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Elon Musk’s Commencement Speech at Caltech (Full Transcript)

• December 28, 2018 4:28 am September 20, 2023 6:11 am
• by Pangambam S
• Life Advice

Here is the full transcript (Edited version) and summary of Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Commencement Speech titled “ Magicians of the 21st Century ” at Caltech. The event occurred on Friday, June 15, 2012.

Listen to the MP3 audio:

TRANSCRIPT: 

Elon Musk – Tesla CEO

I’d like to thank you for leaving ‘crazy person’ out of the introduction.

So I thought — I was trying to think what’s the most useful thing that I – what I can say that can actually be helpful and useful to you in the future.

And I thought, perhaps tell the story of how I sort of came to be here. How did these things happen? And maybe there are lessons there. I often find myself wondering, how did this happen.

When I was young, I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I got older. People kept asking me. But then eventually, I thought the idea of inventing things would be really cool.

And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said that, “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And that’s really true.

If you go back say, 300 years, the things we take for granted today, you’d be burned at stake for. Being able to fly. That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the Internet as a group mind of sorts, and having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. This stuff that really would be magic – that would be considered magic in times past.

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Even Elon Musk doesn’t know what he means by free speech

The billionaire says he wants to make Twitter a free speech platform. That’s easier said than done.

by Shirin Ghaffary

Changes are coming to Twitter. And if we’re to believe Elon Musk, those changes will transform the app in the name of preserving free speech online.

But what exactly does that look like or mean for your account? Not even Musk knows yet , and these changes won’t be coming overnight (Musk’s offer of $44 billion to buy the company is expected to take several months to close).

Even if we don’t know the details, any potential change to Twitter — a platform used by nearly 400 million people including some of the world’s most influential politicians, celebrities, and public figures — will have a major impact. Already, many conservatives are hoping that Musk will reverse the company’s ban on former President Donald Trump (for now, Trump has said that he won’t return to Twitter if given the chance, but that could change). At the same time, some activists, civil rights leaders, and Twitter employees are worried about whether Musk’s absolutist approach to free speech will undo the progress Twitter has made in the past several years to reduce the prevalence of harassment, hate speech, and misinformation.

“The idea of allowing more speech sounds like a very positive thing,” said Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “The question is, how is [Musk] going to balance that with the recognition that content moderation has always existed in the interest of community creation online?”

Musk has talked a lot about the virtues of free speech, but he has no experience managing that on a social media platform where hundreds of millions of tweets are posted a day. The billionaire has offered a few clues, however, about what his overall approach to content moderation on Twitter might look like. In an interview at the TED conference earlier this month, Musk said he plans to “err on the side” of leaving content up — no matter how controversial — and only taking down content that clearly violates the law, such as an incitement to violence. This would be a stark departure from Twitter’s current content moderation policies, which, in recent years, have been aimed at limiting hate speech, harassment, and other types of content on the platform it deems harmful.

In the press release this week about his acquisition of Twitter, Musk also suggested less-controversial changes to Twitter, including “making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” These are all areas that critics have called on Twitter to improve in the past, and in some cases, the company is already working on improvements. So we’ll have to see whether Musk can execute and how long it will take. Many of those eager for him to take the helm want him to turbocharge feature improvements like authenticating all users, and to dial back what they view as Twitter’s heavy-handedness in moderating people’s speech online.

Meanwhile, Musk’s motivations for buying Twitter seem somewhat complicated. One of the most remarkable aspects of this takeover saga is that Musk has publicly said that, for him, it is not about making money, it’s about promoting free speech. This free speech slogan has earned Musk the support of many conservatives who feel that Twitter and other social media companies unfairly discriminate against them. For Musk, it’s more than that: This deal is also a way to exert influence over a major media platform that is used by some of the most important politicians, celebrities, and leaders in the world. Given Musk’s own public battle with the SEC over his tweets, owning Twitter provides a valuable way for Musk to be the one to set the rules.

“If in doubt, let the speech … let it exist. If it’s a gray area, I would say let the tweet exist,” said Musk at the conference. “I do think that we want to be just very reluctant to delete things.”

What Musk is talking about reflects the same ideology on which social media companies like Twitter and Facebook were founded: Let anyone say what they want online. But in practice, nearly every major platform — and even more recent free speech absolutist ones like Parler, Gettr, and Trump’s own Truth Social — have put into place some rules against things like hate speech, harassment, or inappropriate content. That’s because if they don’t, these platforms tend to devolve into cesspools of hateful, negative, or spammy content that isn’t good for users or advertisers. For example, when trolls flood someone with targeted harassment, they can be exercising their free speech, but their intimidation tactics are also potentially discouraging that user from sharing their own viewpoints.

“One of the things that we’ve seen on every single social platform since the invention of the internet is that some people’s free speech is deployed to try to prevent other people’s participation and assembly,” said DiResta.

