Brazil’s Crackdown On X Should Be Warning Sign For All Americans, Legal Group Warns

Alliance Defending Freedom on Saturday filed a petition in support of X, formerly known as Twitter after a Brazilian judge ruled the social media platform should be banned in the country.

Last week, Federal Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ruled that X should be banned in Brazil because the company did not comply with his order to appoint a legal representative for Brazil or suspend a number of accounts. Musk has refused to comply with government demands, promising to protect the free speech of X users. People in Brazil who try to access X through other means, like a VPN, could face daily fines of nearly $9,000. 

In response, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a petition asking the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene on behalf of X as it is blocked. The commission has jurisdiction over Brazil under the American Convention. 

“It’s concerning that governments across the Western legal tradition are starting to look at these companies as avenues to censor rather than benefits to humankind,” ADF SVP of Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco told The Daily Wire on Tuesday. “You really can’t truly be free, you can’t live in a democracy, and you can’t enjoy freedom unless you have free speech as an underlying foundation of your society.”

Tedesco said that the situation in Brazil should concern all Americans because “the exact same impulse to censor exists in our own government.” 

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He pointed to the FBI recommending censorship of stories on Hunter Biden’s laptop, as well as the Biden administration’s efforts to censor information on COVID. Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a letter saying that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly asked him to censor posts about COVID on his platforms. 

Tedesco praised Musk for “standing in the gap,” saying that he was helping to expose government efforts to use corporations to censor speech they didn’t like.

“Every American should be concerned, and not just for themselves and their ideological outlook, for any American regardless of their beliefs if we end up in a place where the government feels like it can get away with that kind of jawboning and pressuring of private corporations to do their censorship bidding,” he said. 

The decision to suspend access to X was upheld on Monday by a panel of judges on the Brazilian Supreme Court.