Elon Musk and X are using the social media platform’s resources to rally supporters and spread legally questionable talking points about Brazilian Supreme Justice Alexandre de Moraes after he suspended X’s availability in the country.
The suspension came after X failed to appoint a legal representative in the country to manage orders and requests from Brazil’s court pertaining to content moderation. Musk refused to comply with de Moraes’ judicial orders to remove disinformation from the platform under Brazil’s speech laws.
But through the mobilization of his platform and his large following there, Musk has worked to spread his own ideas about the ruling, including the belief that de Moraes is usurping due process and democracy to crack down on free speech.
Musk and X have used the platform itself to amplify their interpretation of events, spreading misleading information about how the law and government work in Brazil in the process. Posts from Brazilian academics and journalists shedding light on the situation have gained far less traction, while Musk’s fanbase and his conservative allies have continued to drum up negative sentiment toward de Moraes. The result is an information divide that leaves X users navigating two different realities about why X is banned in Brazil depending on whether their feed is influenced by Musk or people who oppose him.
In the wake of Brazil’s rulings, X has created an official X-affiliated account called the “Alexandre Files” that appeared on Aug. 31, with Musk planning a “daily data dump” from the account. The account has posted 21 times so far and brought in over 124 millions views and more than 377,000 followers with posts referring to de Moraes’ rulings as “unlawful,” “illegal” and “abuses of Brazilian law.” In the unredacted, formerly sealed judicial orders sent to X by de Moraes and then published by X, sensitive personal information of individuals referred to in the case, including Brazil’s version of Social Security numbers, were exposed. The orders sent by de Moraes refer to takedown requests of posts that it describes as intimidation and exposure of law enforcement officials and their families, including their underage children.
Musk has also targeted de Moraes from his personal X account, the most-followed on the platform, calling him a “fake ‘judge,’” “Brazil’s Voldemort” and a “criminal.” Musk has called for de Moraes to be imprisoned and for the U.S. government to stop sending foreign aid to Brazil and to seize Brazilian government assets.
But experts say Musk is misconstruing Brazilian law on free speech, how the government operates and the context for de Moraes’ judicial orders.
“Our laws pertaining to free speech are different from the First Amendment in this country, the same way Europe has a very different understanding,” said David Nemer, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia who is from Brazil and has studied misinformation and the rise of the Brazilian far right. “In Brazil, hate speech is not protected.”
In Brazil, if someone posts misinformation or defamation about a candidate on social media, the country’s Supreme Electoral Court can compel them to remove it, Nemer said. During the 2022 presidential elections in Brazil, he added, “there were digital militias that orchestrated all kinds of misinformation and disinformation campaigns to delegitimize the electoral process.”
“They would say things like, ‘The voting machines were hacked, don’t trust the outcome,’” Nemer said, comparing the rhetoric to 2020 presidential election denialism in the U.S. He added that Brazil even had its own version of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the U.S., with Brazil’s Capitol uprising occurring in 2023. Some of the X accounts investigated by de Moraes belong to elected officials and prominent business leaders, not unlike how some officials and business leaders in the U.S. have pushed election denialism. But in Brazil, doing so is illegal.
“If the person doesn’t take the post down, the court will order the platform to take the post down,” Nemer said. “If the platform does not do so, then the platform becomes criminally and civilly responsible for the post as well.”
Other Brazilian experts and journalists have also spoken out against Musk’s narrative on X. Natalia Viana, co-founder of the Brazilian investigative media outlet Agência Pública, posted: “Twitter was blocked in Brazil because Brazilian law states that any Social Media company operating in Brazil has to have a legal representative in the country. Elon Musk purposefully decided not to comply. But there are laws in other countries too besides the US you know? Don’t fall for Musk’s ‘censorship’ PR Stunt.”
João Brant, Brazil’s secretary of digital policies, posted: “X/Twitter is being suspended in Brazil by court order from the Supreme Federal Court, after repeated failures to comply with judicial decisions. The suspension affects 20 million users in Brazil, but it was the measure courts understood as necessary to enforce Brazilian law.”
“The Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet states that platforms are not responsible for third-party content, but can be held liable if they fail to comply with court orders. Disregarding court orders means, in fact, complacency with crimes on the platforms,” Brant continued. “It is worth remembering that the suspension is temporary, until the company complies with the court orders, pays the fines due and designates a representative in Brazil. In other words, the reestablishment of the service depends solely on the company itself.”
Musk’s campaign against Brazil’s social media laws has operated in tandem with his support of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. Musk has claimed that if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, the U.S. could restrict speech in the ways Brazil does. The “Alexandre Files” also echoes Musk’s earlier attempts at claiming that Twitter’s previous employees worked with the Democratic Party in the U.S. to suppress conservative accounts, in a similar document dump called the “Twitter Files.”
In both cases, some of Musk’s characterizations of the documents are not accurate, but he uses his large following, the X platform itself and his supporter base to push his narrative. Nemer said that Musk and far-right politicians in Brazil are working in each other’s interests, with the politicians using X to spread disinformation and Musk potentially benefiting from their legislative power and support of his companies.
“They want Musk, somebody who is very powerful and very known, to also challenge de Moraes as a way to delegitimize de Moraes’ power,” Nemer said. “By helping these far-right politicians, Musk can rest assured that no regulation that would touch social media would pass because these politicians won’t let it.”
After Musk took over Twitter in 2022, the platform stopped its yearslong practice of publishing aggregated transparency reports for government and other legal requests it received. During his leadership, Musk has complied with a majority of takedown requests from authoritarian governments, including from India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, where some officials hold the second-largest investor stake in X.
In response to X’s ban in Brazil, Nemer said that Musk has made false statements like that Brazil is no longer a democracy, that the Supreme Electoral Court is working in tandem with President Lula da Silva, and that there is no way to challenge or appeal de Moraes’ decisions.
“He’s only doing this because he’s got the backing of these far-right politicians,” Nemer said.
Nemer also said that the “Alexandre Files” account shifted the role of X from just a publisher of user-generated content, the description under the U.S. law Section 230 that shields social media platforms from liability for what users post, to a communications platform like news organizations, which are liable for the information they disseminate.
“There seems to be a shift of paradigm here, where we’re seeing X communicating with and informing, or disinforming, the public,” Nemer said. “It’s already in trouble in Brazil. It gets the platform into some weird territory.”
While X ranked around tenth in social media platforms most used by Brazilians, Nemer said it was still useful for academics, journalists, politicians, celebrities, fandoms and more.
“Although I understand and agree with what de Moraes is doing, I’m also bummed because Twitter was an important platform for me,” he said. “No one’s really happy about it, but people who agree with Alexandre de Moraes understand that there’s an issue there of sovereignty, that Musk can’t just come and break the law and expect things to work for him no matter what.”