In his TED interview, Musk did acknowledge some limitations to the idea of letting free speech remain up all the time. He said that, in some cases, Twitter could potentially deprioritize content to make it less prominent in people’s feeds.

“In a case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, then you would not want to necessarily promote that tweet,” said Musk. “I’m not saying that I have all the answers here.”

Twitter does have people in place to figure out the answers to these hard questions. Currently, Twitter’s moderation and safety teams, which reportedly include hundreds of employees , help make decisions about when to downrank, label, or delete tweets that violate its policies. It’s unclear what Musk plans to do with these teams, and some at the company are worried he’ll cut back.

There’s also a fear that Musk’s plan to “open up” Twitter’s algorithm could prove difficult. The idea is that in cases where the company down-ranks certain tweets, Twitter should make it clear to users what’s going on. As Musk put it in his TED interview, this would show users that “there’s no behind-the-scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”

It’s an idea that, in theory, even some of Musk’s critics on content moderation agree with, but in practice, it needs a lot more fleshing out. For starters, Twitter has many algorithms, so which one is Musk referring to? Also, how would Twitter share its proprietary technology without giving out its secret sauce, thereby allowing its competitors to copy its business?

There’s still a lot we don’t know about how Musk would run Twitter. But what we do know is that his views on how much Twitter should be moderating content are drastically different from his predecessors’ in running the company. If handled well, that could result in a more open, robust realm of conversation on one of the world’s most influential social networks. But if handled poorly, that could mean that problems like harassment, hate speech, and misinformation will only get worse.

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Brilliance or Madness? —

Elon musk just gave another mars speech—this time the vision seems tangible, "these are unthinkable numbers, but we’re not breaking any physics to achieve this.".

Eric Berger - Apr 8, 2024 3:04 pm UTC

Elon Musk has been talking publicly about his sweeping vision for Mars settlement for nearly eight years now, dating to a speech in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September 2016.

This weekend, at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, Musk once again took up the mantle of his "making life multiplanetary" cause. Addressing employees at the location of the company's Starship factory, Musk spoke about the "high urgency" needed to extend the "light of consciousness" beyond Earth. That is not because humanity's home planet is a lost cause or should not be preserved. Rather, Musk said, he does not want humanity to remain a one-planet civilization that will, inevitably, face some calamity that will end the species.

All of this is fairly familiar territory for spaceflight enthusiasts—and observers of Musk. But during the last eight years he has become an increasingly controversial and polarizing figure. Based on his behavior, many people will dismiss Musk's Mars comments as those of a megalomaniac. At least in regard to spaceflight, however, that would be wrong. Musk's multiplanetary ambitions today are more credible because SpaceX has taken steps toward doing what he said the company would do.

SpaceX has real hardware today and has completed three test flights. A fourth is possible next month.

"It’s surreal, but it’s real," Musk said this weekend, describing the audacious Mars vision.

The booster and ship

As part of his 45-minute speech, Musk spoke about the booster for Starship, the upper stage, and the company's plans to ultimately deliver millions of tons of cargo to Mars for a self-sustaining civilization.

If thousands of launches seem impossible, Musk noted that SpaceX has now completed 327 successful Falcon launches and that 80 percent of those have involved used boosters. This year, he said, SpaceX will launch about 90 percent of the mass sent into orbit from the planet. China will launch about 6 percent, he added, with the remainder of the world accounting for the other 4 percent.

"That’s very much a success-oriented schedule, but it is within the realm of possibility," Musk said. With multiple test flights occurring this year, Musk said the odds of catching the booster with the launch tower this year are 80 to 90 percent.

It will take longer to land and begin reusing Starship's upper stage, which must survive the fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere. This vehicle broke apart and burned up during its attempt to return through the atmosphere during a flight test in March. On the next flight, Musk said, the goal for Starship's upper stage is to survive this heating and make a controlled landing in the ocean. At some point this year, he expects SpaceX to achieve this milestone and then begin landing Starships back in Texas next year.

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Elon Musk Is Right That Twitter Should Follow the First Amendment

A long history of free-speech jurisprudence backs him up.

Elon Musk, in his effort to buy Twitter , signaled that under his ownership, the company would allow all speech that the First Amendment protects. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted on April 26 . “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

Many commentators were quick to point out that, as a private company, Twitter is not required to follow the First Amendment, which applies only to federal and state governments. And Musk has further been criticized by those who fear that harmonizing Twitter’s content rules with First Amendment doctrine would lead to an explosion of hate speech, misinformation, and incendiary statements, content that Twitter currently moderates.

This deregulatory approach would make Twitter an outlier among the social-media companies; at the moment, Twitter, like Facebook and Google, has chosen to adopt content rules stricter than First Amendment standards. Facebook, for example, prohibits “hate speech” or “attacks,” which it defines as “violent or dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, statements of inferiority, expressions of contempt, disgust or dismissal, cursing and calls for exclusion or segregation.” By contrast, the First Amendment generally protects hate speech unless it is intended, and likely, to cause imminent injury. Twitter’s current definition of “hateful conduct,” although narrower than Facebook’s, still falls short of First Amendment standards.

