The president of the Foundation for Economic Education (acronym FEE, in free translation into Portuguese Fundação pela Educação Econômica), Brazilian Diogo Costa, wrote an article this Wednesday (11) about the banning of the social network X in Brazil, after a decision by the minister of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) Alexandre de Moraes.
In the text, written on the FEECosta argues that the closure of Elon Musk’s company in the country represents “a dangerous approach that increases institutional distrust.” According to him, “the country has taken extreme measures to police online speech recently by banning X and fining Brazilian citizens who use VPNs to access it.”
The FEE president stressed that Brazil’s hardline and censorious action is “dangerous” in the sense of “empowering the state to treat distrust as merely an information crisis.”
In the Brazilian’s opinion, the crisis of distrust towards Brazilian public institutions has been present since Operation Lava-Jato, in 2014, when figures from Lula da Silva’s government were investigated and convicted of corruption.
In the X case, Costa says Alexandre de Moraes was appointed to “lead a dangerous campaign against disinformation, whose actions would expand the limits of judicial power in Brazil.”
The president of FEE highlighted in his article that the term “disinformation” has become increasingly generic in speeches that criticize the government or the Judiciary. “Under the banner of defending democracy, Moraes initiated a series of measures that would culminate in the digital censorship we see today,” wrote Costa.
Furthermore, he claims that, as Moraes began to target supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro on social media, the Judiciary began to exercise not only the role of arbiter of the law, but of arbiter of truth, in his opinion.
Costa stated that “the escalation of judicial excess reached its peak in recent days, when Moraes ordered the banning of X in Brazil.”
For the president of FEE, the population’s distrust of the institution is not misinformation, “but it is often its cause”.
“Treating a crisis of institutional trust solely as an information problem ignores deeper social fractures and risks intensifying the very tensions it seeks to resolve. Authoritarian control of information erodes democratic norms and further diminishes public trust,” he wrote.
For him, the social network affected by Moraes’ decision has more to offer with its operation than a ban. “[…] X actually offers a glimpse into a possible alternative approach to dealing with misinformation. Its Community Notes feature allows users to collaboratively fact-check and provide context for contentious content, a decentralized approach also envisioned by other platforms.
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