On Monday, the legal representatives of X (formerly known as Twitter) in Brazil announced that the social-media platform and its owner, Elon Musk, would comply with orders from the country’s judiciary to block accounts accused of spreading fake news and hate speech. The announcement marks the anticlimactic resolution of a weeks-long feud between the Tesla boss and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Musk’s capitulation is just the latest reminder of the gap between his free-speech rhetoric and his actual commitments.
As the conflict between X and Moraes escalated, the anti-woke journalist Michael Shellenberger published a series of internal X documents he dubbed the “Twitter Files Brazil.” Much like the original Twitter Files, which Shellenberger helped divulge, the Brazilian iteration details the collaboration between the social-media giant under its prior ownership and Brazilian authorities in cracking down against speech—in this case, mostly that of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Moraes opened a federal inquiry into Musk after the billionaire threatened to reactivate accounts that were previously blocked on X. Musk responded by taunting the black-robed Moraes as Brazil’s Darth Vader and decrying the country’s pervasive regime of censorship.