But Musk’s position is, in fact, convincing. Although private companies are not required to follow the First Amendment, nothing prevents them from doing so voluntarily. And in Twitter’s case in particular, there are strong reasons to believe that the First Amendment should presumptively govern. All four of the main principles that have historically guided the Supreme Court in interpreting the First Amendment apply just as powerfully to social-media platforms as they do to governments.

Derek Thompson: Elon Musk buying Twitter is weird, chaotic, and a little bit awesome

What are these First Amendment first principles? Justice Louis Brandeis expressed all four in his opinion in Whitney v. California , a 1927 case that involved a woman convicted of making a speech at a Communist Party meeting in support of anti-lynching laws. Here is Brandeis’s crucial paragraph, in which he drew heavily upon Thomas Jefferson’s “Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” :

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

Based on these four principles—freedom of conscience, democratic accountability, discovery of truth, and democratic self-government—Brandeis articulated the First Amendment test that the Supreme Court would later adopt in 1969: The government can regulate speech under the First Amendment only when the speech is intended, and likely, to cause imminent and serious injury. Intent, imminence, and severity are crucial components of this test. (Twitter currently forbids accounts whose “primary purpose is inciting harm toward others” and could continue to prohibit and remove imminent threats, targeted harassment, defamation, and other speech that can be defined as illegal under a rigorous First Amendment standard.)

As Brandeis explained in Whitney :

Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent.

Brandeis’s test was based on his Jeffersonian faith in the power of what he called “free and fearless reasoning” to expose falsehood through public discussion. “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education,” Brandeis wrote, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression.” As a result, the United States Supreme Court now protects free speech more vigorously than any other judiciary in the world.

Brandeis’s faith in reason—and his four justifications for protecting all speech not intended to and likely to cause violence—is being questioned in our social-media age. Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. These companies are based on a business model that’s now being called “enrage to engage.” Inflammatory posts based on passion travel further and faster than arguments based on reason. Because of this, some critics are suggesting that America’s free-speech tradition should be reconsidered or amended.

Read: Elon Musk already showed us how he’ll run Twitter

These arguments are unpersuasive, and Musk is correct to reject them. In fact, all four of Brandeis’s arguments weigh heavily against any central authority, whether government or Twitter, exercising the power to monitor free speech. Let’s consider each in turn.

1. Freedom of conscience is an unalienable right because people can think only for themselves.

If freedom means anything, it is the freedom to “develop our faculties,” Brandeis wrote in Whitney , by which he meant our faculties of reason and deliberation. Brandeis and Jefferson rightly believed that freedom of conscience is, by definition, an unalienable right, one that can’t be surrendered or alienated to government or private actors, because our opinions, as Jefferson wrote in the draft of his Virginia Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, “follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to [our] minds.” We can’t give anyone—presidents, priests, teachers, or social-media magnates and their content monitors—the power to tell us what to think, even if we wanted to, because we are endowed as human beings with the capacity to reason and therefore can’t help thinking for ourselves. And a crucial element of thinking for ourselves is deciding for ourselves what evidence is proper for us to consider. Once a public or private regulator gets in the business of deciding which opinions are true or false, or what kind of information is good for people to access, that regulator infringes on the right of all individuals to form opinions with what Jefferson called “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.”

2. Free speech makes representatives accountable to We the People.

As Brandeis wrote, in a democracy “the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary.” This requires people to be able to speak truth to power. The right of the people to criticize all political figures, and the right of political figures to communicate with the people, is crucial to a functioning democracy. Jefferson and James Madison attacked the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which criminalized criticism of the Federalist president John Adams, but not of the Republican vice president Thomas Jefferson, on the grounds that favoring some politicians over others infringed on people’s right “of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.”

For this reason, Musk is correct to question lifetime bans of politicians such as Donald Trump , which are administered in a way that discriminates based on viewpoint, which First Amendment doctrine explicitly forbids. Trump has been banned permanently from Twitter while other leaders who have tweeted similarly inflammatory statements that arguably fall short of the legal standard for incitement have not been deplatformed, such as Ayatollah Khamenei’s tweets calling for the eradication of Israel. The possibility of viewpoint discrimination inherent in giving social-media platforms the power to ban some public officials but not others means that Musk is right to embrace the position that the new Facebook free-speech advisory board has reached as well: Temporary time-outs are acceptable, but lifetime bans are not.

3. Free speech is the best way to ensure the “discovery and spread of political truth.”

Brandeis and Jefferson had faith in the power of reasoned deliberation to distinguish truth from error over time. As Jefferson put it, “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” At the moment, Twitter empowers its content monitors to flag “misinformation,” defined as tweets that lack “context.” But this vague standard has been applied to take down posts that later turned out to be true. Referring to Twitter’s decision to suspend the New York Post for tweeting articles about Hunter Biden that eventually proved to be accurate, Musk rightly tweeted that “suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.”

