One might assume that if a club boasted Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Venezuela as members, the rest of the world’s countries would do anything possible to avoid joining it. Alas, in the case of Brazil one would assume wrong. This week, a panel of judges on Brazil’s supreme court upheld a ruling by Justice Alexandre de Moraes that instituted a total ban on the social-media site X (formerly Twitter). Under the terms of the order, internet service providers in Brazil cannot act as a conduit for X’s traffic, app stores in Brazil are obliged to delete the X app from their catalogues, and the use of VPNs or other traffic rerouting tools to circumvent the prohibition carries a fine of nearly $9,000 per day. Thus did Brazil join the murderers’ row of nations that, for one bad reason or another, have exiled the global town square.
The proximate cause of Brazil’s ban was that X’s owner, Elon Musk, had refused to comply with a court order requiring him to remove certain accounts that had been accused of spreading “misinformation.” The more important question, though, is why Brazil’s government was demanding those removals in the first instance. Explaining the decision, one of the judges, Flávio Dino, proposed that “freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility.” But, predictably enough, that “duty” has only been applied to X accounts operated by figures who are critical of the incumbent president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “Responsibility,” it seems, is an irregular noun.
Apologists for Brazil’s approach have simply repeated the undisputed fact that X is in violation of the country’s laws and reiterated that, Brazil being a sovereign nation, there is not a great deal that anyone outside of its borders can do about it. This, of course, is true. But it tells us nothing of interest or of consequence about whether the laws of Brazil are any good — which, in this case, they are most decidedly not — or about whether they are being used to suppress dissent — which, in this case, they most decidedly are. As a declaration, “It’s the law” is useful when the question at hand is, “Is it the law?” In response to anything more substantive, it is useless.
Throughout history, the protection and expansion of human liberty have been reliant upon technologies that facilitate communication. It was not an accident that the tyrants of old sought control of the printing press, and it is not an accident that our contemporary arbiters of taste aspire to control the internet, either. To superintend the means by which ideas are spread and debated is to superintend those ideas and debates per se. The names come and go — Gutenberg, Edison, Marconi, Berners-Lee — but the core inquiry remains the same: Are the tools of argumentation to be let alone or supervised by busybodies? Brazil, to its disgrace, has opted for the latter course.
It is not the case that all information is of equal value or that all claims are equally true. Movable type promulgated the works of both Shakespeare and Louis XIV; the radio broadcast Churchill and Hitler; the internet delivers uplifting courses on Michelangelo and pernicious conspiracy theories about the Jews. But, in a free country, it is for individuals, not government apparatchiks, to make the final determination about what is what. With all respect to Marshall McLuhan, the Web, properly understood, is a conduit rather than a dispatch. It is what its users make of it, on both sides of the exchange. To interpose judges or bureaucrats into the middle of the conversation is to violate its core purpose, summed by John Gilmore, to “interpret censorship as damage and route around it.”
To their credit, Americans tend to consider the egregious conduct of foreign nations as if it were taking place on the moon. Russia, China, Brazil, Iran — those are other places, with other rules, making decisions that could not be made here. Up to a point, this is correct. The United States has a better Constitution and a better political culture than does Brazil, and, thanks to the First Amendment, the wholesale prohibition of X — or its equivalent — would be legally forbidden. Nevertheless, America, like anywhere else, is full of flawed human beings, some of whom will inevitably be tempted toward censorship. In recent years, the elected president of the United States, Joe Biden, has been caught putting pressure on major social-media networks to remove information that it considered inappropriate or dangerous, and those major social-media networks have been caught playing ball. Last week, the former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert Reich, argued in the Guardian newspaper that the Federal Trade Commission should supervise conversations online, and that it would 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 on display in Brazil. That does not mean it doesn’t exist.
That being so, Congress ought to act swiftly to shore up protections for Americans on the Web. The United States would benefit from a law that mandated the disclosure of all content-moderation requests that the executive branch makes of social-media networks in the United States, as well as from a legislative affirmation that no federal agency enjoys the power to determine what is and is not “misinformation” online. Simultaneously, it ought to be the policy of the United States to keep as much of the internet’s core infrastructure under American control as possible. The “One World. One Internet.” policy that was adopted in the early 2010s — a policy that eventually led to the globalization of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) — was a mistake, predicated upon the false notion that other countries see the internet in the same way Americans do. As Brazil has just demonstrated, they do not. The correct response from the United States would be to take stock of what happened in Brasília and pass the opposite rules into law.