How Brazil’s Experiment Fighting Fake News Led to a Ban on X
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, on Thursday in Brasília. Justice Moraes has sweeping powers to police content on Brazil’s internet. Photo by Ton Molina, NurPhoto/Getty Images
The New York Times
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 and then closed X’s office in Brazil. 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.
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