Read: The Elon Musk placebo effect

Ever since the English philosopher John Milton, in Areopagitica , denounced the censorship of books as inappropriate because identifying censors infallible enough to consistently and reliably distinguish truth from error would be impossible, free-speech defenders have recognized that truth must ultimately emerge bottom-up from public discussion among the people, rather than top-down from a paternalistic (and possibly self-interested) regulator. Free citizens in a liberal democracy shouldn’t trust any centralized authority—public or private—to make decisions about what books, music, and other content they can safely be exposed to.

4. Free speech allows the public discussion necessary for democratic self-government.

Jefferson and Brandeis believed that in a democracy, all citizens have an equal right and responsibility to exercise their freedom of conscience. When social-media platforms presume to decide in advance what sorts of political candidates or information are safe for the people to evaluate, they deny the people their right to make that decision on their own. In the process, they weaken the public’s ability to make the political choices that are the foundation of a functioning democracy.

Elon Musk’s position that Twitter should abide by the First Amendment is a radical one—at the moment, no other major social-media platform, with arguably the exception of Reddit, has chosen voluntarily to embrace First Amendment standards. But for the reasons Jefferson and Brandeis recognized, Musk is entirely correct. It doesn’t matter whether the president or a prominent social-media company is presuming to tell us what to think or restricting the information we receive in the interest of protecting us. In the end, all of us have a right and a responsibility to “think as [we] will and to speak as [we] think,” as Brandeis put it. In other words, we have no choice but to think for ourselves.

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• Elon Musk’s $44bn education on free speech

He has had a crash course in the trade-offs in protecting free expression

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E lon Musk ’s two months running Twitter has been an unhappy experiment. The social network’s 250m users have endured a wearying saga in which Mr Musk is the central character. Advertisers have fled. Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate. The damage has spread to Tesla, Mr Musk’s carmaker, part of the reason it has lost half a trillion dollars in market value since early September, costing Mr Musk the title of the world’s richest man.

On December 19th it looked as if Mr Musk might throw in the towel, after Twitter users voted for him to step down as chief executive. It has been a costly adventure. But in one sense his turbulent stewardship of the social network has done the rest of the world a favour. In two short months Mr Musk has been through a public crash course in the principles of free speech, neatly demonstrating the trade-offs involved in protecting expression online.

From the outside, Twitter seemed simple to someone whose day job was building self-driving cars and space rockets. Mr Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, had grown concerned (with some justification) that Twitter had been captured by censorious left-wing scolds. Shortly after agreeing to buy the platform he explained his approach to moderation: “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law.”

In practice he has found that the right to speech conflicts with other rights. One is safety. Last month Mr Musk said that his commitment to free speech meant he would not ban a Twitter account that tweeted the whereabouts of his private jet, even though he considered this a security risk. But on December 14th he changed his mind after a “stalker” bothered his son. After suspending the jet account, Twitter introduced rules outlawing the reporting of others’ real-time locations.

As well as limiting speech in the name of safety, Mr Musk has curtailed it to avoid the lesser sin of causing offence. In October the number of views of tweets that Twitter deems “hate speech” doubled, as users tested the limits of Mr Musk’s new regime. Rather than allow this legal-but-nasty content, Twitter cracked down. In November hateful tweets recorded one-third fewer views than before the takeover. Earlier this month Twitter suspended the account of Ye, a rapper formerly known as Kanye West, after he posted a picture of a swastika within a Star of David—an image that, however grotesque, is nonetheless permitted by America’s laws.

Mr Musk even limited speech when it was bad for profits. After pranksters sent tweets aping brands like Pepsi (“Coke is better”) and Nestlé (“We steal your water and sell it back to you lol”), Twitter outlawed such behaviour to stop advertisers fleeing. Then, to stem an exodus of users, on December 18th Twitter said it would ban people from linking to rival social networks or posting their usernames. When questions were raised as to whether regulators would consider such a move anticompetitive, Mr Musk apologised and free speech was restored.

All this holds two lessons for whoever follows Mr Musk as Twitter’s boss, should he leave. One is to keep content moderation at arm’s length. The person deciding whether a post is acceptable is compromised if they are also responsible for boosting engagement among users and spending by advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg (whose reputation has risen in light of Mr Musk’s pratfalls) realised this and outsourced Facebook’s biggest moderation headaches to an independent “oversight board” in 2020.

The second lesson is that moderation has no clean solutions, even for “technokings” with strong views on free speech. Free expression is not a problem with a solution bounded by the laws of physics that can be hacked together if only enough coders pull an all-nighter. It is a dilemma requiring messy trade-offs that leave no one happy. In such a business, humility and transparency count for a lot.

