“Why do you demand so much censorship in Brazil?”

Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of the social network X (formerly Twitter), asked Alexandre de Moraes, minister of the Federal Supreme Court and president of the Superior Electoral Court, why he “demands so much censorship in Brazil”. The publication was made in the early hours of Saturday, the 6th, in response to a post by the minister dated January 11, in which Moraes congratulated his former STF colleague Ricardo Lewandowski on his appointment as Minister of Justice and Public Security in the Lula government.

The billionaire, who has made several demonstrations in defense of freedom of expression, including financing the defense of social media users who suffered some type of reprisal for expressing opinions on the network, handed over to journalist Michael Shellenberger internal emails from the company in Brazil, in a new round of what became known as “Twitter Files”. The material was released by Shellenberger, in collaboration with People’s Gazette, last Wednesday: in the emails, legal consultants question demands from the TSE and other courts and bodies, such as the Public Ministry, which contradict Brazilian legislation, including the Marco Civil da Internet, and which would constitute, in the opinion of lawyers, “evidence fishing” and “violation of privacy”. In one case, for example, authorities asked for data from users who had posted hashtags in defense of the auditable printed vote.

Musk has recently spoken out regarding the trials of January 8 defendants and other attacks on freedom of expression in Brazil. A few days after the invasion of the headquarters of the three powers, the billionaire responded to a series of tweets from Glenn Greenwald about Moraes’ decisions to suspend profiles on social networks. In March of this year, he considered the 17-year sentence imposed on a motorcycle courier trapped in one of the National Congesso towers to be “much higher than the crime”.