Brazil, Elon Musk and the misuse of digital sovereignty

Since billionaire Elon Musk endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential race in July, X, the social media platform Musk owns, has come under even more scrutiny. Many critics have accused him of weaponising the platform for his political goals and using it to promote right-wing politicians he favours.
Amid this scrutiny, Musk’s clash with the Brazilian authorities has come to the fore. In August, a Brazilian court suspended X after its refusal to remove content and accounts that were deemed to spread “disinformation”, incitement to criminal activities and perceived threats to democracy.
Facing a nationwide ban in one of its largest markets and mounting fines, Musk eventually threw in the towel and acceded to the court’s demands.
Many on the left in Brazil, the United States and elsewhere celebrated the triumph of the Brazilian state, backing its actions in the name of “digital sovereignty” and “independence”. While I agree that outsized influence in political affairs of social media giants should be countered, the approach of the Brazilian authorities is not the way to do it. If anything, such court orders pave the way for indiscriminate state censorship of social media platforms that will do more harm than good to freedom of expression and democracy fair politics.
To be clear, X has carried out censorship in other countries before this latest controversy in Brazil, targeting individuals, political groups and movements. It is doubtful that Musk’s defiance of the Brazilian court’s order came out of concern for the wellbeing of Brazilians and their right to free speech.
Yet the censorship requests made by Brazil’s Supreme Court have also been troublesome. In April, it requested the suspension of accounts belonging to supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as part of an investigation into “digital militias” that supported attempted coup activities in January 2023. The details of this investigation have not been fully revealed.
The court has also made other requests before that do not stand up to scrutiny. Documents obtained by the Brazilian press reveal that in 2022, Supreme Justice Alexandre de Moraes had sought to block the X account of popular gospel singer Davi Sacer – a Bolsonaro supporter – for retweeting posts encouraging protests against Brazilian ministers attending a conference in New York. The same judge ordered the ban on the X accounts of the left-wing Workers’ Cause Party for criticising the Supreme Court.
Over the past few years, Moraes, a conservative who previously administered police repression in Sao Paulo, has consolidated the power to ban disfavoured speech across the Brazilian internet, as the arbiter and enforcer of which content should be removed as “disinformation”. If his campaign against free speech on social media is not reined in, there is little that will prevent him and the judiciary from expanding their censorship powers.
They may be primarily targeting the far right in Brazil right now, but this can easily change. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who backed Moraes’s actions against X, is currently facing criticism from environmental defenders and political forces to the left of him. If they organise forceful opposition to his pro-capitalist agenda, military police initiatives, and environmentally destructive policies, then we can expect they, too, will be subject to social media censorship.
As American scholar Noam Chomsky and others have documented, a capitalist media system concentrates media ownership to manufacture consent. Yet even when the corporate media suppresses important facts and perspectives, if the government supports free speech, the public still has the opportunity to expose falsehoods and express alternative opinions. In this case, dissent is marginalised, rather than banned altogether.
However, when the state gets involved, we can easily end up with full censorship of dissent. If a government assumes the role of a single arbiter and authority on “truth”, then it can use this power to silence anyone who challenges it. In this way, all media – whether traditional or social – is at risk of effectively becoming state media.
It is true that Big Social Media has too much power to shape the flow of information. Yet, upholding “digital sovereignty” and defying digital colonialism cannot mean imposing the will of the government to suppress political opposition, even if it is on the far right.
If there is indeed illegal speech on a social media platform, then it should be prosecuted in a court, where defendants receive a fair trial. “Fake news” is a real problem, but if the speech is not illegal, it’s not the business of the government to scrub it from the internet. There are other mechanisms to combat this issue.
Those of us on the left may deem Musk and the far-right politicians he backs like Bolsonaro and Trump as a threat to society and the planet, but normalising state censorship of politically disfavoured speech in the name of “digital sovereignty” sets a dangerous precedent. It creates space for this concept to be exploited to “protect society” against unpopular or controversial views.
Let us remember that we live in a world where 67 countries have anti-LGBTQ laws criminalising same-sex relations between consenting adults, while many Western “democracies” weaponise accusations of anti-Semitism to suppress the Palestinian solidarity movement. In Israel, nearly 60 percent of the population favours censoring social media posts sympathetic to the Palestinians in Gaza. Should governments have the right to censor posts about LGBTQ rights or the genocide against the Palestinian people, in the name of protecting “national security” and “democracy”?
One person’s “fake news” can be another’s “truth”, which is why states must not be given the authority to censor social media.
To oppose government overreach is not to suggest that Musk and X did not also defy the Brazilian state in ways that are highly questionable. The full story is complex and much of the detail is sealed away from the public view.
That said, there are ways to push for genuine digital sovereignty and oppose the overwhelming power wielded by Big Social Media companies that do not involve state-driven sponsorship.
Grassroots activists should press for social media decentralisation laws that mandate interoperability between and within social media networks. This would mean that any user of any social media network would be able to see and interact with the users and content published by any other network. As a result, companies like X and Meta will no longer have a monopoly on social media publishing.
Interoperability coupled with public subsidies and bans on platform-based advertising can also decommodify the social media landscape, reducing the immense profits Big Social Media is making.
A variety of independent fact-checking organisations and tools could be supported and chosen by social media platforms or their members to contain the spread of propaganda and disinformation.
Alongside these changes, the left needs a stronger vision and strategy to decolonise the global digital economy. I’ve suggested a Digital Tech Deal as a blueprint that would phase out the private ownership of the means of computation and knowledge as part of a sustainable digital degrowth agenda.
Much like the environmental crisis, the internet is largely borderless, and digital sovereignty cannot be achieved within one country. The urgent need for drastic change to the digital ecosystem requires internationalist grassroots activism that targets the American tech empire at the core, as well as the system of digital capitalism and colonialism operating in each country.
Authoritarian censorship masked as “digital sovereignty” is not the way to go.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.