These are novel concepts to some in Silicon Valley, who are impatient to tear up the established ways of doing things. But just as cryptocurrency enthusiasts have recently received a bracing lesson in the value of boring old financial prudence, so Mr Musk and his fellow free-speech enthusiasts are learning why free expression has caused many to scratch their heads over the centuries. Tech valuations have suffered a sharp correction in 2022. It has also been a chastening year for tech egos. ■

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “A $44bn education”

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What Elon Musk Doesn’t Know About Free Speech

These days, every debate about free speech and social media in America feels tendentious and dumb. But, unfortunately for everyone who would rather mute the words “First Amendment” from their lives than read another opinion column about free speech, a great number of Americans seem to believe that we have entered an era of unprecedented censoriousness. One reason that this conversation feels both stunted and endless is that the same people who feel the deepest paranoia that their speech is being impinged upon don’t exactly know how. Is Instagram hiding their posts? Have they been “shadow-banned” on Twitter? Is there a council of élites who determine which thoughts are acceptable and which ones are not?

This past weekend, the writer Matt Taibbi released what he called “THE TWITTER FILES,” a somewhat puzzling series of tweets fashioned in the shape of a work of investigative journalism. Taibbi’s story was drawn from “thousands” of internal company documents provided to him by Elon Musk , and was perhaps the first piece of journalism that came with its own promotion campaign from the world’s richest man. In the weeks since he bought Twitter , Musk has been promising the public “ transparency ” into all the supposedly twisted and biased ways in which the old guard of the company had been suppressing free speech to help their political allies.

For all the pomp, the actual revelations in the first salvo of the Twitter Files were a bit thin. We learned how Twitter’s previous leadership handled requests from the Biden campaign to review tweets, and how a series of bad executive decisions led to the suppression of the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden ’s laptop. A second installment of the Twitter Files, which was promised to be released on Saturday, has yet to materialize.

Musk’s stated plan with all this—at least the one that doesn’t change from week to week—is to purge Twitter of its censorious past, and fully embrace the idea of a digital town square governed by the normative principles of free speech. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk tweeted, in late November, after a promo of the Twitter Files. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

It’s worth asking, then, what Musk actually thinks about free speech, not just at his new company but in general. Musk seems to understand that there are legal distinctions in what the First Amendment protects and what it does not, and to believe in a spirit of free speech that should allow for people to express their views without fear of being banned from social media. Considering that he has unbanned thousands of accounts —the comedian Kathy Griffin , Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene , and the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, to name a few—it appears that Musk believes that virtually all people have a right to a Twitter account, however racist, toxic, or absurd they may be.

I actually agree with Musk here. Last year, I wrote a column decrying Twitter’s decision to ban Greene’s personal Twitter account. Greene had repeatedly been spreading COVID -19 misinformation, but I worried—and still do—about what it meant that so many liberals were lining up to cheer the content-moderation decisions of a giant tech corporation that could, at any given moment, turn those same censorious tools upon anyone who got in the way of its profits—or, as is more relevant now—the megalomaniacal whims of its new owner. It seemed clear that many of the people who applauded Greene’s ban assumed, perhaps correctly, that Twitter’s leaders respected science, sought to fight disinformation from right-wing actors, and were mostly acting in a rational manner.

The First Amendment does not protect one’s right to have a social-media account, but today’s dissent has mostly moved online, and, as a result, is privately owned. If you allow tech companies to play God and flout societal norms just because they can, you get something similar to what we have now: Elon Musk making up the First Amendment as he goes along.

But the more deeply felt part of Musk’s beliefs on free speech involves his grievances over tech and the media. The Twitter Files were supposed to dispel the faith that his new customers had in the company’s old leadership, and paint everyone he has fired—particularly the company’s former lawyer Vijaya Gadde—as partisan actors who conspired with the traditional news media and the government to prune away at free speech. Taibbi shared screenshots of an e-mail exchange between two Twitter employees that includes a list of URLs for tweets that the Biden campaign seemingly wanted removed. Taibbi does not include any information on what these tweets said, who the offending accounts might have been, or even the substance of the complaints. But he does show confirmation that Twitter did seem to delete some tweets at the behest of a Presidential campaign, because the second e-mailer replied to the list of tweets saying, “Handled these.”

“ ‘Handled,’ ” Musk emphasized on Twitter, in scare quotes. He continued, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”

Musk was implying that the sitting President of the United States used a back channel into Twitter to suppress the free speech of individuals on the platform. Many defenders of the President were quick to point out that Biden was not in any official government position when these e-mails were sent; he was, technically and legally speaking, a private citizen who happened to be running for President. Therefore, this argument goes, deleting the tweets didn’t constitute a violation of the First Amendment at all, but rather a private company acting at the behest of a powerful private individual.

