In a newly released interim report, Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government accuse the Biden administration of being suspiciously “silent” in the face of draconian attacks on free speech abroad.
The Select Subcommittee said it has received troubling testimony about government censorship in Canada, France, and most recently Brazil.
Brazil’s authoritarian censorship regime stems from the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision in 2019 to grant itself new powers to “ act as an investigator, prosecutor and judge all at once in some cases,” the report states.
🚨 BOMBSHELL: Brazilian Government Forced Censorship on X, @elonmusk
Read about it here: https://t.co/YAnQesOiXV
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) April 17, 2024
XCorp. announced Monday that the company had been formally subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee to provide information on the Brazilian Supreme Court’s orders regarding content moderation.
Wednesday night, the House Judiciary Committee released over 500 pages of confidential Brazilian court documents related to the regime’s censorship demands on X.
The documents show how Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes demanded permanent bans on over 150 elected officials and journalists.
Rather than relying on a prosecutor or a law enforcement officer to open an investigation, the president of Brazil’s Supreme Court, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, “issued an order granting the Supreme Court itself the authority to open an investigation.”
Former Brazilian Supreme Court justices openly criticized the move as unprecedented and in violation of Brazil’s constitution.
In his unprecedented order, Toffoli selected fellow Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to run the first investigation conducted by the court.
Moraes first joined the Supreme Federal Court in 2017. Moraes has been described as a “political animal” with hopes of being president of Brazil someday.
This is Judge @alexandre.
He is currently targeting @elonmusk after @X refused to suspend accounts of conservative influencers and politicians opposed to @LulaOficial.
Historically, dictatorships begin with lawfare waged on free speech/ free press.
What will happen to Brazil? pic.twitter.com/XCto3olXfv— Bree A Dail (@breeadail) April 18, 2024
Moraes has also served as president of the Superior Electoral Court since August 2022.
The Superior Electoral Court is the highest court in Brazil that oversees the country’s electoral processes and is frequently the court that issues orders compelling the censorship of alleged misinformation about elections.
Moraes has used “these new, extraordinary powers” to censor regime critics, the Select Subcommittee reported, and Elon Musk’s X refused to go along with the program.
The committee’s investigation found that Brazil’s government directed X to shut down hundreds of accounts that are critical of the Brazilian government.
The accounts targeted, according to the report, include members of the regime’s political opposition, including former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro; conservative journalists and commentators; a former judge; a public prosecutor; a gospel singer and a pop radio station.
When Musk resisted, Moraes threatened to entail a fine of $20,000 per day for every banned person X platformed.
XCorp said that because the company was threatened with not only fines but the arrest of employees, it was forced to shut down in Brazil.
According to the report, the Brazilian government justified its heavy-handed crackdown on speech in the name of stopping so-called “hate” speech and the “subversion” of “order.”
“We believe that such orders are not in accordance with the Marco Civil da Internet or the Brazilian Federal Constitution, and we challenge the orders legally where possible,” X’s Global Government Affairs team posted on April 6. “The people of Brazil, regardless of their political beliefs, are entitled to freedom of speech, due process, and transparency from their own authorities.”
Brazil’s censorship actions “violate Brazilian law,” Musk argued on X.
The censorship actions against elected representatives demanded by @alexandre violate Brazilian law https://t.co/7GfwjrOuJL
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 18, 2024
The Subcommittee noted in its report that the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights exists to “ advance the security of the American people by assisting countries around the world to build more democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.”
Yet, the Department, and Under Secretary Uzra Zeya, has been “noticeably silent as Brazil and other countries have sought to censor speech online.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Zeya, asking him to weigh in on the issue.
“Free speech, including free speech on digital platforms, is a fundamental and necessary part of democratic and just societies.” the letter states. It asks for the department to hand over documents on any social media censorship request from the Brazilian government “to understand what the State Department is doing to promote online free speech in Brazil and to protect against tyrannical censorship abroad.”
“Government-directed censorship is not a problem contained only to authoritarian governments in faraway lands; it is happening here in the United States,” the Subcommittee declared in its report.
When Musk took over Twitter (now X) in 2022, he “faced criticism and attacks from governments around the world, including the United States” because of his public commitment to free speech, the report says.
“Under the Biden Administration, censorship demands are delivered in closed-door meetings with implicit regulatory threats, on top of lawfare for political opponents,” the report continues. “Now, more than ever, Congress must act to uphold its duty to protect free expression.”
The Judiciary Committee’s and Weaponization Subcommittee said their findings of the Biden regime’s attacks on free speech reveal how the the United States, like Brazil, has sought to silence regime critics.
On just its third day of the new Administration, the Biden White House demanded that Twitter remove Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s tweet that contained no misinformation “ASAP” and urged Twitter to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”
Turning its attention to Facebook, the Biden Administration demanded that the company censor one of its top critics on cable television, Tucker Carlson, even though his reporting was truthful and did not violate Facebook’s standards.
Unsatisfied with going after social media companies, the Biden White House even turned its attention to book stores, pressuring Amazon to censor books expressing skepticism of vaccines.
The report also pointed to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was created at the request of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity & Infrastructure, as another example of the regime’s ongoing campaign against free speech.
The report stated that it is “perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Biden Administration seems to have been silent in the face of these free speech attacks abroad,”
The Subcommittee urged Congress to take seriously “the warnings from Brazil and other countries seeking to suppress speech online.”
“We must never think that it cannot happen here,” the report said.
In response to the “relentless attacks on free speech,” Musk vowed in a pinned post on X, “to fund a national signature campaign in support of the First Amendment.”