Since Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election, important elements of the US ruling class have been concerned about the spread on the US internet of disinformation (sometimes called misinformation or “fake news”). These concerns were greatly amplified by events during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and, during the same year, lies about Donald Trump being robbed of the US presidency which incited the US capitol riots of January 6th. Left wing websites have suffered as a result of this anti-disinformation push. For example, beginning in 2017, in response to government pressure to fight disinformation, Google reformed its search engine to amplify “authoritative” sources like the New York Times; liberal-left sites opposing militarism and neoliberal economics saw significant drops in site visits resulting from Google searches. Facebook has reduced amplification or totally deplatformed authentically American progressive voices in its overkill drive responding to government pressure to eliminate alleged disinformation originating from Russia.

However, almost all mainstream media coverage of the disinformation problem has centered on right wing grievances. Right wing politicians and commentators have charged that the Biden administration–in coordination with anti-disinformation academic research organizations like Stanford’s Internet Observatory–have put pressure on social media platforms to censor the speech of pro-MAGA Americans. Right wingers have been particularly upset about monitoring of social media by federal government officials looking for disinformation on Covid or the 2020 presidential election. On July 4, 2023, Trump appointed federal judge Terry A. Doughty granted an injunction sought by the Republican attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana which greatly limited the Biden administration’s contact with social media companies about disinformation on their platforms. Several months later, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed nine of the ten specific guidelines on the Biden administration imposed by Doughty’s injunction. The US Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case, Murthy v. Missouri (originally called Missouri v. Biden), in June. 

Inspiring much of the right wing’s campaign against supposed federal government censorship–including the lawsuit in Murthy v. Missouri–has been Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and military contractor. In late 2022, Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion and ordered the release of tens of thousands of documents produced under Twitter’s previous ownership to his own handpicked journalists. This release, which became known as the Twitter Files, was clearly a marketing campaign aimed at conservatives. It sought to demonstrate that Musk would reverse the dynamic allegedly occurring at Twitter before he took over. That supposed dynamic was that content moderators heavily censored MAGA friendly speech, often collaborating in doing so with federal government agencies and anti-disinformation academic researchers under cover of fighting disinformation. I wrote about the Twitter Files here. 

The case made by the Twitter Files, like the broader recent right wing hysteria about federal government plots to censor conservative speech, is not entirely without a basis in reality. It is problematic that a small group of academic experts and government officials have sought, in non-transparent fashion and with lack of democratic oversight, to influence social media companies’ content moderation policies. However, the Twitter Files, like the overall right wing pushback against federal government anti-disinformation efforts, was marred by serious exaggeration and distortions of fact. 

In spite of his repeated claims that he is a “free speech absolutist” and passionate about enabling free flowing debate on all subjects, Elon Musk is a prime example of the lack of seriousness among right wingers about advancing free speech. He has touted reduced content moderation on X (formerly Twitter) and has restored to the platform the accounts of tens of thousands of previously banned conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, white nationalists and neo-nazis.  X, under his ownership, has, at the same time, targeted pro-Palestinian and radical left accounts for lengthy suspensions. According to one report, X complied with 80 percent of all tweet removal requests made by governments around the world in the six months after Musk took over the company, up from 50 percent before. 

Although it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Musk thinks of himself as a genuine fighter for free speech, it would be extremely foolish to take him seriously as one. Musk is not a serious free speech fighter; he is, however, very serious about advancing his personal business interests . Under cover of grandstanding as a free speech defender, his ultimate goal seems to be to amplify “anti-woke” right wing voices because the latter advocate policies to eliminate government regulation of business (such as the companies Musk owns). The  claim made repeatedly by powerful people like Musk that right wing voices  are being suppressed–even subjected to government censorship–serves to amplify the attention given to those voices in mainstream corporate media. Musk’s free speech propaganda is similar to that  of right wing “working the refs” propaganda in past decades complaining about mainstream media bias against conservatives. 

