An example of eroding support for free speech around the world can be seen in a recent public letter by academics and writers from several countries supporting Brazil's government in its battle to ban the X social media platform and punish Brazilians who evade restrictions. It's not that it's surprising to see intellectuals endorse authoritarianism—many do so, more often than not. But it's disappointing to see their ranks include prominent individuals, including one who has a reputation as a civil libertarian.
Brazil's Speech Battle
For those who haven't followed the drama, X and its CEO, Elon Musk, have been locked in a dispute with Brazil's Supreme Court and, especially, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, over the degree to which the social media platform should censor "disinformation"—especially from accounts connected to the political opposition. The court banned X after it refused to appoint a new legal representative following the resignation of the previous one, who had been threatened with arrest.
Demand for virtual private network (VPN) software soared by 1,600 percent in Brazil following the ban, presumably to evade the government-imposed blockade. That's remarkable given that evading restrictions to use X is punishable by fines of nearly $9,000 per day.
X then reworked its servers in a way that makes the service accessible again to Brazilians. Moraes and company threatened X—and Starlink, also owned by Musk—with penalties for resisting the blockade. And that's where we currently stand on an effort by the government of a nominally free country to control what its people can say online, and to ban an entire platform for not playing along.
Free Speech as an International Conspiracy
The open letter supporting Brazilian government efforts (here in Portuguese and thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer) is remarkably conspiratorial in tone. It accuses tech companies and their political allies of (in English translation) undermining Brazil's plans for "digital independence" and engaging in an "effort to restrict the ability of sovereign nations to set a digital development agenda free from the control of US-based megacorporations."
According to the signers, the Brazilian state "intends to force Big Tech to pay fair taxes, comply with local laws, and be held accountable for the social externalities of their business models, which often promote violence and inequality." They claim, "these efforts have been met with attacks from X's owner and right-wing leaders who complain about democracy and freedom of expression."
Well, yes. The Brazilian government's actions do excite worries about the health of democracy and free expression in the country—and not just from the right wing. Observers worried about the Brazilian government's treatment of speech and dissent well before X and Elon Musk got involved.
Warnings of Authoritarianism Fulfilled
Justice Moraes "has jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal," Jack Nicas observed for The New York Times in 2023.
In May of 2023, Christopher Hernandez-Roy and Michael McKenna of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that "Brazil's misaligned censorship policy risks cutting off free speech to spite disinformation." They skeptically asked "whether governments should be in the business of enacting speech restrictions that are content- or viewpoint-based."
Now that Brazil's highest court has banned X and threatened to punish Brazilians who use the service anyway, Sarah McLaughlin of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression bluntly concludes: "These moves represent a serious threat to Brazilians' right to freely speak and access information online." She puts Brazil's censorship efforts in the context of comparable efforts at the UN, in France, India, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere.
Free Speech Under Siege Everywhere
Unfortunately, free speech is under siege around the world, including in supposedly free countries.
"Dramatic erosions of freedom of expression in democracies are not isolated events," The Future of Free Speech found in its 2023 report, The Free Speech Recession Hits Home. "They are part of a broader and global free speech recession that has afflicted the heartland of free expression in open democracies, and which threatens to roll back hard-won freedoms." The report tracks "free speech trends across 22 open democracies" including Australia, Canada, France, South Korea, the U.S. and the entire European Union.
To this, the signers of the open letter seem to say, "more, please!"
"All those who defend democratic values must support Brazil in its quest for digital sovereignty," they write. They insist that "Big Tech" resistance to Brazil's censorship efforts "undermine not only the rights of Brazilian citizens, but the broader aspirations of all democratic nations to achieve technological sovereignty."
"Technological sovereignty" here being a euphemism for government control of online discourse at the expense of the liberty of individuals to disagree with and criticize the officials who rule over them.
Among the signers are prominent individuals including economists Daron Acemoglu, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. But the most surprising name is that of Cory Doctorow, a writer and thinker long associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of anti-authoritarian novels. His book Homeland won a 2014 Prometheus award for best novel from the Libertarian Futurist Society.
Why did a man who has seen governments at their worst and penned novels suffused with awareness of the abuse of power put his name to a document that endorses state authority to censor online speech and to punish online speakers? I asked Doctorow that question by email. He didn't respond.
So, I can only speculate that Doctorow and his colleagues have joined the many people in historically liberal societies who have decided that free speech is more trouble than it's worth. Around the world, and not just in Brazil, governments are seizing the authority to decide what constitutes unacceptable "disinformation" and who should be punished for expressing themselves.
This erosion of individuals' fundamental right to free speech proceeds to the applause of entirely too many supposed thinkers.
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