One might assume that if a club boasted Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela as members, the rest of the world would do everything in its power to avoid joining. Unfortunately, in the case of Brazil, that assumption is wrong. This week, a panel of justices of Brazil’s Supreme Court upheld a ruling by Justice Alexandre de Moraes that imposed a blanket ban on the social media site X (formerly Twitter). Under the terms of the order, internet service providers in Brazil are not allowed to act as a conduit for X’s traffic, app stores in Brazil are required to remove X’s app from their catalogs, and the use of VPNs or other traffic-redirecting tools to circumvent the ban carries a fine of nearly $9,000 per day. Brazil has thus joined the ranks of countries that, for one reason or another, have been exiled from the global public square.
The immediate cause of Brazil’s ban was that X’s owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with a court order requiring him to remove certain accounts that had been accused of spreading “disinformation.” The more important question, though, is why the Brazilian government was demanding these removals in the first place. Explaining the decision, one of the justices, Flávio Dino, proposed that “freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility.” But predictably, this “duty” only applied to X accounts operated by figures critical of the incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “Responsibility,” it turns out, is an irregular noun.
Advocates of Brazil’s approach have simply repeated the indisputable fact that X is violating the country’s laws, and reiterated that since Brazil is a sovereign nation, there’s not much anyone outside its borders can do about it. This is, of course, true. But it tells us nothing interesting or relevant about whether Brazil’s laws are good—which, in this case, they most definitely are not—or whether they are being used to suppress dissent—which, in this case, they are. As a statement, “It’s the law” is useful when the question is “Is it the law?” In relation to anything more substantial, it is useless.
Throughout history, the protection and expansion of human freedom have depended on technologies that facilitate communication. It was no accident that ancient tyrants sought control of the press, and it is no accident that our contemporary arbiters aspire to control the Internet. To supervise the means by which ideas are spread and debated is to supervise those ideas and debates themselves. The names come and go—Gutenberg, Edison, Marconi, Berners-Lee—but the central question remains the same: Should the tools of argument be left alone or overseen by busybodies? Brazil, to its misfortune, has chosen the latter path.
It is not the case that all information is of equal value or that all statements are equally true. Movable type has disseminated the works of Shakespeare and Louis XIV; broadcast radio has disseminated Churchill and Hitler; the Internet has provided edifying courses on Michelangelo and pernicious conspiracy theories about the Jews. But in a free country, it is up to individuals, not government bureaucrats, to make the final determination of what is what. With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, the Web, properly understood, is a medium, not a message. It is what its users make of it, on both sides of the exchange. To interject judges or bureaucrats into the conversation is to violate its essential purpose, summed up by John Gilmore as “interpreting censorship as harm and circumventing it.”
To their credit, Americans tend to regard egregious conduct by foreign nations as if it were happening on the moon. Russia, China, Brazil, Iran — these are other places, with other rules, making decisions that could not be made here. To some extent, that is correct. The United States has a better Constitution and political culture than Brazil, and thanks to the First Amendment, a blanket ban on X — or its equivalent — would be legally prohibited. But the United States, like everywhere else, is full of imperfect human beings, some of whom will inevitably be tempted to censorship. In recent years, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has been accused of pressuring major social media platforms to remove information he deemed inappropriate or dangerous, and those major social media networks have been caught acquiescing. Last week, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich argued in the newspaper The Guardian that the Federal Trade Commission should monitor online conversations and that it would be better for the world if it could figure out a way to put Elon Musk in jail. Thanks to the Bill of Rights, the threat in the United States is not identical to the threat visible in Brazil. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Congress must therefore act quickly to strengthen protections for Americans online. The United States would benefit from a law mandating the disclosure of all executive branch content moderation requests from U.S. social media platforms, as well as a legislative affirmation that no federal agency has the power to determine what is and what is not “disinformation” online. At the same time, it should be U.S. policy to keep as much of the internet’s core infrastructure under U.S. control as possible. The “One World. One Internet” policy adopted in the early 2010s—a policy that ultimately led to the globalization of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)—was a mistake, based on the false notion that other countries view the internet the same way we do. As Brazil has just demonstrated, they do not. The correct response for the United States would be to take stock of what happened in Brasilia and pass opposing rules. [AutoridadeparaAtribuiçãodeNúmerosdaInternetIANAnasiglaeminglês)-foiumerrobaseadonafalsanoçãodequeoutrospaísesveemainternetdamesmaformaqueosamericanosComooBrasilacabadedemonstrarelesnãoofazemArespostacorretadosEstadosUnidosseriafazerumbalançodoqueaconteceuemBrasíliaeaprovarregrasopostas
© 2024 National Review. Published with permission. Original in English: Musk v. Brazil
#censorship #rules #Brazils