This article will flesh out how Musk’s goal of advancing his personal business interests under cover of free speech advocacy are revealed in his latest propaganda campaign, Twitter Files Brazil. This campaign, based on the release of documents from X’s Brazil office dating back to 2020, supposedly highlights how supporters of Brazil’s former far right president Jair Bolsonaro are being censored on social media, forced to release their private electronic communication to the government and are being persecuted in other ways by Brazil’s current government. Supporters of Bolsonaro, a fervent admirer of the US backed military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964-85, attempted a coup in January 2023 after Bolsonaro failed in his reelection campaign the previous year. Bolsonaro is so crude that he has even praised Alfredo Stroessner, the utterly barbarian and corrupt dictator who ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. 

The themes of Twitter Files Brazil have been amplified by an assiduous partisan of Musk’s business interests, MAGA Republican Jim Jordan. Jordan chairs the US House Judiciary Committee, which has held hearings and released a lengthy report, describing what it claims is the legal persecution of Bolsonaro and his supporters under the mildly social democratic government of Brazil’s president Lula de Silva. Jordan seems to intend these hearings as a way to further solidarity between right wing populists in Brazil and in the United States. The linking of the struggles of right wing populists in both countries can be seen in a headline in a January article published on Public, the Substack page of Twitter Files Brazil’s main author, Michael Shellenberger. The headline read: “FBI, Soros, And Secret Police in Vast Censorship Conspiracy in Brazil.” 

This article will also highlight a glaring example of distortion of evidence in Twitter Files Brazil made by Shellenberger as well as the fallacious claims made about Elon Musk’s motives by another pro-Musk commentator, Glenn Greenwald. It will conclude with a call for radically overhauling social media platforms in both Brazil and the United States. 

Twitter Files Brazil and Michael Shellenberger

The main roots of Twitter Files Brazil are in Brazil’s 2022 presidential election–although some of it is rooted in earlier political conflict. In that election, Brazil’s far right president Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for re-election. In the months leading up to the election, Bolsonaro clearly was testing the waters for launching a coup. Trump-like, he made baseless claims that dark forces were conspiring to rig the election against him. There appeared to be insufficient support in Brazil’s military and business community for a coup–although such support was not entirely non-existent. Bolsonaro appeared to accept defeat when he lost his re-election bid to Brazil’s former president Lula da Silva by a narrow 51-49 margin.  However on January 8th 2023, eight days after Lula’s inauguration, a mob of thousands of Bolsonaro supporters attacked federal government buildings in Brazil’s capital Brasilia. In Brazil’s version of the January 6th riots in the US, the rioters hoped to stimulate a coup by Brazil’s armed forces. Over 1400 people were arrested.

The January 8th insurrection failed but Brazilian authorities subsequently launched a crackdown on coup supporters under the banner of fighting  disinformation about the integrity of Brazil’s election system as well as any incitement to a repeat of the coup attempt. One aspect of Brazil’s anti-disinformation fight has seen the banning of many coup supporters from activity on social media platforms by Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court. The latter is headed by one of the country’s supreme court justices, Aleander de Moraes. Persons banned from Brazilian social media have no right to appeal the decision or learn the specific reasons why they are banned. Social media companies are limited in how much information about the bannings they can publicly report and are subjected to heavy fines if they refuse compliance. Bolsonaro has been banned from social media and blocked from running for the presidency again until 2030. He is also under investigation for corruption charges. 

In early April, Elon Musk suddenly announced that he would reinstate persons previously banned from Brazil’s X platform under court order and refuse compliance with upcoming court orders to ban additional individuals spreading disinformation about Brazil’s 2022 election. In announcing X’s defiance in a tweet, he posed as making a heroic stand in defense of free speech. He claimed that  Alexandre de Moraes had threatened arrest of X’s Brazilian employees, the imposition of massive fines and the banning of X from Brazil altogether. He tweeted that “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit.” A week after Musk made this grand announcement, X announced that it would comply with all the orders Musk previously claimed he would resist–although, after this, Musk continued to call for Moraes’s resignation and impeachment. Several days after Musk proclaimed his defiance of court orders, Moraes  announced an investigation into Musk for obstruction of justice and spreading “fake news.” 

