The all-powerful judge taking on Elon Musk
IT REQUIRES A giant ego and plenty of courage to take on Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who owns X, a social-media network that can often seem like his personal megaphone. Alexandre de Moraes, the judge who on August 30th ordered X to be blocked in Brazil, has both. Mr Musk has likened him to Darth Vader and shared an AI-generated image of the judge behind prison bars.
The ban on X partly reflects Brazil’s severe laws on speech. But it also fits a pattern of controversial decisions by Mr Moraes, known for his relentless pursuit of high-profile cases. In hyper-polarised Brazil he was once cheered as a hero by liberals for taking on Jair Bolsonaro, an autocratic former president. Now even they worry that Mr Moraes may be overreaching his judicial powers.
Mr Moraes did not always appear destined to be a target for memes from a world-famous right-wing billionaire. A former prosecutor, he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017 not by a woke liberal but by Michel Temer, a conservative president of Brazil. In a previous role Mr Moraes had dealt with a hacker attempting to blackmail Mr Temer’s wife.
The blocking of X is Mr Moraes’s most high-profile decision yet. It comes after Mr Musk refused to comply with his orders to take down accounts on X as part of an investigation into online misinformation. Instead, Mr Musk closed X’s local office. Without a legal representative in Brazil, the company is not permitted to operate there. That is a position few well-run firms would contemplate.
Nonetheless, the judge’s punitive response hardly seems proportional. He has warned that anyone logging into X by using a virtual private network (VPN)—services that make it appear as if a device is in another country—will face daily fines of up to 50,000 reais ($8,700). He also froze the Brazilian bank accounts of Starlink, a separate satellite company founded by Mr Musk, supposedly in order to collect fines levied on X of nearly 19m reais.
Part of the explanation for this draconian approach is Brazil’s interventionist laws on speech. These now seek to police “crimes against democracy”, such as falsehoods on social media that may jeopardise the electoral process, and “crimes against honour”, even when offensive messages are received in private. Although a single judge on Brazil’s 11-member Supreme Court can make binding decisions, these are sometimes reviewed by the full or partial bench. On September 2nd a panel of five judges including Mr Moraes upheld his rulings on X with small modifications.
Yet Brazil’s laws are only half the story. Mr Moraes also has form: he is a man who likes and understands power. He has extensive contacts in the police, military and intelligence services. “Alexandre is a sherifão,” says a source close to the judge, using slang for “super sheriff”. “If you put a problem in front of him, he will go to the ends of the earth to complete his mission.”
His most celebrated moment involved confronting Mr Bolsonaro. When the covid-19 pandemic struck, Mr Bolsonaro supported quack cures. Before the presidential election in 2022 he spread lies that voting machines were rigged. On January 8th last year, one week after Mr Bolsonaro’s opponent was inaugurated, bolsonaristas ransacked Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court. Mr Moraes opened a probe against the rioters. In 2023 an electoral tribunal that he presided over barred Mr Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years for spreading falsehoods about voting machines.
Other campaigns have made the court look authoritarian. In 2019 Mr Moraes was put in charge of investigating misinformation about the Supreme Court and threats against the court’s members. These had spiked after the election of Mr Bolsonaro. The “fake news” inquiry was contentious from the start. Normally investigations are opened by the public prosecutor or the police. By giving itself the power to initiate investigations the Supreme Court became victim, prosecutor and judge all at once. No time limit was set, there is no legal definition for disinformation in Brazil and Mr Moraes has not made public which accounts he has ordered to be shut and why. He later opened a related inquiry into “digital militias”, a worryingly woolly term.
Some decisions seem even harder to defend. In 2019 Crusoé, an investigative outlet, published an article suggesting that another Supreme Court judge was mentioned in emails from 2007 about a corrupt permit for a dam. Mr Moraes deemed the article “fake news” and ordered it to be taken down. Only after public outcry was the order reversed. In another case, businessmen who exchanged loose but passive talk about preferring a coup to the main left-wing party on a private WhatsApp chat had their homes raided, their bank accounts frozen and their social-media accounts suspended.
Mr Moraes is undoubtedly brave. As the public face of the crusade against bolsonarista fanatics, he has received numerous death threats. Yet today there is a wider sense that his mission has veered off track. In December 2022 almost a third of Brazilians said the court did a “good” or “excellent” job. In May only 14% did. Pushback is mounting. The day he shut X Mr Moraes demanded that Apple and Google prohibit downloads of X and VPNs, but revoked the order hours later after a public outcry.
Luiz Augusto D’Urso of the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a university in São Paulo, calls the VPN order “absurd”. The decision to freeze Starlink’s assets “violates the fundamental rights” of the firm, says Ricardo Sayeg, a lawyer. Many farmers and soldiers depend on Starlink for internet in remote areas. The takedown of X and Mr Musk’s angry response is stirring up Brazil’s hard right, which feels that it is persecuted. Mr Moraes’s legacy may be to strengthen the very elements he sought to curb. ■
Correction (September 4th 2024): Alexandre de Moraes was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2017, not 2016 as we originally wrote. This has been corrected.
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