The Real Reason Elon Musk Is Throwing a Tantrum About 'Free Speech' in Brazil
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Elon Musk spent the weekend embroiled in a war of words with the government of Brazil, which has reportedly opened an investigation into the X owner’s refusal to police misinformation on the social media site. And while Musk insists the battle is all about “free speech,” that argument falls apart pretty quickly when you remember all the times the tech CEO has bowed to the will of authoritarian governments.
Brazil’s Justice Alexandre de Moraes, an ally of current left-wing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, reportedly ordered X to suspend some accounts in the country in recent days as part of an investigation into last year’s coup attempt by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro, who tweeted a 2022 video of himself with Musk on Saturday, lost his re-election campaign in late 2022 and hundreds of his followers stormed federal buildings on January 8, 2023, in an effort to allow the former president to remain in power. There’s currently an investigation into what role Bolsonaro played in the coup attempt after he falsely claimed there was widespread fraud in the election, taking a page out of former president Donald Trump’s playbook.
Musk has called the order to suspend some X accounts in Brazil “aggressive censorship,” while vowing to disobey the court because, “principles matter more than profit.” The billionaire pledged to shutter the company’s Brazilian offices rather than censor the accounts and has made hyperbolic claims about what’s actually happening.
“These are the most draconian demands of any country on Earth!” Musk tweeted on Sunday.
That assertion is, of course, absurd on its face when you remember X isn’t even allowed to operate in China—a country where Musk has made big investments with Tesla. And anyone who knows the history of Musk’s acquiescence to various authoritarians from China to Turkey to India will recognize he doesn’t put up a similar fight when similarly censorious governments want to prohibit speech.
For officials in Brazil, it’s about pushing back against a far-right movement that’s quite literally tried to overthrow the government. Brazil’s Attorney General Jorge Messias criticized Musk’s claims about the suppression of speech by pointing out that billionaires who live in other countries shouldn’t control social media platforms that spread misinformation in Brazil.
“We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities,” Messias wrote Sunday on X according to an English language translation.
What does Musk have to say about government requests for censorship in countries where he’s seeking to open a new Tesla plant or launch SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet? The common refrain is that Musk is just following local laws, as you can see in the examples from our slideshow.
Musk in Turkey
Musk first met Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2017 and the billionaire’s company SpaceX has had contracts with Turkey to launch satellites since at least 2021. But Musk’s courting of Erdogan really kicked into high gear in 2023 when it was revealed Turkey was among the top candidates for Tesla’s next factory.
“Which one do you want?”
Musk defended the decision to censor tweets critical of Erdogan before Turkey’s election in 2023 after liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias pointed out the hypocrisy.
“Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?” Musk tweeted at the time.
Obviously, that’s not what Musk said over the weekend about efforts to censor tweets in Brazil, a country where there are no indications Musk is trying to build a Tesla plant.
Cozy With China
Musk has refused to criticize China, where he does an enormous amount of business, despite the fact that X is banned in the country. Chinese officials even praised Musk’s suggestion in 2022 that Beijing take control of Taiwan.
“I would like to thank @elonmusk for his call for peace across the Taiwan Strait and his idea about establishing a special administrative zone for Taiwan. Actually, Peaceful reunification and One Country, Two Systems are our basic principles for resolving the Taiwan question and the best approach to realizing national reunification,” Qin Gang, the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. tweeted.
Musk has told X users in Brazil to just use a VPN if the social media site gets blocked in the country, a solution he’s never raised for people in China. In fact, Musk himself doesn’t even tweet when he’s in China until he’s on the plane home.
“If we don’t obey local government laws, we will get shut down.”
X censored accounts in India at the order of the Modi government in February, blocking at least 120 people, according to the Guardian. And Musk’s closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has centralized power as an authoritarian, is almost certainly the reason X just follows along.
“I am a fan of Modi,” Musk said in June 2023 after a meeting with the nationalist leader.
Musk has repeatedly made excuses for why he obeys censorship demands from India. To hear the billionaire tell it, his hands are simply tied.
“Twitter doesn’t have a choice but to obey local governments. If we don’t obey local government laws, we will get shut down,” Musk said last year, according to the Business Standard.
Musk Is Too Busy to Care About Censorship in India
When Musk was called out for censoring a BBC documentary that was critical of Modi in India last year, Musk tried to suggest he was too busy to care.
“First I’ve heard. It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things,” Musk wrote.
Oddly enough, Musk is only too busy to know about it when authoritarians are asking for censorship. Left-wing governments in Brazil seem to get his full attention.
Musk and Trump World
Musk has also had close ties to people in Donald Trump’s orbit, even meeting with the former president in Florida recently. Musk later said it was a chance meeting when he was having dinner with a friend, but Musk’s proximity to folks like Jared Kushner, seen in the photo above as the two men watched a soccer match in Qatar, has raised plenty of eyebrows.
It’s notable, of course, that X was in the process of banning all mentions of rival social media networks when he was meeting with Kushner, a move that was even controversial among the most die-hard Musk fans.
Musk and Trump Butt Heads
- Photo: Truth Social / Donald Trump
Musk has even invited Trump back to X, after the former president was banned from the platform after the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021. But Musk’s relationship with Trump has been admittedly fraught, even when they’re working toward the same goals.
“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump wrote in July 2022.
