MONOKULTUR

Pressen hader Elon Musk, fordi han har købt Twitter og med sin kamp for ytringsfrihed, truer den etablerede forretningsmodel, der ikke er skabt til at tryktestes på ideernes markedsplads. “Elon Musk condemned by Downing Street for claim ‘civil war is inevitable’ in UK after riots”, hedder en overskrift. Musk’s false X posts on US election viewed 1.2 billion times, says watchdog hedder en anden og endnu mere statsejet. “Elon Musk is disrupting US elections to boost Trump” advarer en tredje. 

Associated Press “Brazil judge orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X”

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of his decision.

The move further escalates the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month.

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote in his decision.

Ikke nok med det, så er det også ulovligt at hente nyheder fra omverdenen, som det tilføjes  uden indignation, da de Moraes “…also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using VPNs to access it.” I stedet noterer AP blot, at med 40 mio brugere af X i Brasilien, så er det et stort marked, som skal ses i lyset af “the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the former Twitter in 2022”. Michael Shellenberger skaber noget klarhed 

Brazil is not a democracy. It is a nation ruled by two men, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and President Lula. Moraes apparently controls Brazil’s Senate President by abusing his powers. And Lula endorsed Moraes’ actions this morning. 

According to Brazilian legal experts, Moraes’ censorship demands of X, his summons to X on Wednesday, and his freezing Starlink’s bank accounts yesterday are all brazenly illegal and unconstitutional acts.

The Lula government stepped up the persecution of political dissidents, including the incarceration without trial of an aide to former president Jair Bolsonaro, and crackdowns on freedom always start small.

And a few minutes ago, Moraes ordered the suspension of X in Brazil and said that anyone who tries to evade the ban through a VPN will be fined $8,900 per day.

Lula’s defenders correctly note that local elections are still scheduled for October 6, that there are three social media alternatives to X, and that Brazil has had a robust democracy at the regional level since colonial times.

Men situationen er alvorlig, siger Shellenberger og påpeger de dystre forhold for det brasilianske folk: “And while X is still online, the government can turn it off any minute. As for the other 3 major social media alternatives, one of them i Facebook, which is complying with the government censorship demand, another is Rumble, which already left Brazil last year, in order to escape the censorship, and Telegrams future is in serious doubt given the arrest of the founder and CEO by the french government”

The Twitter Files—Brazil revealed that a government prosecutor said that Google, Facebook, Uber, WhatsApp, and Instagram had all complied. Google even sent Congress many gigabytes of data from deleted videos on YouTube.

Moreover, Lula’s statements this morning were openly dictatorial. Lula told a radio station that X owner Elon Musk “can’t go around insulting presidents, insulting representatives, insulting the Senate, insulting the House, insulting the Supreme Court. Who does he think he is?”

“Finally, the US government and George Soros funding are behind much of the Censorship Industrial Complex in Brazil.” siger Shellenberger videre og den vurdering er han ikke alene om. “This is not a case of the Brazilian government gone rouge” siger Mike Benz og fortsætter “The US government sponsored it through the state department, through USAID, through National Endowment for Democracy and about a hundred different NGOs, university centers legal scholars and activists within Brazil!”

Starting in about october 2018 and first the came for the social media companies. The they came for Whatsapp and Telegram, and now finally they’re coming for X. Now, they are between a rock and a hard place, which is why I believe the US embassy finally issued this pittance of a public statement, just hours ago, before the ban, that they are monitoring the situation.

Shellenberger istemmer at Brasiliens lederes “are behaving like the hypocritical pig leaders in George Orwell’s Animal Farm”

After the election of populist president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, the US government funded pro-censorship organizations that demanded censorship. Moraes yesterday openly defended censorship to prevent “extremist populist groups” from coming to power. As United States Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr noted yesterday, that’s a direct violation of the Brazilian constitution, which explicitly protects political speech.

As such, the totalitarian takeover of Brazil is a model for what the Democrats and the legacy news media want for the whole world. Pro-censorship scholars at Stanford and Harvard, Democrats in Congress, and the US news media have long recognized that the First Amendment is an obstacle to their plans. And so they have supported censorship efforts by nations with weaker free speech protections, like Brazil, Britain, Australia, and the European Union, to censor and even block X.

Lyder det kulørt? “Most of the Brazilian left wants a dictator who will silence and imprison all their political opponents” skriver Glenn Greenwald og henviser til Brendan Carr, der har læst begrundelsen for anslaget mod X og ytringsfriheden

Moreas’s own words make clear that he is attempting to strike a broader blow against free speech and in favor of authoritarian controls. 

His opinion does not even try to hide it.  He comes right out and points to Brexit and the 2016 election of President Trump as examples, in his telling, of the types of extreme “populist” outcomes that he is attempting to avoid by imposing a new censorship regime in Brazil ahead the country’s elections later this year.

But this type of censorship of a political and ideological nature is expressly prohibited by Brazil’s own Constitution.

Nonetheless, de Morea argues that free speech on X cannot be allowed to continue because the diversity of political opinions expressed on the site might influence the people of Brazil ahead of their 2024 elections.  See op. at 31-32.

In other words, de Morea is arguing that free speech is a threat to democracy—a position that is as Orwellian as it is dangerous. 

Det var ikke hvad AP artiklen ovenfor kom frem til, der i stedet skrev “de Moraes’ cited Musk’s statements as evidence that X’s conduct “clearly intends to continue to encourage posts with extremism, hate speech and anti-democratic discourse, and to try to withdraw them from jurisdictional control.”” Er det mærkeligt, at annoncørerne tøver på X med den pressedækning?