What we are witnessing today is much more than a feud between a tech mogul and a Supreme Court justice over the limits of free speech.
For some time now, South African billionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, has been waging a war against a justice of Brazil’s Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, supposedly to defend Brazilian people’s right to “free speech” on the popular social media platform.
So far, however, Musk’s ongoing feud with the judge has achieved nothing in the way of furthering the Brazilian people’s freedom of expression. Instead, it has highlighted the hypocrisy of Musk’s absolutist discourse on free speech and exposed the immediate threat that tech leaders like him who see themselves above the law and the will of nations pose to democracy.
The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.
Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.