But liberals shouldn’t default to these sorts of hair-splitting arguments when it comes to free speech. Yes, Joe Biden was technically a private citizen at the time those e-mails were sent, but he was also a former Vice-President of the United States. To defend him is to suggest that you’d rather limit the First Amendment than expand its logic to all parts of public and private discourse. Though we don’t know the contents of all of the offending material, Biden’s team was directly using political influence—connections unavailable to most other “private citizens”—to get tweets that may have violated Twitter policy deleted far more easily than any normal user could. (Archival data indicates that some of the deleted posts included revealing images of Hunter Biden.) The rest of us are subjected to an automated reporting system when we encounter abusive tweets—one that seems almost random in its range of responses. One could argue about the electoral consequences of all of this, given that a vast majority of Americans believe that free speech is a vital and first-order right, but there is a much more straightforward moral argument right in front of us: it’s wrong for influential politicians, even those who aren’t currently in office, to pressure companies like Twitter to suppress the speech acts of its customers, however unsavory.

On Saturday, Musk joined a Twitter “Space”—an audio platform within the site that allows people to talk to an audience—to discuss the story. He revealed that he had released the documents to Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a third, unnamed person. This seemed to offer a preview of Musk’s ultimate vision for the social network: a somewhat proprietary entity in which handpicked media personalities discuss free speech, Twitter, and Elon Musk. That same day, Musk tweeted , “The more Twitter improves its signal to noise ratio, the less relevant conventional news becomes,” and also accused the New York Times of becoming “an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians.”

If Musk wants to turn Twitter into a vanity news publication that is beholden to his own personal interpretations of constitutional law, that’s his right. It’s up to individuals to decide whether they want to stay on the platform or move off it . But I do wonder how long the public will actually care about the “scoops” that Musk provides to media figures like Taibbi and Weiss, or how much patience it will have for an endless, and ultimately aimless, conversation about free speech. Elon Musk is not the President of the United States; he does not have access to backroom conversations between politicians; as far as I can tell, he does not know who killed J.F.K . The valuable information that he can actually distribute to journalists is limited to his own companies, and it’s unlikely that he’s going to start handing over information about, say, Tesla ’s relationships with China, or the crash data on self-driving cars. Absent that, the political corner of Twitter will likely just become what Musk says he hates about the mainstream media: yet another insular space that drones on, endlessly, about itself. ♦

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Brazil blocks Musk’s X after company refuses to name local representative amid feud with judge

Brazilian Supreme Court justice orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X nationwide

FILE - Tesla and SpaceX chief executive officer Elon Musk listens to a question as he speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, March 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

FILE - Brazilian Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexandre de Moraes arrives for a court hearing, in Brasilia, Brazil, June 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

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SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil started blocking Elon Musk’s social media platform X early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through its mobile app after the company refused to comply with a judge’s order.

X missed a deadline imposed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to name a legal representative in Brazil, triggering the suspension. It marks an escalation in the monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

To block X, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, told internet service providers to suspend users’ access to the social media platform. As of Saturday at midnight local time, major operators began doing so.

De Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month.

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote in his decision on Friday.

The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using VPNs to access it.

In a later ruling, he backtracked on his initial decision to establish a 5-day deadline for internet service providers themselves — and not just the telecommunications regulator — to block access to X, as well as his directive for app stores to remove virtual private networks, or VPNs.

The dispute also led to the freezing this week of the bank accounts in Brazil of Musk’s satellite internet provider Starlink.

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the former Twitter in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month.

“This is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform. I wish it did not have to come to this – it breaks my heart,” X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said Friday night, adding that Brazil is failing to uphold its constitution’s pledge to forbid censorship.

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote.

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users.

Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X’s lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court in April, saying that since 2019 it had suspended or blocked 226 users.

In his decision Friday, de Moraes’ cited Musk’s statements as evidence that X’s conduct “clearly intends to continue to encourage posts with extremism, hate speech and anti-democratic discourse, and to try to withdraw them from jurisdictional control.”

In April, de Moraes included Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation into the executive for alleged obstruction.

Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has repeatedly claimed the justice’s actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil’s political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant.

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time it is imperiled. He wrote Friday that his ruling is based on Brazilian law requiring internet services companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are relevant court decisions and take requisite action — specifying the takedown of illicit content posted by users, and an anticipated churn of misinformation during October municipal elections.

The looming shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil.

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company’s refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan , Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.

A search Friday on X showed hundreds of Brazilian users inquiring about VPNs that could potentially enable them to continue using the platform by making it appear they were logging on from outside the country. It was not immediately clear how Brazilian authorities would police this practice and impose fines cited by de Moraes.

“This is an unusual measure, but its main objective is to ensure that the court order to suspend the platform’s operation is, in fact, effective,” Filipe Medon, a specialist in digital law and professor at the law school of Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro, told The Associated Press.

Mariana de Souza Alves Lima, known by her handle MariMoon, showed her 1.4 million followers on X where she intends to go, posting a screenshot of rival social network BlueSky.

On Thursday evening, Starlink, said on X that de Moraes this week froze its finances, preventing it from doing any transactions in the country where it has more than 250,000 customers.