Musk’s theatrical display of defiance coincided with the launch of his latest propaganda campaign, Twitter Files Brazil. Musk ordered the release of company documents related to X’s operations in Brazil to Michael Shellenberger, one of Musk’s handpicked journalists in the original Twitter Files. 

Shellenberger has a background in Brazil: nearly thirty years ago, when he was in the orbit of the radical left, he co-wrote a book with Kevin Danaher entitled Fighting for the Soul of Brazil, published by Monthly Review Press. He subsequently worked as a consultant for the Sierra Club, led a campaign against Nike sweatshops and served as a public relations contractor for Venezuela’s government under Hugo Chavez. Eventually he turned his private public relations business into a tool for various corporate friendly ideas, evolving into a right wing publicist, most notably as an advocate for a right wing environmentalism.  Looking through his Substack site Public, one sees the voicing of such common right wing opinions as global warming skepticism, the sinister influence of “Soros money,” the terrorist sympathies of pro-Palestinian activists, the horrors of transgenderism and the “woke” policies fueling rampant crime and homelessness in “Democrat run cities.” 

Shellenberger has also become an abject flatterer of Elon Musk, building up the latter in a cult of personality fashion as the greatest free speech defender of this era. Last month, as Musk staged his ridiculous public confrontation with Alexander de Moraes, Shellenberger proclaimed that “Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism.” 

After Musk backed down in his confrontation with Moraes, in late April Shellenberger announced that he personally had become the “victim of Cuba style censorship and repression at the hands of” President Lula da Silva’s government. Lula’s attorney general had urged that the Federal Supreme Court prosecute Shellenberger because Shellenberger, in his release of Twitter Files Brazil, had allegedly published information on “confidential judicial decisions.” Shellenberger denied that he had done so. Further, Shellenberger alleged that, in making his recommendation, the Attorney General never stated that either Shellenberger “or my coauthors Eli Vieira and David Agape lied or presented inaccurate information in the Twitter Files – Brazil.” 

Putting aside the content of the Attorney General’s memorandum on the affair, the last sentence of Shellenberger was misleading. In Brazil, before Shellenberger announced to the world that he was heroically staring down “Cuba style censorship and repression,” a controversy had arisen when it was revealed that Shellenberger had stitched together portions of different e-mail messages to make the false claim that Alexander de Moraes had threatened X’s top Brazilian lawyer with criminal prosecution for refusing to hand over private information about Moraes’s political enemies. This claim was amplified by Elon Musk and embraced by Bolsonaro supporters all over Brazil. However it was soon revealed that what Shellenberger’s email evidence referenced was merely criminal prosecution of X by the Sao Paulo District Attorney’s office (not Moraes) for refusing to hand over information about a leading Brazilian cocaine trafficker. Shellenberger at this point appears to have apologized for his distortion–claiming it was an honest mistake–only in the Portuguese language Brazilian media. For obvious reasons, he has appeared none too keen to call attention to the matter in English language publications. 

For their part, defenders of the Brazilian judicial censorship orders argue that they are a legitimate response to the January 8th coup attempt. They have stressed that it is unfair to judge Brazil’s censorship methods by the standards of the United States’s First Amendment. Brazil, like many parliamentary democracies around the world, has long had more restrictive speech standards than the United States. For example, public expression of Nazism is criminalized in Brazil. Brazilian authorities have long monitored Brazilian social media for any trends that might be inciting public disorder.  During national elections, the Supreme Electoral Court monitors campaign ads for truth and accuracy, and orders their removal based on violation of a certain factual standard. By traditional Brazilian legal standards, the violation of the integrity of elections by spreading disinformation about irregularities outweighs any concept of freedom of speech. 

Glenn and Elon 

One formerly serious journalist (who has become a joke in recent years) jumping into the fray on the Brazilian censorship controversy is Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, an American long resident in Brazil, established himself as a journalistic legend in the 2010s for his involvement in the Edward Snowen, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning cases. However, he has intellectually disintegrated in recent years, constantly making the utterly asinine argument that Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones and similar MAGA figures are serious critics of US foreign policy, neoliberal economics, the military-industrial complex and the national security state. He is also an Elon Musk defender, taking the billionaire’s professed passion for free speech at face value. I’ve written about Greenwald here, here and here. 

