As Brazil grappled with a flood of online disinformation around its 2022 presidential election, the nation’s Supreme Court made an unusual and fateful decision: It gave one justice sweeping powers to order social networks to take down content he believed threatened democracy.
That justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has since carried out an aggressive campaign to clean up his country’s internet, forcing social networks to pull down thousands of posts, often giving them a deadline of just hours to comply.
It has been one of the most comprehensive — and, in some ways, most effective — efforts to combat the scourge of internet falsehoods. When his online crackdown helped stifle far-right efforts to overturn Brazil’s election, academics and commentators wondered whether the nation had found a possible solution to one of the most vexing problems of modern democracy.
Then, on Friday, Justice Moraes blocked the social network X across Brazil because its owner, Elon Musk, had ignored his court orders to remove accounts. As part of the blackout order, the judge said internet users who tried to circumvent his measure in order to keep using X could be fined nearly $9,000 a day, or more than what the average Brazilian makes a year.
It was the judge’s boldest measure yet, and it left even many of his defenders worried that Brazil’s experiment had gone too far.
“I was someone who was very on his side,” said David Nemer, a Brazilian-born media professor who has studied his nation’s approach to disinformation at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
“But when we saw the X decision, we were like: ‘What the hell? This is too much,’” he said, using an expletive. “It was a warning to all of us.”
Brazil’s yearslong fight against the internet’s destructive effect on politics, culminating in the current blackout of X, shows the pitfalls of a nation deciding what can be said online. Do too little and allow online chatter to undermine democracy; do too much and restrict citizens’ legitimate speech.
Other governments worldwide are likely to be watching as they debate whether to wade into the messy work of policing speech or leave it to increasingly powerful tech companies that rarely share a country’s political interests.
The United States had long largely stayed out of the debate, letting tech companies police themselves and one another. But this year it changed course, passing a law to ban TikTok unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer because of concerns over its parent company’s ties to China. TikTok has sued to challenge the law as unconstitutional.
The European Union approved sweeping legislation in 2022 requiring social networks to adhere to specific rules about what can be posted on their sites. And only days ago, France charged Pavel Durov, the Russian-born entrepreneur who founded the messaging service Telegram, with a wide range of crimes for failing to prevent illicit activity on the app.
But few democratic governments have taken as drastic a step as Brazil’s suspension of X and its threat of fines against people who keep using it.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the move “absurd and dangerous.”
“The thing that is really disturbing is that increasingly, undemocratic governments can point to democratic ones to justify their actions,” he said. “Where there are narrower ways of addressing privacy concerns or misinformation concerns, governments should use those narrower means.”
Carlos Affonso Souza, a Brazilian internet-law professor, called the order “the most extreme judicial decision out of a Brazilian court in 30 years of internet law.” Yet he added that Brazil had to take some action after Mr. Musk so publicly and explicitly flouted multiple court orders.
“It’s not up to a company to decide if a judicial decision is adequate or not,” Mr. Souza said. “The company must file a complaint in a lawsuit, not just decide to not comply.”
Fábio de Sá e Silva, a professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma, said the order was a powerful rebuke of multinational tech companies that sometimes view themselves as above the laws of nations, especially poorer ones.
“The world looks at Brazil now and sees something is being done there to push back,” Mr. de Sá e Silva said. “It might encourage some other countries to do the same.”
Yet there were signs that even Justice Moraes believed he had gone too far. At first on Friday, he ordered Apple and Google to prevent downloads of apps that offer virtual private networks, or VPNs, software that can cause a user’s internet traffic to appear as though it were coming from another country. VPNs are commonly used for privacy and cybersecurity, but can also be used to evade blockades against certain websites or apps.
The measure against VPN apps prompted a swift backlash across Brazil, and three hours later, Justice Moraes amended the order to drop his demand to Apple and Google.
But Justice Moraes retained the threat of fining anyone who continued to use X in Brazil via VPN. That move “is absolutely authoritarian, and there is no explicit legal provision that allows for it,” said Thiago Amparo, a prominent Brazilian lawyer and newspaper columnist who has supported Justice Moraes.
The head of Brazil’s national bar association said on Friday that the organization would ask Brazil’s Supreme Court to review the measure about fines.
Justice Moraes’s support in Brazil has faded as the nation has moved past the acute tensions of the 2022 election. At the time, then-President Jair Bolsonaro was using social media to sow doubts about the integrity of Brazil’s voting systems, despite a lack of evidence, and Justice Moraes was ordering social networks to remove some of his posts.
After Mr. Bolsonaro lost the election, thousands of his supporters blocked highways, camped outside army bases and eventually stormed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court in a bid to provoke a military takeover. Justice Moraes responded by ordering social networks to block dozens of prominent accounts that questioned the vote or sympathized with the attempted insurrection, including some belonging to federal lawmakers.
But since then, as the political temperature has cooled, Justice Moraes has kept issuing court orders to social networks to remove accounts. The orders are both secret and lack explanations on how a certain account had broken the law, according to leaked copies of orders.
“Moraes’ actions were very much legitimized by the need to protect the Constitution,” said Mariana Valente, a lawyer and director of Brazil’s InternetLab, a think tank. “But obviously there’s concern that this is continuing.”
She said Brazil’s full Supreme Court should rule soon on Justice Moraes’s order to block X. “That is essential to create legitimacy for a decision that’s very extreme,” she said.
Justice Moraes has continued to use the threat to democracy as a justification for his actions. In his order on Friday, he said Mr. Musk’s refusal to comply with orders to suspend accounts “represents an extremely serious risk to the municipal elections in October” in Brazil.
Justice Moraes has “set up a state of exception,” Mr. Nemer said. “But it’s a permanent state of exception, and that’s not good for any sort of democracy.”
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