Billionaire Elon Musk joined this week a campaign led by the Brazilian far-right to characterize Brazil as a dictatorship — an effort to discredit the ongoing investigations into an attempted coup orchestrated by former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Mr. Musk’s businesses, such as Tesla and Starlink, inspire huge interest in Brazil, and his recent threat to disobey Brazilian court decisions also fits into his longstanding crusade against regulations to fight disinformation.
As The Brazilian Report showed last month, a group of far-right pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers visited Washington D.C. and met with U.S. Congressman Chris Smith, a member of the Republican Party. In a press conference held outside the U.S. Capitol, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, the former president’s third-eldest son, declared: “Brazil, unfortunately, is not a democracy anymore.”
A week later, in Brazil’s House of Representatives, his ally Congressman Gustavo Gayer made a pledge: “The world will know that Brazil is a dictatorship.”
Mr. Musk parroted those talking points on Monday by saying on X, the media platform he owns: “How did [Supreme Court Justice] Alexandre de Moraes become the dictator of Brazil?”
Justice Moraes has been a lightning rod for Brazil’s far-right vitriol for years. Since 2022, he has also held the rotating presidency of the Superior Electoral Court. One of his first initiatives as the main referee of Brazil’s elections was to create an “intelligence center” to combat electoral violence.
Two months later, during the runoff, he spearheaded a resolution granting the Superior Electoral Court more powers in its fight against electoral disinformation, such as the ability to order social media platforms and websites to remove content without the need for a specific request from a prosecutor or plaintiff, providing said posts were identical to content banned in a previous decision.
The resolution went against the judiciary’s design as a responsive rather than proactive branch of government, an on-brand move for Justice Moraes.
For over five years, Justice Moraes has also been the rapporteur of the so-called “Fake News inquiry,” which has no clear object and has been used for different purposes, including censoring stories in press outlets and suspending an investigation by Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service concerning a different justice.
Twitter Files Brazil
The dispute between Mr. Musk and Justice Moraes began last week after U.S. journalist Michael Shellenberger posted a thread called “Twitter Files Brazil.”
After buying Twitter late in 2022, Mr. Musk allowed journalists to dig into the company’s internal communications from the pre-Musk era — the so-called “Twitter Files.” The results were not...
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