In 2019 and 2020, as a top notch investigative reporter, Greenwald was a constant thorn in the side of the Bolsonaro regime, which subjected him to harassment and threats to deport him from the country. However, since his turn to the right politically, Greenwald has changed his tune. He has called Bolsonaro a populist who is a victim of repression by the Brazilian establishment led by Alexander de Moraes. He has severely downplayed the danger of the attempted January 8, 2023 coup and played dumb about Bolsonaro’s attempts to lay the groundwork for a coup. According to Greenwald, when Bolsonaro claimed in 2022 that the forthcoming presidential election was going to be rigged against him, all he was doing was stating an opinion and was not up to anything sinister. 

 On his System Update podcast, he has also sought to burnish Bolsonaro’s anti-imperialist credentials. News reports have suggested that the Biden administration engaged in efforts in 2022 to warn Bolsonaro that it would not support any strongman shenanigans on his part as he sought re-election. Greenwald points to this as proof that global right wing populism, represented in Brazil by Bolsonaro, is the biggest threat to US imperialism–and not any left wing ideology. According to Greenwald’s logic, if the US is opposing him, doesn’t that make Bolsonaro an anti-imperialist rebel?  In reality all the US’s apparent warnings to  Bolsonaro showed was that the US prefers parliamentary democracy to be maintained in third world nations–as long as such democracies are constrained by neoliberal economic policies. The US apparently saw no fundamental threat to the neoliberal order in Brazil in Lula’s succession to Bolsonaro in holding Brazil’s presidency–or, in any event, saw no reason that its interests required that it endorse Bolsonaro’s strongman antics. 

On his April 11th System Update, Greenwald celebrated the fact that Rumble, the right wing streaming service that airs his podcast, had taken a stand for free speech–it had ceased airing its programs in Brazil on the ground it did not want to be party to any Brazilian supreme court order banning persons from its platform. In the same episode Greenwald defended Musk’s right to interfere in Brazil’s internal affairs and from charges that Musk had inconsistent free speech principles. The show’s transcript shows Greenwald offering this spin: 

You can make a lot of criticism of Elon Musk, and the Brazilian media has been doing it endlessly, pointing out that he has a business in China and rarely stands up to the Chinese government the way he’s standing up to the Brazilian government and that he has business with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and very rarely denounces the attacks on free speech in Saudi Arabia. But everybody knows China and Saudi Arabia are undemocratic. Those countries don’t pretend to be part of the democratic world. Brazil does. He’s also denounced the United States censorship regime at great length as well. It’s not like he’s confining it to Brazil. And then there’s also just this sort of sense in Brazil that ‘why should a foreign billionaire be able to demand the impeachment of our judge and to attack our political institutions?’ And that’s because anyone has free speech to attack political officials in any other country. Brazilians constantly attack American political officials, American policy and American institutions, and they have every right to do so. But it’s especially necessary here because the Brazilian government is demanding that Twitter serve as an arm of their censorship regime by doing their dirty work for them. 

Last year, Rumble decided it had enough, it wasn’t willing to continue to do that, and now Elon Musk is saying that he has had enough as well….I think he’s concerned about the safety of his employees in Brazil, given that they have now been explicitly threatened with arrest and criminal prosecution. And I think he wants to protect them first. 

Greenwald’s reference to Musk’s denunciation of the “United States censorship regime” refers to the charges mentioned above that the US federal government has been pressuring social media companies like X to censor conservative friendly speech. 

Also,here is something Greenwald did not mention in his above reflections. India, like Brazil, has freedom of speech enshrined in its constitution. In some ways, it has stronger democratic traditions than Brazil. Yet the autocratic regime of Narendra Modi, which has governed India since 2014, has imposed on social media companies the requirement that they remove speech considered distasteful to Modi’s government. Modi’s critics have been censored in huge numbers through this route; social media companies are required to cooperate with these edicts under possible penalties of fines and imprisonment. Elon Musk’s Twitter has heavily cooperated in serving as an arm of Modi’s “censorship regime.” Why is Musk striking heroic poses as a free speech defender in Brazil while fully cooperating with censorship in India? 

