Elon Musk is mixing in politics again.
The Tesla and SpaceX billionaire has threatened to disobey an order by Brazil’s top court to suspend the accounts of prominent users accused of spreading fake news on X, his social media platform.
The self-assigned crusader of free speech said he would reinstate all suspended profiles, which prompted the justice overseeing fake news investigations, Alexandre de Moraes, to open a probe into him as well.
In taking on Brazil’s Supreme Court, Musk aligns himself not only with far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro — who’s also being investigated for allegedly spreading misinformation about the electoral system and then planning a coup d’etat — but also with critics who charge the court with overstepping its reach.
It’s part of a pattern for Musk. He disavows politics, but his free-speech interventions are frequently political, from his tussles with a Jewish civil rights group that led to accusations of anti-semitism to his comments on right-wing extremism in Germany.
Brazil’s top court is indeed a highly political institution. Just ask President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was arrested for corruption in 2018 with the court’s tacit agreement, only to have its same justices change the rules that kept him in jail and eventually annul his convictions — putting him in a position to successfully challenge Bolsonaro.
Musk, who has reinstated numerous X accounts that had been removed for misinformation, is now up against justices with firm ideas about the destabilizing impact fake news can have on democracies.
Their conviction only grew after Bolsonaro’s supporters, riled by falsehoods spread by the conservative leader and his allies, rampaged through government buildings in Brasilia last year, attempting to overturn the election result.
The Supreme Court was among their targets.
Musk may have just picked a fight he’s unlikely to win. — Walter Brandimarte