I’ve followed the work of economist Robert Reich for decades. Long before he was labor secretary under the Clinton administration, he was writing fascinating books on industrial organization and U.S. living standards. Agree or disagree, I always learned from him and enjoyed the challenge of grappling with ideas that challenged my assumptions about the world. I’ve always regarded him as an honest observer.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” he wrote.
Reich is among many in the censorship camp who have proclaimed certain views to be dangerous to public order and therefore worthy of prosecution.
Reich’s call to jail Musk comes exactly at the time when the seemingly unthinkable happened in Brazil. A supreme court judge named Alexandre de Moraes, who apparently exercises autonomous autocratic power, outright banned the entire platform in the country. It is the most popular news application in the country. The judge further imposed criminal penalties on anyone who uses the app through a Virtual Private Network at nearly $10,000 per day.
It is unenforceable, of course, but it opens up possible investigations of every single political dissenter in the country. Already there have been grave questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2022 election that took President Jair Messias Bolsonaro out and brought to power President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The voting results provoked the largest public protests in the country’s history, and hardened a resistance that has depended on alternative news sources, simply because the mainstream news in the country appears largely government-controlled.
It is not even controversial to say it plainly: This censorship is not about blocking falsehoods and misinformation. It is about entrenching a certain political perspective, that of Lula and his party. In the backdrop of the ban on X, the government had leaned hard on every other social media platform to ban many accounts and throttle alternative voices. They were secret orders, and issued as such, but every platform complied.
Believing such requests were contrary to Brazilian law, which Elon Musk has pledged to follow as he must, X refused to block accounts simply because a judge told him to. After all, the Brazilian constitution says the following:
“Art. 5 IX—the expression of intellectual, artistic, scientific and communication activities is free, regardless of censorship or license; Art. 220. The manifestation of thought, creation, expression and information, in any form, process or vehicle, shall not suffer any restriction, in compliance with the provisions of this Constitution. [Section] 2 Any and all censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is prohibited.”
Presuming those words to be the law, Elon refused to ban accounts and incurred the wrath of Lula’s party. Elon is hardly alone in facing this choice in the world of communication technologies. Every platform has a deep record of contact with government agents, in most every country. Most comply, which is why the Internet in general is a different place than it was five years ago. What’s been called the “Censorship Industrial Complex” is built out, global, and highly effective.
Elon paid $44 billion for Twitter precisely because he wanted it to serve as a bulwark against the incursions on free speech. This has cost him immensely in terms of advertising dollars. The advertising consortia boycotted the platform. And keep in mind why. It is not because his rebranded platform was tilted politically to the right. It is because it permits the freedom to speak within the bounds of the law. That is not what the powers that be want these days.
Notice that the U.S. State Department has not expressed any real opposition to what is happening in Brazil, which is deeply disturbing. Ten and 15 years ago, the United States was the leading champion of free speech throughout the world. It insisted on social media that was open and free of government influence, even to the point of condemning Russia for demanding a backdoor to Telegram, even congratulating CEO Pavel Durov for leaving the country.
Those days appear to be over, as many U.S. elites—Robert Reich among them—have tacitly approved of what is happening in Brazil. Certainly, the Democratic ticket has had nothing to say, while the Republicans are now at least making an issue of it.
I’ve been in close contact with Brazilians throughout this ordeal. They are scared. They feel that they are next on the list, not because they supported the 2022 “insurrection,” which was really a mass protest. My friends have never publicly doubted the outcome of the election. And yet as opponents of Lula’s brand of socialism, they feel themselves to be targeted. And they warn that the United States could be next on the list.
It does appear these days that free speech hangs by a very thin thread. It’s helpful to imagine how things would be if Elon had not stood up and said no. All of the other platforms fully went along without saying anything publicly, even if they resented the bullying privately. Elon and X are being targeted precisely because he stood up and flatly said that the actions of the government contradict the laws of the country, which he has sworn to follow.
As of this writing, X is banned in China, North Korea, Russia, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Venezuela, Iran, and now Brazil. It is banned in all of these countries for one reason only: It permits people to be exposed to a variety of points of view. What’s at issue here is simple. It is politics. In all of these countries, you can have all kinds of opinions on food, music, and technology, but you must stay away from politics and, in some cases, religion, but even that is connected to politics, too.
Freedom and democracy depend fundamentally on an informed public, which in turn exercises influence over the regime under which people live. That is the basic idea of post-feudal systems of governance. If we don’t have that, we have autocracy or totalitarianism. Some countries are fine with that. But presumably Western nations favor a different course, which is why free speech has such an exalted position in law.
Now this commitment is being put to the test, especially with communication tools that have opened the range of people’s opinions as never before. We believe that people have the right to speak and the right to hear. It is quite the commentary on our times that it has required the courage and commitment of one man who happens to be a multibillionaire to make it real for the rest of us.
Because of my many travels in Brazil and because several of my books have been translated to Portuguese, I’ve developed a special interest in this case. It has startled and saddened me to see that The New York Times’ own coverage has tilted in favor of restrictions. I truly never thought I would live to see the day when such a fundamental postulate of civilized living would come into question and be so threatened in our time.
I want the freedom to read and comment on the works of Robert Reich. But according to his own words, he does not want you or me to have the right to read perspectives that contradict his own views. No one wins from this game. A forced consensus is not a stable one. If the censors win, they will inherit control of a distrustful and angry population. No one benefits from that.
