Should people be able to say whatever they hell they want on social media? Brazil doesn’t think so, at least when it comes to public misinformation. While most social media platforms have bent the knee, Musk and Twitter (now X) have held out.
Unlike the US, the Brazilian govenrment enforces laws over public misinformation, which ultimatley led the courts to shut down Twitter within the country. Most social media platforms have complied with these laws, addressing any calls for violence and falsehoods within their feeds.
This is just one example of the differing global approaches in regulating freedom of speech online. Much of Europe is keeping a close eye on Brazil right now to see how this all shakes out, since they have their own issues stacking up…including that pesky app Telegram that the Russians love so much.
Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
And then there’s you.
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.
Hey everybody, Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re going to talk about social media, truth, government, Elon Musk, the right to lie, and all that good stuff. The issue of the moment is happening in Brazil, where Elon Musk and Twitter (or X, if you prefer) are in a spat with the legal system, including the government and the Supreme Court in Brazil, over social media postings. The very, very, very short version is that Brazil has laws on the books that prevent you from lying in the public sphere, unlike the United States.
They are trying to enforce those laws against Twitter. Twitter refused, at Musk’s direction, to play ball, so the Brazilian courts shut Twitter down. Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, said, “Well, I’ll just transmit it via Starlink.” So the Brazilian government started the process of shutting Starlink down. Needless to say, once his bluff was called, Musk backed down. The court cases are continuing. Musk has called his friends at the FCC (the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States) to work that angle against the Brazilian government, and that is in play as well. It’s a lot of back and forth, but let’s start with the basics.
This isn’t unique to Twitter. There are numerous social media platforms operating in Brazil. The issues the Brazilian government is concerned with involve calls for the overthrow of the government, outright lies, and calls for violence in schools. Every other media institution in Brazil complied with the government’s orders to take this stuff down.
What Elon Musk is really talking about when he mentions extreme rights to free speech is the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, regardless of the consequences. Social media is new, and so is its regulation. Every time the United States has gotten new technology for information transfer, we’ve had to build a legal structure to manage and regulate it.
If you go back to the 1800s, every political party in the United States had its own newspaper. If you think MSNBC and Fox are bad now, it’s nothing compared to what we used to put into print, with everyone just making things up about everybody else. Eventually, that got tamped down, and you had to, you know, tell the truth to some degree.
Then we got the telegraph. Suddenly, you didn’t have to wait for the morning edition—people could just type things out and send them across the country. Once again, lies, lies, lies. We got something called “yellow journalism,” which was partly why the United States got involved in the Spanish-American War.
To move from a wild west of information sharing and fabrication to something more civilized, you need some level of agreement among various factions of society. During Reconstruction and the Roaring ’20s, the United States didn’t have that. But with World War II and the dawn of the Cold War in the 1950s, we got a series of Supreme Court cases and Congressional laws that built the structure of libel and fraud laws we know today.
What we’re struggling with now in the United States is that we have those fraud and libel laws that regulate television, newspapers, and magazines, but they don’t regulate social media. Social media comes under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which says if you’re a technology platform provider, you’re not legally liable for what anyone posts on it.
We don’t have laws regulating what people post, so anyone can say whatever they want, and it can stay up for as long as they want. If someone regulates it, they’re doing it out of goodwill or because the government said, “Hey, this could kill people.”
The quintessential topic of the day is Donald Trump insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him. After four years, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee have yet to produce any evidence that the election was stolen. It’s not that evidence has been presented and found faulty; nothing has been produced at all. If you don’t believe me, go to Chris Krebs. He was in charge of maintaining election integrity under the Trump administration, and he said the 2020 elections were the cleanest in American history. Trump fired him.
Saying the election was stolen is still illegal in the United States. Repeating it as news is still legal because we haven’t built the legal structure to regulate it. At this moment in our country’s history, we’re debating a few things, so the consensus needed for new speech regulations probably won’t happen soon. That moment, however, has come and gone in Brazil.
Brazil had a military dictatorship in the latter half of the last century. Once civilian rule was reestablished, they got a new constitution, a new currency, and peaceful transfers of government. They concluded that outright lies in political discourse were bad for their society, so they regulate them.
The danger, of course, when regulating free speech is that someone must act as the arbiter of truth. Someone has to determine, on a case-by-case basis, what is factually correct and what is a flat-out lie. In Brazil’s case, since the recent issues involve calls for sedition, coups, and murder in schools, it hasn’t been hard for Brazilians to get behind this. These aren’t gray areas in the free speech debate, but you still need an arbiter of truth.
The judge involved in this case has been on the job since the “carwash scandal” years ago, where multiple Brazilian governments have tried to clean up public affairs. While it may be too strong to call this a bipartisan or multiparty effort, it does enjoy support across Brazilian society. Musk maligned this judge personally, but the ruling was appealed, the Supreme Court got involved, and it was a unanimous decision. The executive branch of the Brazilian government supports it too.
It’s hard to see the Brazilians backing down on this. Brazil is an important country in South America. What matters here is that many other countries are struggling with this topic for the same reasons. The European Union is paying close attention to what happens in Brazil because they’ve already built a digital directive. This directive gives the European Commission (their executive branch) the legal authority to create an arbiter of truth, manage social media, punish bad actors, and handle content moderation. They haven’t built that arbiter yet, but they’re watching Brazil to see what works.
It’s probably not going to be Musk and Twitter that decide this case. The first case for whatever this new authority will be is likely to involve a different platform—something called Telegram, which originates from Russia. And we’ll talk about that tomorrow.