I think there is a more plausible answer to the question than Greenwald’s touching notion that Musk is seriously concerned about free speech in Brazil and the safety of his employees there. Narendra Modi’s government has been extremely solicitous toward Elon Musk’s businesses. When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he was also extremely solicitous of Elon Musk’s business interests. Now that the mildly progressive Lula da Silva is president, Brazil’s government has been less solicitous toward Elon Musk’s businesses. Because of less favor from Brazil’s government for his business interests, Musk retaliated by engineering a propaganda campaign, Twitter Files Brazil, denouncing that government for engaging in censorship.

Under Bolsonaro, Musk’s satellite operation Starlink (a division of his company SpaceX) signed an agreement with the Brazilian government to deliver internet service to remote schools in the Amazon. The contract was carried out only in limited fashion. Meanwhile, under President Lula, Brazil’s government has cracked down on illegal mining and logging on Amazon indigenous land; they have seized many Starlink satellite kits used in such operations. 

One of Musk’s main economic interests in Brazil appears to be centered around accessing lithium and nickel for Tesla, the electric car company of which he is CEO. Tesla has been jockeying for position in Brazil with BYD, its rival Chinese electric car manufacturer.  Musk had been trying to buy the Brazilian company Sigma Lithium; the company’s owners refused sale and signed a supply agreement with BYD. The website BrasilWire suggests that Musk’s response to this was to throw a tantrum and launch Twitter Files Brazil.. There is no conclusive confirmation that this was Musk’s motive but, again, it seems substantially more plausible than the story that, in Greenwald’s words, Musk had “had enough” of Moraes’s unjust censorship decrees and decided to take a stand. 

In July 2020, after being accused by a Twitter user of being involved–for the purposes of pursuing lithium access–in the November 2019 US backed coup against Bolivia’s president Evo Morales, Musk famously tweeted “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” The tweet was subsequently cited as an admission of Musk’s involvement in the coup although Musk probably intended it as tongue-in-cheek, having some fun at the expense of humorless leftists. Although Musk was probably not being completely serious, the tweet was realistic enough in terms of both Musk’s influence on US foreign policy and his actual motives (advancing his own business interests as opposed to being an idealist trying to advance free speech). 

The Way Forward

Brazil, like the United States, needs an infinitely large overhaul of its communications and information system. There is no real free marketplace of ideas in either country: the distribution and amplification of information and opinion is in the hands of a small number of corporate media owners (and the advertisers which subsidize those companies). 

In 2022, not long before Musk took control of Twitter, the leading left media scholar Victor Pickard wrote in The Nation: 

Core communications systems like Twitter shouldn’t be left to the whims of billionaires and profit-driven monopolies in the first place. Until we radically democratize such platforms and treat them as the essential public infrastructures they are—shared resources that shouldn’t be governed by market forces alone—Musk, Trump, or some other petulant billionaire can come along and make them their playthings.

What would such radically democratized platforms look like? Ideas for structural reform are flourishing, though you wouldn’t know it from the narrowed parameters of mainstream policy debates. Some analysts and activists have argued for transitioning the platforms into public utilities, or devolving their ownership and control to tech workers and users as cooperatives, or breaking up platform monopolies into smaller firms. Others have suggested creating an entire public stack in which each layer of our digital media—from the platforms to the pipes that carry the Internet into your home—is democratized.

Wise words. They offer a potentially better path forward to combating the chicaneries of Elon Musk, Jair Bolsanaro and their ilk than the heavy handed crackdown on disinformation launched by Alexander de Moraes. 

At the end of the day, it should be up to ordinary Brazilians to decide the laws and media structure of their country–not bad faith Americans like Elon Musk, Jim Jordan and their journalistic courtiers like Michael Shellenberger and Glenn Greenwald. 

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