Elected leaders worldwide call on Brazil to back off censorship as global elite call for more

With U.S. authorities' silence on Brazil's Supreme Court upholding a nationwide ban on X and $9,000 fines for users who circumvent technical blocks – and the Democratic vice presidential nominee claiming the First Amendment doesn't protect "hate speech" or "misinformation" – foreign leaders elsewhere are stepping up to defend free speech in Latin America and globally.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, three members of its House of Lords, Chilean presidential runner-up José Antonio Kast, current and former lawmakers from Mexico to South America and the European Parliament, five Republican state attorneys general and prominent journalists and academics joined an open letter organized by Alliance Defending Freedom International.

"This situation extends far beyond Brazil, serving as a striking example of a growing trend of censorship by government officials, who are becoming increasingly aggressive in suppressing speech they find objectionable," the 100-plus signatories told Brazil's Federal Senate and Chamber of Deputies. Brazil's actions "could set a dangerous precedent that quickly spreads."

American and European elites, from philanthropist Bill Gates and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich to Truss's predecessor Tony Blair, are increasingly speaking favorably of suppressing challenges to official government narratives, even preemptively.

Reich may have gone the furthest, laying out a six-point roadmap in the U.K Guardian to "rein in" X owner Elon Musk through economic boycotts, canceled government contracts and arrest for "disseminating lies and hate" wherever the Donald Trump-endorsing billionaire travels, approvingly citing France's arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

"I certainly see a position where the world's going to have to come together and agree to some rules around social media platforms," Blair told "Leading Britain's Conversation" last week when asked directly if the U.K. "may have to follow Brazil's lead" on punishing platforms for disinformation in light of the country's own recent protests against unchecked immigration.

As for "what the answer is and what the right system of regulation is, I'm not sure," but "there's got to be" something because "people can provoke, you know, hostility and hatred," Blair said.

"Fascists," Musk responded Thursday to new Australian legislation to fine platforms up to 5% of their global revenue for not preventing the spread of purported misinformation. 

Reuters reported it targets "false content that hurts election integrity or public health, calls for denouncing a group or injuring a person, or risks disrupting key infrastructure or emergency services." If platforms don't devise their own government-approved codes of conduct, a regulator would do it and fine them for noncompliance.

Artificial intelligence is serving as both the justification for censorship and a tool for protecting the public from purported misinformation, as tracked by civil liberties group Reclaim the Net.

California lawmakers recently passed several AI-related bills, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he supports, including a ban on content "materially deceptive related to elections in California" that plausibly covers satirical memes. 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently apologized for his platform censoring such content.

"We should have free speech, but you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries?" Gates asked rhetorically in a CNBC interview on his new Netflix series "What's Next?" A major vaccine funder, Gates himself spurred vaccine hesitancy by criticizing the lackluster performance of COVID-19 vaccines.

He speculated the U.S. could enforce "rules" through "some AI that encodes those rules, because you have billions of activity [sic] and if you catch it a day later, the harm is done." Reclaim the Net noted Gates didn't say who would enforce those rules.

Gates incorrectly stated U.S. legal precedent by claiming that "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" isn't protected by the First Amendment, in another interview with CNET. 

To guard against "deepfakes" – also the subject of a California bill on its way to Newsom – "most of the time you're online you're going to want to be in an environment where the people are truly identified, that is they're connected to a real-world identity that you trust, instead of just people saying whatever they want," Gates said. His foundation funds such projects.

ADF International previously urged the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates complaints against signatories including Brazil, to "urgently intervene" after Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the "immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations" and a freeze on its half-sibling Starlink's assets, partly owned by Musk, two weeks ago.

Both are based on X's refusal to name a legal representative in Brazil after Moraes threatened to imprison the employee in that position for flouting "illegal orders to censor its users as a preemptive measure, without due process," the advocacy group told IACHR commissioners.

Using the "pretext of combatting disinformation and fake news" – the latter not even defined in the country's law – Brazil has "targeted conservative voices for censorship" going back six years, including by blocking pro-life advocacy against the "pro-abortion" position of then-election candidate Lula da Silva in 2022, the letter says. 

It cited a 2023 survey that found most Brazilians felt chilled by these actions, which include "criminal proceedings against individuals, journalists and influencers" for sharing opinions, claiming they violated Article 41 of the convention. 

"The situation, severe and endemic in Brazil, has not even been included by the Rapporteur [for Freedom of Expression] and the Commission in their annual reports!" ADF International said.

Court actions violate Brazil's own constitution, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the new open letter to Brazil's lawmakers says. "Freedom of expression is not negotiable, nor is it a privilege – it is the cornerstone of every democratic society."

Other signatories include Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who exposed the efforts of Moraes to criminalize dissent and censor supporters of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and cofounder Melissa Chen of Ideas Beyond Borders, which translates and digitally distributes "vital, but often banned information" in authoritarian countries.

Current and former U.S. elected officials include Sam Brownback, the former GOP senator from Kansas and ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and the Attorneys General for Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, Utah and Tennessee. High-profile academics include Princeton's Robert George and Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Ordinary internet users can also sign the open letter, whose web page of Thursday night says nearly 1,500 have done so.

A recent article on Northeastern University's in-house news site touted its faculty's analysis of Brazil's actions, framing them as a legitimate response to "the vision of the internet as a libertarian, transnational free-speech zone where only the best ideas rise to the top." 

Political science and law professor Claudia Haupt said companies have to regularly change their "community standards" to comply with laws in different countries, "and there’s no First Amendment problems with that."

"Courts are rethinking libertarian free speech paradigms," computer science and law professor Elettra Bietti said. Both professors invoked the European Union's Digital Services Act, which a Brookings Institution scholar said would be mostly unconstitutional stateside.

Northeastern said Justice Samuel Alito "opened the door to regulation" through his concurring opinion in a decision that returned two social media neutrality laws to lower courts. Alito said the DSA requires "similar disclosures" as Texas and California, "yet the sky has not fallen."

On Friday, Brazil's supreme court said that it ordered funds to be moved from Musk's Starlink and X bank accounts to pay fines levied against his social media venture. Following the transfers, the court ordered the seized bank accounts and assets of X and Starlink be unfrozen, according to CNBC.com,