Musk v. Brazil's Supreme Court, explained

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I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice that the number of posts at the top of my X feed from a certain Elon Musk have increased massively since he bought the company. And so I kind of felt I knew a lot about the current fight he is having with Brazil’s Supreme Court, what with the frequency that he posts about it.

But at the same time, what did I know? Musk’s mini-missives on the matter – which consist largely of insults, complaints and barbs directed at Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes – told me nothing substantive about what was actually going on. And that is where today’s piece from Yasmin Curzi, a digital law expert at Rio de Janeiro’s FGV Law School and University of Virginia research associate, comes in.

Curzi takes a look at Brazil’s decade-long effort to regulate social media platforms – a task made all the more difficult by the barrage of disinformation surrounding the 2022 election and subsequent storming of Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and the presidential palace in January 2023. The judicial inquiries following that attack on democratic institutions led, via Musk’s refusal to play ball, to the banning of X.

But as Curzi writes, this is more than a bitter personal feud. It “raises important questions about platform regulation and how to combat disinformation while protecting free speech. And while the focus is on Brazil and Musk, it is a debate being echoed around the world.”

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