The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said he hopes the crisis surrounding the social network X in Brazil might teach the world that “it isn’t obliged to put up with [Elon] Musk’s far-right free-for-all just because he is rich”.
Lula’s comments to the network CNN Brasil came after the supreme court voted unanimously on Monday to uphold the ban on X, which is now largely inaccessible in one of its biggest global markets.
The suspension was first ordered on Friday as a result of the company’s refusal to obey court orders requiring the removal of profiles accused of spreading disinformation and for the social network to name a local legal representative.
Debate is raging in Brazil over the rights and wrongs of preventing more than 20 million X users from accessing the service – not to mention the political wisdom of doing so, amid fears the move could strengthen the country’s far-right movement by allowing it to pose as a champion of free speech.
Thousands of supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro are expected to take to the streets on Saturday for an independence day rally some believe will be turbocharged by anger over the supreme court’s stance.
Musk has unabashedly aligned himself with Bolsonaro’s radical political movement, just as he has championed the former president’s most important international friend, Donald Trump, ahead of November’s US election.
On Tuesday, the rightwing tech billionaire shared an invitation to Saturday’s demo with his 196 million X followers. It claimed Brazilians would turn out to “march for freedom, protesting judicial overreach and defending free speech”.
Twenty-four hours earlier Musk had shared another post advertising the Bolsonarista march. It claimed “patriotic Brazilians” were preparing to “flood” São Paulo’s financial heart to demand the impeachment of Alexandre de Moraes, the supreme court judge behind the original X ban.
Musk has painted the suspension of X as part of a dictatorial leftwing plot to silence conservative voices that is being spearheaded by Moraes.
The ban was endorsed on Monday by a panel of five supreme court judges. “No one can seek to perform their activities in Brazil without complying with the laws and the federal constitution,” argued the supreme court justice Cristiano Zanin.
Pedro Doria, a Brazilian columnist who often writes about the intersection between technology and politics, said he was concerned Moraes had gone too far in his battle to rid social media of anti-democratic far-right voices. He also voiced shock at what he called last week’s “quite absurd” decision to ban the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to access X, punishing the uses of such technology with a daily fine of 50,000 reais (£6,760).
But Doria balked at Musk’s attempt to portray himself as a free speech torchbearer, saying that under his leadership X (then known as Twitter) had blocked content during the May 2023 Turkish election. The platform said at the time the move was “in response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey”.
“He talks about free speech but he doesn’t walk the talk,” Doria said of the owner of X, who a 2023 data analysis by the technology information portal Rest of World, said had accepted 83% of government requests in its first six months under Musk’s control. Musk has cited the need to comply with local laws in countries such as India.
“Just compare how he acted in Turkey in comparison to how he is acting in Brazil. When the Turkish asked him to block certain accounts […] he blocks them and then he goes on Twitter and says: ‘Well the option would be to block the entire country and I’m not doing that’.”