“This order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X. It was issued in secret and without affording Starlink any of the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution of Brazil. We intend to address the matter legally,” Starlink said in its statement. The law firm representing Starlink told the AP that the company appealed, but wouldn’t make further comment.

Musk replied to people sharing the reports of the freeze, adding insults directed at de Moraes. “This guy @Alexandre is an outright criminal of the worst kind, masquerading as a judge,” he wrote.

Musk later posted on X that SpaceX, which runs Starlink, will provide free internet service in Brazil “until the matter is resolved” since “we cannot receive payment, but don’t want to cut anyone off.”

In his decision, de Moraes said he ordered the freezing of Starlink’s assets, as X didn’t have enough money in its accounts to cover mounting fines, and reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group.

While ordering X’s suspension followed warnings and fines and so was appropriate, taking action against Starlink seems “highly questionable,” said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Technology and Society Center.

“Yes, of course, they have the same owner, Elon Musk, but it is discretionary to consider Starlink as part of the same economic group as Twitter (X). They have no connection, they have no integration,” Belli said.

AP writers Barbara Ortutay reported from San Francisco and David Biller from Rio. Savarese contributed from Sao Paulo.

Mark Cuban says Elon Musk's 'biggest power play' on X is letting users think they have free speech

• Mark Cuban has said X isn't the "bastion of free speech" everyone thinks it is.
• The "Shark Tank" star said the platform was "only as free as Elon wants it to be."
• Cuban has frequently accused Musk of running X based on the latter's own whims.

Mark Cuban doesn't think the social-media platform X is as free as Elon Musk says it is.

"I know everyone thinks this platform is a bastion of free speech. I see the opposite," Cuban wrote in an X post on Sunday.

The "Shark Tank" star gave his opinion of Musk's ownership of X while engaging with the professional gambler Haralabos Voulgaris on the platform.

Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, before renaming it X in July 2023.

"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in statement in April 2022, when the acquisition was announced.

Musk said he wanted to improve Twitter by introducing "new features" and "making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."

But Cuban said on Sunday that the X of today wasn't what Musk initially promised.

"It's only as free as Elon wants it to be. He can intimidate. He can alter the algorithm. He can suspend anyone he wants at any time," Cuban wrote.

"He is the ultimate arbiter of everything on here. And the biggest power play is him making everyone think their speech is free speech Until he decides it isn't, and there is nothing any of us can do about it," he continued.

Cuban, however, hasn't stopped using X.

"Whenever he calls me out or calls me names, I'll throw something back at him. It's fun. And you know I always enjoy and respect our back and forth," Cuban said in his post.

I don’t think it’s tragic. I like to engage with different people on any number of topics. Kills time when I’m doing cardio or in between emails. I know everyone thinks this platform is a bastion of free speech. I see the opposite. It’s only as free as Elon wants it to be.… — Mark Cuban (@mcuban) September 1, 2024

This isn't the first time Cuban has accused Musk of running X based on his own whims.

Last month, Cuban said in an interview on "The Daily Show" that Musk might have adjusted X's algorithm to suit his own preferences.

"When you write an algorithm — I haven't written a lot, it's been a while — but when you write one, you get to set the parameters of what you want to see happen. And he certainly has done that to the things he likes," Cuban said, without providing evidence of Musk's manipulation of the algorithm.

Related stories

Cuban's accusation spurred a response from Musk, who wrote just days later in an X post that his platform was open-source, unlike other platforms.

Cuban, Musk said, was seeing more content from right-wing accounts because the algorithm was taking into account Cuban's frequent interactions with them. Cuban has been known to respond to a wide variety of accounts on X.

Musk later followed up with another post that called Cuban a giant turd in human form .

Cuban only had a brief response for Musk: a series of heart-hands emojis.

🫶🫶🫶 https://t.co/ByayAZlB7q — Mark Cuban (@mcuban) August 14, 2024

In June, Cuban told Business Insider that he had no issues with Musk despite their heated exchanges on X.

Besides X, the pair have gone head-to-head on topics such as corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and the US presidential election this year.

"I have fun sparring with Elon. He likes to troll and so do I," Cuban said in June.

Representatives for Musk at X and Cuban didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

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Brazil Blocks X After Musk Ignores Court Orders

The social network began to go dark in the nation of 200 million, the result of an escalating fight between Elon Musk and a Brazilian judge over what can be said online.

By Jack Nicas and Kate Conger

Jack Nicas reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Kate Conger from San Francisco.

X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts.

The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.

Alexandre de Moraes , a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.

Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.

X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.

In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.

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The Americas

Brazil starts blocking social media platform x amid a dispute with elon musk.

The Associated Press

Brazilian Supreme Court Chief Justice Alexandre de Moraes arrives for a court hearing, in Brasilia, Brazil, June 22, 2023. Eraldo Peres/AP hide caption

SAO PAULO — Brazil started blocking Elon Musk’s social media platform X early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through mobile apps after the billionaire refused to name a legal representative to the country.

