Court that means means that uh we are getting here again a violation of Brazilian sovereignity in some terms when someone decided just because holds a company that has makes a lot of money um to to violate this these laws and decisions of Justice in Brazil and the second point it's important to say that this sort of debates and controversies are quite good for for X they they live aot also based on that more more f for debates and discussions that will give more uh visibility to the platform and to musk as well okay Chris I see you're agreeing what Venus has to say on in terms of the visibility when it comes to X but but how significant is this decision for the company itself because as we know Brazil is one of the biggest markets for x and there's a statistic market research group E marketer says some 40 million Brazilians that's roughly 1if of the population access X at least once a month yeah if we we contextualize that further e marketers data is sometimes a little bit shaky sometimes overstates things a little little bit based on different measurements and so it's not like for like but you know X's user base is probably also around about a fifth of that is Brazilian uh maybe a little bit less maybe a little bit more depending on how you count but this would be a significant blow in terms of the number of users that it loses but it is frankly uh playing into Elon musk's hands I suppose that this is banned and it goes back to what Flora said and also what felus has said in terms of this is musk's Mo he likes to pick fights with people and and try and test their metal and decide whether or not he is bigger and more powerful than elected governments elected judges those who sit in power and have this kind of democratic right to say these are the laws of our country either you like them or lump them and he's done this in the past with Australia he he's gone into a fight with their e safety commissioner who's in charge of overseeing their Online safety law over uh trying to take down uh videos of images of a an attack at a church that will broadcast through X the E safety commissioner required those to be taken down musk and X basically took them to court he's doing the same thing in Europe in the global North in terms of arguing with tierry Breton one of the commissioners of the European Union over whether or not they are breaking rules here and the EU has taken uh preliminary action to decide that X is in in breach of uh one of the the digital markets act or the Digital Services act in terms of not doing things by the book so um yeah this is musk realizing that he likes to be the center of attention realizing that all publicity is good publicity when it comes to this sort of stuff and thinking well I'm going to take a risk that actually these people won't follow through on their threats it just turns out that increasingly we're seeing those sorts of judiciaries those sorts of governments really are okay Chris hang on a second I got to ask you this I mean you say that this is sort of um of Elon musk's Mo but if you look at what happened back in 2009 what the Obama Administration at the time insisted it's not meddling in Iran confirmed it had asked Twitter at the time it was called Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters which were taking place during 2009 Twitter had planned to temporarily shut down the government intervened asked them to stay online I wonder to what extent X is sort of embedded or following the US policy agenda and this is simply not his own Mo as you call it I think that's not true I think that musk frankly wouldn't be cow Towing to any US president not even Donald Trump I believe that if Trump were to be elected in uh November musk would probably believe that he is a smarter individual he has more power and he doesn't need to follow those rules he could shape those rules and so given the political divide between him and Joe Biden and the Kam La harus ticket as well I don't think that there is any uh idea that musk might be uh somehow in bed with them it is interesting you do point out a really fascinating point of which is you know X formerly Twitter has long been the sort of cradle of uh Democratic uh decision making and the ability to kind of stir up a populace against often authoritarian Rule and and so there is this concern here we had in the package uh that opened up our discussion that it is banned in in many kind of authoritarian States and and viewers of Al jaer will remember a decade and a half ago the Arab Spring basically being fermented through social media platforms like Twitter actually being able to share footage and and information about what was happening helped bring that across the region here I don't think this is necessarily what's happening in Brazil I think that um you know there is an element of politics here no doubt we know that Lula is very different to bolaro in terms of his presidency and political viewpoints as our two other panelists will be able to comment on in much more detail than I could but we also know I think here um that there is a difference between um what's happening now and in Brazil and what happened perhaps in 2009 in Iran and in the rest of the Middle East around the Arab Spring Flora would you like to weigh in on this of course um thank you Chris for this because this is very important the L latest decision to b x it's a culmination of months of escalation and it has been showed in the in the the piece before so there were two Milestone moments right this year back in April 2024 musk