One example of the waning support for free speech around the world is a recent public letter from academics and writers from several countries supporting the Brazilian government in its fight to ban social media platform X and punish Brazilians who evade restrictions. It’s not surprising that intellectuals support authoritarianism – many do, and in most cases. But it’s disappointing to see prominent figures among their ranks, including one known as a civil rights activist.

Brazil’s war of words

For those who haven’t been following the drama, X and its CEO Elon Musk are embroiled in a dispute with Brazil’s Supreme Court, and specifically with Judge Alexandre de Moraes, over the extent to which the social media platform should censor “disinformation” – particularly from accounts linked to the political opposition. The court banned X after refusing to appoint a new legal representative after the previous one resigned and faced threats of arrest.

Demand for virtual private network (VPN) software increased by 1,600 percent in Brazil following the ban, presumably to circumvent the government-imposed blockade. This is remarkable considering that circumventing restrictions on the use of X is punishable by fines of almost $9,000 per day.

X then revamped its servers so that the service is once again accessible to Brazilians. Moraes and his company threatened X – and Starlink, which is also owned by Musk – with penalties if they defied the blockade. And that is the current state of affairs in the efforts of the government of a nominally free country to control what its citizens can say online and ban an entire platform if it doesn’t play along.

Freedom of expression as an international conspiracy

The open letter supporting the Brazilian government’s efforts (here in Portuguese; thanks to Tyler Cowen for pointing it out) is written in a remarkably conspiratorial tone, accusing tech companies and their political allies (in English translation) of undermining Brazil’s plans for “digital independence” and of engaging in “attempts to limit the ability of sovereign states to set a digital development agenda free from the control of U.S. megacorporations.”

According to the signatories, the Brazilian state intends to “force big tech companies to pay fair taxes, comply with local laws and hold them accountable for the social consequences of their business models, which often promote violence and inequality.” They claim that “these efforts have been met with attacks from X’s owners and right-wing politicians who complain about democracy and freedom of expression.”

Well, the measures taken by the Brazilian government Do is raising concerns about the health of democracy and free speech in the country – and not just among the right. Observers have been concerned about the Brazilian government’s handling of free speech and dissent long before X and Elon Musk intervened.

Warnings of authoritarian regime have come true

Judge Moraes “has imprisoned people without trial for posting threats on social media; he helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; he has ordered raids on businessmen despite little evidence of wrongdoing; he has suspended an elected governor from office; and he has unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of social media posts with virtually no transparency or opportunity for appeal,” noted Jack Nicas for The New York Times in 2023.

In May 2023, Christopher Hernandez-Roy and Michael McKenna of the Center for Strategic and International Studies warned that “Brazil’s misguided censorship policies threaten to stifle free speech for the sake of disinformation.” They asked skeptically “whether governments should impose restrictions on speech that are content- or opinion-based.”

After Brazil’s Supreme Court banned X and threatened penalties for Brazilians who use the service anyway, Sarah McLaughlin of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression bluntly concluded: “These measures pose a serious threat to Brazilians’ rights to freely express themselves and access information online.” She puts Brazil’s censorship efforts in the context of similar efforts at the UN, France, India, Russia, Iran and elsewhere.

Freedom of expression threatened everywhere

Unfortunately, freedom of expression is under threat all over the world, even in supposedly free countries.

“Dramatic erosion of freedom of expression in democracies is not an isolated case,” The Future of Free Speech found in its 2023 report. The crisis of free expression hits us hard. “They are part of a broader and global recession in free expression that has struck at the heart of free speech in open democracies and threatens to roll back hard-won freedoms.” The report tracks “free expression trends in 22 open democracies,” including Australia, Canada, France, South Korea, the United States and the entire European Union.

The signatories of the open letter seem to be saying: “More of this, please!”

“All defenders of democratic values ​​must support Brazil in its quest for digital sovereignty,” they write, insisting that Big Tech’s resistance to Brazil’s censorship efforts “undermines not only the rights of Brazilian citizens but also the broader aspirations of all democratic nations to achieve technological sovereignty.”

“Technological sovereignty” here is a euphemism for government control of online discourse at the expense of individuals’ freedom to disagree with and criticize the officials who rule over them.

The signatories include prominent figures such as economists Daron Acemoglu, Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty. The most surprising name, however, is that of Cory Doctorow, a writer and thinker who has long been associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is the author of anti-authoritarian novels. His book Hometown won the 2014 Prometheus Award for Best Novel from the Libertarian Futurist Society.

Why did a man who has seen government at its worst and written novels riddled with abuses of power put his name to a document supporting the state’s authority to censor online speech and punish online speakers? I emailed Doctorow this question. He did not respond.

So I can only speculate that Doctorow and his colleagues have joined the many people in historically liberal societies who have decided that free speech is more trouble than it’s worth. All over the world, and not just in Brazil, governments are arrogating to themselves the power to decide what counts as unacceptable “disinformation” and who should be punished for speaking their minds.

This erosion of the individual’s fundamental right to freedom of expression is lamented by far too many supposed thinkers.