The decision of Brazil’s Supreme Court to ban the popular social media platform X (formerly Twitter) is a milestone in the saga of worldwide attempts to rein in the so-called digital town square that is shaping contemporary public life and civic discourse. That X has been blocked entirely in the world’s fourth-largest democracy, where it had 22 million daily active users, is a sign that free societies are increasingly being forced to grapple with a dilemma hitherto believed to be confined to dictatorships — how much freedom of expression should be allowed before it upends public interest and order?
Predictably, X has been proscribed in China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela, which rank among the lowest in the world in civil and political liberties. But when democratic Brazil resorts to a shutdown on grounds that X is not removing accounts that spread hatred, conspiracy theories and misinformation, it calls for a deeper introspection as to whether transnational social media giants have overstepped limits.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who issued the ruling to ban X in Brazil, has targeted its billionaire owner Elon Musk for confusing “freedom of expression with freedom of aggression.” Brazilian president Lula da Silva’s taunt that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s far-Right ideology just because he is rich reflects the socialist Brazilian government’s view that unfettered digital freedom is being misappropriated by extreme Right wing elements such as the mobs that attacked the country’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in 2023 to trigger a regime overthrow and reinstate former president Jair Bolsonaro.
X’s closure in Brazil is inseparable from the politics of Musk, a flamboyant larger-than-life personality who has picked fights with figures on the Left of the spectrum such as Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, United States (US) president Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris. Musk’s global ego tussles have rubbed many the wrong way and raised red flags about whether X is truly a “politically neutral” bastion of free speech, as he has claimed, or if it is being weaponised for pushing libertarian values and Rightist ideological hegemony.
Musk’s endorsement of former US president Donald Trump (whose own X account had been blocked in 2021 but restored in 2022 after Musk bought the company) has made him a darling of the Right wing. The fact that tens of thousands of supporters of the “Trump of the tropics”, Bolsonaro, have been protesting X’s ban in Brazil and lionising Musk as a “superhero” and a “saviour of their country from communism”, shows how far the world’s richest man has waded into domestic politics of different countries. Using the bullhorn of his 197 million followers on X, Musk has become too big and too loudly partisan, with a keen sense of his own power to shake up global public opinion.
Still, X is complying with local laws, regulations and orders in most countries that it operates in. Also, X’s 600 million or so monthly active users hail from all kinds of political leanings, and no single faction or camp can easily prevail or silence its opponents on the platform. The question of which side is “trending” or winning on any particular heated topic is still an open and contested one on X.
But given the capacity of some ideological forces to organise and propagate their views more effectively on social media, the inbuilt algorithmic bias in social media applications that favours extreme and violent content, and Musk’s own polarising interventions, X has a serious credibility problem.
Ignoring X is not an option in today’s world, where vast numbers of netizens say that social media is their primary source of news and information. The sheer size and cascading impact that social media giants have in setting the narrative and moulding people’s minds demand that they be regulated and held responsible for the content pouring out of their accounts.
The usual excuse of libertarian digital moguls like Musk or Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, who was detained in France for non-compliance with local laws, is that content moderation is censorship that deprives netizens from accessing diverse viewpoints. But X and Telegram are raking in massive revenues, and given the global systemic influence that they are exercising, they must be held accountable.
Even in India, authorities have had multiple run-ins with X about objectionable content on issues such as the farmers’ protests, the coronavirus pandemic and terrorist propaganda. Unlike Brazil, however, India managed to leash X and other big American social media companies through an array of densely technical rules, judgments and law enforcement actions.
Musk’s willingness to comply with India’s persistent pressure regarding dangerous content on X has been critiqued by internet freedom advocates as a sellout. But the bottom line is that India’s less overzealous regulatory approach has ensured that the approximately 26 million Indian users of X have not been deprived of the platform. Unlike angry Brazilians, whose X apps have all gone blank, Indians can access their virtual public square unimpeded.
The conduct of X and Musk is indeed problematic and it must be tamed, if not reformed. However, the Brazilian method is crude and counterproductive. The subtler Indian strategy is actually the template that other democracies should emulate as they contemplate how to regulate the digital masters of the universe.
Sreeram Chaulia is dean, Jindal School of International Affairs. The views expressed are personal