has deliberately decided to put back online several profiles that were under investigation already by the Justice right spreading disinformation hate speech and these individuals they were monetizing on that content right so April 2024 musk says I'm not respecting any more judicial measures and that's the escalation that started so the ban of Twitter is actually the latest the last resort that the Justice had in its hands because when Twitter decided to close its office last week and then there was no legal representative in the country to respond to any judicial measure um then they were given 24 hours to appoint a new legal representative after those 24 hours there was no really other measure to be taken by the Judiciary in the country and the civil law in Brazil sorry actually the civil law in Brazil Demands a legal representative to be appointed and the internet bill in Brazil gives all those you know escalation of measures by the Judiciary so they gave a warning they issued fines they warned that it would be suspended and ultimately it led to the ban so we've got to see this as an escalation of events and not necessarily something that just happened this week because Justice um are tired of the attacks that musk has been directing towards them okay Chris go ahead and respond yeah I just wanted to to add a little bit more context to what what Flor said I think it's really important that we we think about this to listeners and viewers of this program will have seen me appearing earlier this week on on a discussion similar to this around pav durov the the CEO of telegram and one of the issues around telegram that we've had is with French authorities uh that essentially there has not been that accountability for issues of law enforcement for issues of government requests where there are these real concerns around spreading disinformation and so on so yes that trigger point all this being there is no legal representative for X is essentially an abdication of responsibility by Elon Musk and X more like the similar thing that we've seen with pavl durov and I think that's why we're starting to see this drastic action against these Tech CEOs first durov and Telegram and now musk and X is that previously we've always found social media CEOs a bit of a problem frankly they they have often kind of ignored the rules and pushed the boundaries and the the the benefit of what we would call disruption and disruption has two different meanings depending on whether you're a Silicon Valley texi or you're the rest of the world who affected by those decisions but I think what's different here is that even when it comes down to it at the crunch Point those tech companies have actually acceded to requests and had those elements whereas now with with musk here in particular and durov last week There's an indication here that they've refused to they've stepped away from this due process of of judicial reviews and also government requests to try and say no we know better than you and and our way or the highway is the rule here okay Venus I mean is there a feeling in Brazil amongst those who uh do not support this ban that the government that the Brazilian government the judge in fact could have taken uh perhaps alternative measures to address uh the concerns without resorting to a complete ban and if so what are they well yes and um I think one of the topics that connect what our colleagues were saying here um is that many people in Brazil calling that a censorship um but it's important to make a very clear distinction here X is not burned in Brazil it's temporary ly suspended until it complies with uh uh some some regulations and some um decisions of the court so it's not a question of being burned it's just to to to be comp compliance with the law that's the first point and of course many of the the oppositions of the government in particular or those who have their accounts um Frozen or requested by law to be put down um they are using that as an opportunity to say that really there is bias in the Brazilian uh decision on the court here and the second point that I would like to make also connecting to what uh my colleague said before um is that it's not clear how the platform Works operate democratically speaking it's not that everything that's sp there it's really being treated the same way we don't know clearly what algorithmic system is in use to to share and more or less um posts uh it's not clear how this is been used in terms of uh manipulating information so the risk uh for for this here is huge and it's also proved that this was important too in the attacks of 8 of January that you are just showing now some image to to the audience so it's clear that we have here really a platform that in some way was actually encouraging more anti-democracy than the Democracy that pretends to be uh spreading or promoting okay Flora we touched upon this a little bit I mean I wonder if you can elaborate on how this action by Brazil compares to other countries approaches to regulating or suspending uh social media platforms right I think Chris brought a very important point that I that I would love uh to elaborate indeed so we are seeing Trend in indeed that authorities because there aren't necessarily specific legislations to um hold social media platforms accountable they're having to rely on the existing laws which is absolutely perfect and that's how the way it should be but we also have to be aware that not necessarily the laws that we have in place in many countries US is an example Brazil is