Brazil judge wrangling with Elon Musk has long battled social media
SÃO PAULO—Before his weekend showdown with tech billionaire Elon Musk, Brazil’s Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes had already earned a reputation as a lightning rod in Brazil’s battles over free speech. In recent years, de Moraes has slapped fines and bans on social-media companies and ordered police to investigate—and even arrest—some of the country’s most powerful conservative bloggers, businessmen and politicians over what he deemed offensive online posts.
Now the court’s order to block a swath of X accounts has sparked fresh debate, with critics on the right, including many legal experts, saying de Moraes has gone too far. They argue his crusade to clean up the internet in the name of safeguarding democracy is arbitrary and repressive, and that the biggest risk to democracy in Brazil could be the Supreme Court.
Musk appears to think so. On Monday, he said de Moraes had given X two hours to suspend a series of high-profile accounts from the platform, formerly known as Twitter, which the tech magnate acquired in 2022.
“We were being given demands to suspend sitting members of the parliament and major journalists, and moreover we could not tell them that this was at the behest of Alexandre de Moraes and we had to pretend that it was due to our rules of service," said Musk during a podcast. “That was the final straw and we said no," he said, describing the order in another post as “the most draconian demands of any country on Earth." Musk has called for de Moraes’s removal and has goaded him online in recent days, referring to the judge as “Brazil’s Darth Vader" and likening his powers to those of a “brutal dictator." Supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, who gave Musk a medal during his visit
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