At 10 minutes past midnight on 31 August, Elon Musk’s X (nee Twitter) went dark in Brazil, a country of more than 200 million souls, many of them enthusiastic users of online services. The day before, a supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, had done something hitherto unthinkable: ordered the country’s ISPs to block access to the platform, threatened a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reis (just under £6,800) for users who bypassed the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) and froze the finances of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service provider in the country. The order would remain in force until the platform complied with the decisions of the supreme federal court, paid fines totalling 18.3m reis (nearly £2.5m) and appointed a representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for foreign companies operating there. Moraes had also instructed Apple and Google to remove the X app and VPN software from their stores, but later reversed that decision, citing concerns about potential “unnecessary” disruptions.
Cue shock, horror, incredulity, outrage and all the reactions in between. Musk – who has been sparring with Moraes for quite a while – tweeted: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” The animosity between the two goes back to 8 January 2023, after the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, when a mob of his supporters attacked federal government buildings in the capital, Brasília. The mob invaded and caused deliberate damage to the supreme federal court, the national congress and the Planalto presidential palace in an abortive attempt to overthrow the democratically elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Justice Moraes is in the firing line because before the 2022 presidential election the country’s supreme court had given him expansive powers to crack down on online threats to democracy and he has been an enthusiastic deployer of that capability ever since. A New York Times report, for example, said that he “jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil’s institutions. He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal.” And it is this last practice that brought him into collision with Musk, whose platform was one of the channels used by the 8 January insurgents.
Media coverage of this clash has predictably personalised it as ruthless enforcer versus tech titan. Who will blink first? Why on earth did Musk pick this fight? Has his fatuous obsession with free speech finally pushed him over the edge? After all, he could have complied with Moraes’s takedown orders, kept the office in Brasília and fought the issue through the Brazilian courts. Instead, he took his ball away, leaving more than 20 million Brazilian X users bereft. On the other hand, although Moraes turned out to be a pretty effective check on Bolsonaro – a cut-price Donald Trump who attacked the media, the courts and the country’s electoral system – some critics are beginning to wonder whether, in his mission to protect democracy, the judge may also wind up eroding it.
Who knows? But for now at least, one thing is clear: this is the first time a democratic state has shut down a main tech platform. Autocracies do this at will (for instance, China, Russia, Iran, Gulf states), but until now democracies have shied away from such an extreme measure. Listening to some of the chatter on the web about the Moraes order provides a clue to the timidity, for what you pick up is astonishment at the effrontery of a mere Brazilian who dares to take down a big American platform because it doesn’t obey the law of his particular land. Who does he think he is? Doesn’t he understand Silicon Valley’s “manifest destiny” to be the prime engine of human progress, leaving lesser breeds bobbing helplessly in its wake?
This servile cringe suggests that Silicon Valley tech is just the latest manifestation of what political scientist Joseph Nye famously called “soft power”. Nye defined it as the “power of a nation, state, alliance, etc deriving from economic and cultural influence, rather than coercion or military strength”, but it may be more cynically described as the capacity to inflict the cultural norms of a hegemonic superpower on the rest of the world. In that sense, Facebook et al are merely doing the same work as Hollywood, McDonald’s, Nike and their ilk did in the 1960s and 1970s. And if that is indeed the case, then we are in deep trouble, because the US has morphed into a chronically polarised superpower that is in thrall to corporate interests, governed by a dysfunctional, antiquated constitution and hellbent on imposing libertarian nonsense on the rest of the world.
Whatever the explanation for our democratic passivity, the record of the last two decades has not been encouraging. Western governments seemed to be asleep at the wheel as their citizens avidly adopted new tools and media that empowered and delighted them – but which at the same time rendered them vulnerable to detailed surveillance (and manipulation) by a small number of monopolistic foreign corporations. By 2015, though, alarm bells ought to have been ringing in the west, as it became clear that the technology was enabling foreign adversaries (as well as internal subversives and criminals) to disseminate disinformation on an industrial scale that could undermine democratic institutions, particularly elections. And if anyone doubted that the technology posed an existential threat to liberal democracy, then the 6 January 2021 insurrection in Washington DC should have settled the matter.
Underpinning all this, though, was an even bigger question: do liberal democracies have the capacity to control the corporations that own and operate this technology? We know that it can be done because authoritarian states do it. But are we too hamstrung by our attachment to the rule of law, the deep pockets of corporations and our legislators’ tolerance of lobbying to pull it off? Until recently, my fear was that the answer would be no because, historically, democracies have been slow-moving beasts.
Suddenly, though, the atmosphere seems to be changing. The EU now has three significant pieces of legislation on its statute book: the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and now its AI Act. Across the Atlantic, we’ve seen the conviction of Google as a monopolist and now its prosecution for abusive control of the digital advertising market. Here in the UK the Competition and Markets Authority has been casting a baleful eye on the kind of tech corporate mergers that used to be waved through. Across the Channel, the French are holding the Telegram chief executive while they investigate the toxic sewer that he runs. And now X has been shut down by a judge in Brazil. So something’s up. About time too.
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What I’ve been reading
Viral load
There Is No “Woke Mind Virus” is a striking essay by Dan Williams about the pernicious idea that if people disagree with you, they must be suffering from the cerebral equivalent of Covid.
Text message
Daniel Rothschild’s Discourse magazine essay In Praise of Reference Books argues that these publications should be valued at least as much as fiction and other nonfiction works.
Motor mouth
An interesting blogpost is On Five Ludicrous Years in which EW Niedermeyer reflects on half a decade of watching Tesla Inc.
