As you probably have heard or read the previous news about Pavel Durov’s arrest in France, the Telegram CEO, now comes threats to Elon Musk’s platform “X” when over the last 24 hours X" formerly known as Twitter, has been forced to go offline in Brazil due to a recent Judge’s demand that Musk appoint a legal representative in the country to address the many posts by people protesting the last elections in the country.
Musk has simply refused to comply with the Judge’s order and accused him of violating the tenets of free speech when it came to the usage of his platform to criticize political figures opposed to recent prime minister Jair Bolsonaro’s claim that the last elections were rigged and rife with corruption. Hmm? Where did we hear that before?
What does this mean in the bigger picture? Its pretty clear that any social media platform committed to protecting free speech and exposing the dark under currents of today’s Tyrannical governments world wide bent on having total control on main stream narratives, then they will use their political power to go after the likes of Durov and Musk, and this latest example is precisely that and nothing to do with addressing violent hate speech or undermining a country’s laws and everything to do with squashing free speech altogether.
This my friends is part of the war that is being fought over to ensure that ordinary people have access to the truth and can express their opinions freely without the overreach of such thugs masquerading as prominent judges like Alexandre de Moraes. If you google his name you will see images of him in voldemart pomp who projects as someone who is drunk with power and not ethically aligned to protect such individual rights but someone who seeks absolute power akin to a modern day Hitler. It remains to be seen how both Durov’s case and how Musk navigates through these treacherous waters where we are fast approaching a major election that will have major reverberations all over the world, including protecting free speech at all costs.
The banning of X, which has more than 22 million users in Brazil, is the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country’s top court and the rightwing tech billionaire.
Alexandre de Moraes, the influential supreme court judge responsible for the ban, had been spearheading an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of the January 2023 uprising in the capital, Brasília, carried out by supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
Musk, who has aligned himself with rightwing figures including Bolsonaro and his US ally Donald Trump, pushed back, accusing Moraes of squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views. Musk’s public attacks on Moraes – many of them infantile and vulgar – were reminiscent of his repeated online digs at the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, during the recent far-right UK riots, which X’s owner was accused of inflaming.
The final straw before X’s blocking in Brazil came on Thursday, when Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline to name a new legal representative after the social media platform closed its local office in mid-August. In Friday’s ruling ordering the ban, Moraes accused X of treating the social network “like a no man’s land – a veritable land without law” by allowing the “massive propagation” of misinformation, hate speech and anti-democratic attacks.
Hours later, at shortly after midnight local time, Brazilian users began noticing that X had expired.
Musk ramped up his attacks on Moraes, calling the judge “Voldemort” and tweeting a meme of a dog dangling its scrotum in the face of another animal.
Credit: The Guardian
Another article by the Washington Post offers a deeper perspective on this issue. Read it with filters and ignore the digs to the obvious usual conservative pejoratives and biases. The post is a CIA publication with intent to spread propaganda with an agenda.