another example necessarily attend the broad and vast uh different levels of operation of these platforms and so if we if you look at Brazil just last year um we were about to vote a legislation a bill called the fake news bill in Brazil big Tech platforms although publicly they say that they want to be regulated and they would love to be regulated to have legal certainty when attempts are to actually pass a legislation they use their own platforms and their own forums to curb those um those attempts so we are seeing X doing this now against the judicial measures last year we saw meta and Google using its own platforms to convince the population that a bill wasn't necessary and that bill would just curb on freedom of speech so there is different levels of how these platforms try to shape the narratives around legislations being put in place to hold hold them accountable um we mentioned briefly about Europe Europe has been it is a model now it is a blueprint for other countries to follow suit in terms of how to regulate social media platforms and we saw friends that Chris mentioned before and that's also important to realize us B Tik Tok so we are seeing different levels of accountability towards these platforms that um are necessary because we as society as democracies need to catch up to these technological uh advancements Chris do these measures though go far enough or are we just at this point seeing kind of um toughening up by governments around the world towards these social media platforms who are saying look if you're going to overstep then we're going to have to step in and do something about it but but is it enough I I think that um putting the fear of God into Tech CEO is by arresting admittedly a relatively small one uh last week and now standing up to a rather bigger one and saying well we're going to cut off one of your biggest markets is better than we've done before I'm not going to say that it is perfect but I think that previously you the the long history of the internet and social media in particular is one of about a 25 years of in action and trusting that big Tech Executives will make their own rules and that sunlight is the best disinfectant and that we can trust them to step in when it's needed and because of that we had January 6th in the United States we've had January the 8th in Brazil which we've shown footage of and which venicius was talking so eloquently about the impact of there about these anti-democratic measures that happen and and we have also this huge confusion and we we can't escape the fact that politics is always tied up in this and the Brazil case is a perfect example of this you know fici has talked about how this is essentially you know potentially right-wing voices trying to get back a little bit at leftwing voices claiming censorship when in fact actually uh Twitter's research admittedly before Elon Musk took over although I don't think many impartial observers would say that Elon Musk has taken X as he's rebranded it in anything like a leftwing direction in fact probably the opposite but back then Twitter did exhibit a a right-wing bias in terms of the accounts that it Amplified through its algorithm and that was Twitter's own research realizing that is the issue so um you know there is this really interesting element of both the people who recognize that there does need to be an element of bringing these Executives back to heal are often those who are the most divided in terms of how this should be done because we are both simultaneously living in the consequences of unchecked uh social media regulation and also trying to wrestle with it while having that political divide that has been caused by it venicius go ahead I see you nodding and also I mean do you think that there are any lessons from the situation that that other countries might learn from regarding uh the balance between regulation and free expression yes absolutely um I think um even if it looks hard I think it's a good decision and a decision that will change parameters from now on on how big TCH and X or other social media companies uh we operate in some countries thinking that they can just go over uh regulations of those countries um I think it's a good a good parameter also to to show us how important is what Flora said to discuss more uh more clearly the regulations and norms for for operations of those companies um in different countries countries have different rules and laws and they need be observed there is no company that is over and above all laws in the world and Chris mentioned quite clearly we have already enough data and enough studies and research to start to create parameters and I think this situation in Brazil today even looking hard um it's a good step in terms of giving more more as I said parameters to to create checks and balances for those companies operating in democracies that's what I think we need now and that's a lesson that Brazil can be teaching now for many countries in the world that taught that they never could face powers like those all right we'll have to leave it there thank you so much for joining us thanks to my guest Flora rebella aruni Chris stok Walker and venicius dealo thanks so much thank you for watching you can see the program again anytime by visiting our website Al ja.com for further discussion you can go to our Facebook page facebook.com/ AJ Insight story you can also join that conversation on X our handle is AJ inside story from myself the whole team here in delha thanks for watching and bye-bye for now [Music]