Brazil Bans and Criminalizes Elon Musk's X - Glenn Greenwald on Worldwide Free Speech Ramifications

we're going to start with Elon Musk in a battle now as Brazil where you happen to live um is kicking X Out of Brazil threatening Elon saying he has to pay $3 million in fines because he won't do what they tell him to do but meanwhile X unbeknownst to me until the story broke is huge in Brazil it's in fact one of its biggest uh forums and Elon so far standing firm on not doing what the government wants him to do so put this in perspective for us so first of all I think when a lot of people hear what's happening in Brazil people in the United States think oh that's a little bit distant from me it doesn't have a lot to do with me but Brazil is one of the world's top five democracies it's the second largest country in our hemisphere 215 million people a land mass almost the size of the United States huge geostrategic importance because of oil and the Amazon and it's also always played the major role in South America but more important Brazil has been being used as a test case of how far online censorship can go people in Western Europe even the United States have conferences they invite these Brazilian judges these Brazilian prosecutors and officials who are implementing a system of online censorship that may be a couple of steps ahead of where Europe and and the United States is but on that same path so it has great relevance because a lot of sensors in the west are watching how far it can go and the fact that X which is it's not the biggest app in Brazil just like it's not in the US you have Instagram and YouTube that are bigger but in terms of politics and news and free speech and the like it is the epicenter and has long been the epicenter of Brazilian journalism activism dissent and for you to now have a single judge in Brazil with the support of the Brazilian political class Banning the app not only Banning it but making it a crime to use a VPN to access if you're in brail VPN allows you you know to disguise where you are it's used in a lot of authoritarian countries the Chinese use it the Russians use it to access prohibited sites really gives you a sense of how extreme states are becoming in terms of their determination to control the flow of information on platforms that they currently can control they demanded that Elon appoint a local representative of x who is based in Brazil he refused to do it because he thought you just want to threaten me by arresting my guy you want me to appoint Glenn Greenwald and next thing you know Glenn's back in jail where you've already been Thanks to these the Brazilian government they don't like Glen because he reports on them and he's unsparing but anyway he sees the game that they're trying to play and he's a a step ahead of them but right now he's been shut down and this really is an important means of of allowing free speech in a place like Brazil so how do you see this ending yeah so I think this is the crucial point is you know in in theory it isn't that unreasonable for a country to say if you want to operate in our country you have to have a physical representative in our country in theory that's a sort of reasonable thing to do most countries will have that if you want to operate in the United States of course you need a physical office and a representative the problem is that every time there's an order of censorship that is given not by the government by a single judge and X doesn't comply with it immediately the judge threatens X Executives that it will imprison them they did it to Facebook a few years ago too and Facebook was starting to become resistant so who in their right mind would agree to be the representative of X when the judge has already said and I'm talking about the Supreme Court judge if you are the representative acts and they don't censor immediately then you will be imprisoned until do he basically wants a hostage to force them now let me just about these censorship orders Megan let me just tell you many of the people who are being ordered censored and off the off the internet are not just random extremists which would still be wrong we're talking mostly about elected officials of the federal Congress the federal Senate the most known people in Brazil whose crime is that they Number One support Jer bolsonaro and the right-wing movement and number two that they frequently L criticize the Supreme Court the mentality of the Supreme Court in Brazil is any criticism of us any questioning of our legitimacy is an attack on Brazilian democracy itself and this is becoming the mentality in the broader West that if you question our decrees on covid you question our decrees on war on January 6 on Election Integrity it's not just wrong you have to be banned because you're threatening the security of our society itself and that is mentality that is being implemented first in Brazil but is being deeply watched and monitored by other countries who want to do the same including potentially our own I mean we just had Mark Zuckerberg come forward in a letter that he penned saying we regret that we submitted when we were pressured during covid by this government into Banning certain memes certain questioning of things like vaccines it's been happening under the Biden Administration it will continue happening under a Harris Administration as she has basically admitted she says her values haven't changed here she was talking to Jake Tapper about social media needing oversight and regulation in 2019 S four and the bottom line is that you can't say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter the same rule has to apply which is that there has to be a a a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power they are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of of of oversight or regulation and that has to stop that's scary well it's such a remarkable Revelation when when the internet was first starting to develop in the mid 90s and into the early 2000s the excitement around it was that oh we're finally going to have a instrument that not the government or big Corporation will control but that the citizenry will control so we can communicate with one another share information with one another without needing a huge corporation to pay for uh satellites and printing presses that was the promise of the internet and I think that what happened was after 2016 first when the British voted to leave the EU by approving brexit and especially when Americans voted for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton Western Elites realized you hear it in KLA Harris's statement there that they can no longer allow a weapon in the hands of the people that is free that allows a free expression of ideas a free exchange of information as she said we need to start regulating it we need to start controlling it and I I I'm sure you saw today Megan there was some sort of trumpeting by CNN of this exclusive breaking news that the Biden Administration is about to announce that the Russians intend to interfere in our election once again in 2024 yeah so so but what I want to say is the biggest and worst and most egregious interference in the 2020 election was when the Biden Administration pressured big Tech including Facebook and Twitter to censor reporting not that was questionable but that turned out to be true about Joe Biden and how his family was exploiting their name for profit in China and Ukraine by having the intelligence Community which isn't allowed to interfere in our domestic politics Li and call that Russian disinformation and based on that lie there was mass censorship of a major story two or three weeks before a very close election I don't think we've really come to grips with how significant that story is because it pressed this notion that that is the real interference on the part of our US Security State and our government to censor and control the internet much like we're seeing in Brazil and Zuckerberg mentioned the pressure he was receiving over at Facebook from the government to suppress the hunter Biden laptop saying it's one of the things he regrets doing you still have some Publications holding on to the fact to the to the lie that this could be Russian disinformation those 51 intelligence analysts are still holding on to well you never know it's been verified they can't admit their mistakes but it's somewhat promising that you've got somebody like Zuckerberg saying I see now I see what they did and I see that I took the knee too fast and you've got Elon standing up like these social media companies Maybe are finding their spines kamla Harris has a long history of wanting to censor the internet people on the internet who she finds objectionable even people who happen to be president of the United States here she was back in October of 19 When Donald Trump was in the White House and she was mad about his so-called perfect phone call that led to his first impeachment listen to her I know you wrote to um Twitter and the CEO uh Jack dorsy and asked him to take away the president's Twitter handle his account how is that not a violation of free speech how would that not just be a slippery slope or they have to ban you know half of the people on Twitter I've heard that argument but but here's the thing Jake first of all a corporation which is what Twitter is um does not have the has obligations and in this case Twitter has terms of use policy and their terms of use um dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not and Donald Trump has clearly violated the terms of use and there should be a consequence for that I mean think about that trying to get the president of United States Bann from expressing his views on one of the biggest P public platforms we have because she thinks this is an outside person at that point that he's violated the terms of use well Megan when she ran for president and it was about six seconds because her campaign was such a failure in 2019 for the Democratic nomination she made as one of her Central planks a demand that Donald Trump be banned from the internet I remember very well she was on a stage with people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and she said Senator Warren I challenge you to support my argument that Donald Trump should be banned from the internet and even Elizabeth Warren was like uh I don't know that seems kind of radical to ban the Pres of the United States and remember they they did ban him Twitter Facebook Google all got together after January 6 and they forcibly ban the sitting president of the United States to the point that even the Western European countries who hated Trump said this is alarming this is scary this should not be happening you didn't vote for this economic downturn right but you could be paying for all of it at the pump at the grocery store and elsewhere Financial stress can be crushing and one solution could be done withth debt.com done with debt created 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