How not to counter the political sway of Elon Musk’s X | Social Media
Since billionaire Elon Musk endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential race in July, X, the social media platform Musk owns, has come underneath much more scrutiny. Many critics have accused him of weaponising the platform for his political targets and utilizing it to promote right-wing politicians he favours.
Amid this scrutiny, Musk’s conflict with the Brazilian authorities has come to the fore. In August, a Brazilian court docket suspended X after its refusal to take away content material and accounts that have been deemed to unfold “disinformation”, incitement to felony actions and perceived threats to democracy.
Going through a nationwide ban in a single of its largest markets and mounting fines, Musk finally threw in the towel and acceded to the court docket’s calls for.
Many on the left in Brazil, the United States and elsewhere celebrated the triumph of the Brazilian state, backing its actions in the identify of “digital sovereignty” and “independence”. Whereas I agree that oversized affect in political affairs of social media giants needs to be countered, the strategy of the Brazilian authorities is not the method to do it. If something, such court docket orders pave the method for indiscriminate state censorship of social media platforms that can do extra hurt than good to freedom of expression and democracy honest politics.
State censorship
To be clear, X has carried out censorship in different nations earlier than this newest controversy in Brazil, focusing on people, political teams and actions. It’s uncertain that Musk’s defiance of the Brazilian court docket’s order got here out of concern for the wellbeing of Brazilians and their proper to free speech.
But the censorship requests made by Brazil’s Supreme Court docket have additionally been troublesome. In April, it requested the suspension of accounts belonging to supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as half of an investigation into “digital militias” that supported tried coup actions in January 2023. The small print of this investigation have not been absolutely revealed.
The court docket has additionally made different requests earlier than that do not arise to scrutiny. Paperwork obtained by the Brazilian press reveal that in 2022, Supreme Justice Alexandre de Moraes had sought to block the X account of fashionable gospel singer Davi Sacer – a Bolsonaro supporter – for retweeting posts encouraging protests in opposition to Brazilian ministers attending a convention in New York. The identical choose ordered the ban on the X accounts of the left-wing Employees’ Trigger Get together for criticising the Supreme Court docket.
Over the previous few years, Moraes, a conservative who beforehand administered police repression in Sao Paulo, has consolidated the energy to ban disfavoured speech throughout the Brazilian web, as the arbiter and enforcer of which content material needs to be eliminated as “disinformation”. If his marketing campaign in opposition to free speech on social media is not reined in, there may be little that can forestall him and the judiciary from increasing their censorship powers.
They could be primarily focusing on the far proper in Brazil proper now, however this could simply change. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who backed Moraes’s actions in opposition to X, is at the moment dealing with criticism from environmental defenders and political forces to the left of him. In the event that they organise forceful opposition to his pro-capitalist agenda, army police initiatives, and environmentally damaging insurance policies, then we are able to count on they, too, will likely be topic to social media censorship.
Free speech is critical for democracy
As American scholar Noam Chomsky and others have documented, a capitalist media system concentrates media possession to manufacture consent. But even when the company media suppresses vital info and views, if the authorities helps free speech, the public nonetheless has the alternative to expose falsehoods and specific various opinions. On this case, dissent is marginalised, moderately than banned altogether.
However, when the state will get concerned, we are able to simply find yourself with full censorship of dissent. If a authorities assumes the position of a single arbiter and authority on “truth”, then it might probably use this energy to silence anybody who challenges it. On this method, all media – whether or not conventional or social – is in danger of successfully changing into state media.
It’s true that Large Social Media has an excessive amount of energy to form the stream of info. But, upholding “digital sovereignty” and defying digital colonialism can’t imply imposing the will of the authorities to suppress political opposition, even whether it is on the far proper.
If there may be certainly unlawful speech on a social media platform, then it needs to be prosecuted in a court docket, the place defendants obtain a good trial. “Fake news” is an actual drawback, but when the speech is not unlawful, it’s not the enterprise of the authorities to scrub it from the web. There are different mechanisms to fight this challenge.
These of us on the left might deem Musk and the far-right politicians he backs like Bolsonaro and Trump as a menace to society and the planet, however normalising state censorship of politically disfavoured speech in the identify of “digital sovereignty” units a harmful precedent. It creates house for this idea to be exploited to “protect society” in opposition to unpopular or controversial views.
Allow us to keep in mind that we reside in a world the place 67 nations have anti-LGBTQ legal guidelines criminalising same-sex relations between consenting adults, whereas many Western “democracies” weaponise accusations of anti-Semitism to suppress the Palestinian solidarity motion. In Israel, almost 60 % of the inhabitants favours censoring social media posts sympathetic to the Palestinians in Gaza. Ought to governments have the proper to censor posts about LGBTQ rights or the genocide in opposition to the Palestinian folks, in the identify of defending “national security” and “democracy”?
One particular person’s “fake news” might be one other’s “truth”, which is why states should not be given the authority to censor social media.
Digital sovereignty from under
To oppose authorities overreach is not to counsel that Musk and X did not additionally defy the Brazilian state in methods which are highly questionable. The complete story is complicated and far of the element is sealed away from the public view.
That mentioned, there are methods to push for real digital sovereignty and oppose the overwhelming energy wielded by Large Social Media firms that do not contain state-driven sponsorship.
Grassroots activists ought to press for social media decentralisation legal guidelines that mandate interoperability between and inside social media networks. This may imply that any consumer of any social media community would have the opportunity to see and work together with the customers and content material revealed by some other community. Consequently, firms like X and Meta will not have a monopoly on social media publishing.
Interoperability coupled with public subsidies and bans on platform-based promoting may decommodify the social media panorama, decreasing the immense earnings Large Social Media is making.
A range of impartial fact-checking organisations and instruments might be supported and chosen by social media platforms or their members to comprise the unfold of propaganda and disinformation.
Alongside these adjustments, the left wants a stronger imaginative and prescient and technique to decolonise the international digital financial system. I’ve advised a Digital Tech Deal as a blueprint that may section out the personal possession of the means of computation and information as half of a sustainable digital degrowth agenda.
Very similar to the environmental disaster, the web is essentially borderless, and digital sovereignty can’t be achieved inside one nation. The pressing want for drastic change to the digital ecosystem requires internationalist grassroots activism that targets the American tech empire at the core, in addition to the system of digital capitalism and colonialism working in every nation.
Authoritarian censorship masked as “digital sovereignty” is not the method to go.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and do not essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.