The move escalates a monthslong feud between Musk and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension on Friday.

The latest chapter in a feud between Elon Musk and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice

To block X, Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, told internet service providers to suspend users’ access to the social media platform. As of Saturday after midnight local time, major operators had begun doing so.

De Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month.

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote in his decision on Friday.

The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using VPNs to access it.

In a later ruling, he backtracked on his initial decision to establish a 5-day deadline for internet service providers themselves — and not just the telecommunications regulator — to block access to X, as well as his directive for app stores to remove virtual private networks, or VPNs.

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the former Twitter in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month.

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive officer Elon Musk listens to a question as he speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington, March 9, 2020. Susan Walsh/AP hide caption

“This is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform. I wish it did not have to come to this – it breaks my heart,” X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said Friday night, adding that Brazil is failing to uphold its constitution’s pledge to forbid censorship.

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote.

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users.

Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X’s lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court in April, saying that since 2019 it had suspended or blocked 226 users.

In his decision Friday, de Moraes' cited Musk's statements as evidence that X's conduct “clearly intends to continue to encourage posts with extremism, hate speech and anti-democratic discourse, and to try to withdraw them from jurisdictional control.”

In April, de Moraes included Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation into the executive for alleged obstruction.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov indicted in France

Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist," has repeatedly claimed the justice’s actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil’s political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant.

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time it is imperiled. He wrote Friday that his ruling is based on Brazilian law requiring internet services companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are relevant court decisions and take requisite action — specifying the takedown of illicit content posted by users, and an anticipated churn of misinformation during October municipal elections.

The looming shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil.

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company’s refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.

A search Friday on X showed hundreds of Brazilian users inquiring about VPNs that could potentially enable them to continue using the platform by making it appear they were logging on from outside the country. It was not immediately clear how Brazilian authorities would police this practice and impose fines cited by de Moraes.

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“This is an unusual measure, but its main objective is to ensure that the court order to suspend the platform's operation is, in fact, effective," Filipe Medon, a specialist in digital law and professor at the law school of Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro, told The Associated Press.

Mariana de Souza Alves Lima, known by her handle MariMoon, showed her 1.4 million followers on X where she intends to go, posting a screenshot of rival social network BlueSky.

On Thursday evening, Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service provider, said on X that de Moraes this week froze its finances, preventing it from doing any transactions in the country where it has more than 250,000 customers.

“This order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X. It was issued in secret and without affording Starlink any of the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution of Brazil. We intend to address the matter legally,” Starlink said in its statement. The law firm representing Starlink told the AP that the company appealed, but wouldn’t make further comment.

Musk replied to people sharing the reports of the freeze, adding insults directed at de Moraes. “This guy @Alexandre is an outright criminal of the worst kind, masquerading as a judge,” he wrote.

Musk later posted on X that SpaceX, which runs Starlink, will provide free internet service in Brazil “until the matter is resolved” since “we cannot receive payment, but don’t want to cut anyone off.”

In his decision, de Moraes said he ordered the freezing of Starlink’s assets, as X didn't have enough money in its accounts to cover mounting fines, and reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group.

While ordering X’s suspension followed warnings and fines and so was appropriate, taking action against Starlink seems “highly questionable,” said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Technology and Society Center.

“Yes, of course, they have the same owner, Elon Musk, but it is discretionary to consider Starlink as part of the same economic group as Twitter (X). They have no connection, they have no integration,” Belli said.

People trying to access Elon Musk’s X in Brazil face daily fines greater than their annual wage

Users of Elon Musk’s X in Brazil who skirt a ban of the platform risk daily fines surpassing the average annual wage in Latin America’s largest economy. 

X, formerly Twitter , was shut down this weekend after the company refused to comply with demands to name a new legal representative in Brazil, home to an estimated 40 million active users. The previous representative resigned rather than face the threat of possible imprisonment for any alleged crimes the company may have committed.

Now anyone caught accessing the site via a virtual private network (VPN) could end up paying 50,000 Brazilian reais ($8,910), far in excess of the 2,979 reais ($529.93) the  average worker earns every month —or for that matter in a year.

Ahead of U.S. elections in November, Musk’s bitter feud with the Brazilian judicial system has become a global flash point in the debate around how far governments can go to police protected free speech in a democracy. 

“In Brazil, we do not have X anymore since midnight. I am tweeting this with VPN,” posted Marcel van Hattem, a member of parliament for the country’s  libertarian  NOVO Party, this weekend. “I will keep tweeting regardless of state persecution or threats, because I believe in freedom of expression, democracy, and real justice.”

He called on Brazilians to take to the streets on Sept. 7 to demand Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes—who imposed the ban—be impeached by the Senate and face trial. 

In Brazil, we do not have X anymore since midnight. I am tweeting this with VPN. This tweet may cost me almost 10,000 USD according to the decision of tyrant @alexandre de Moraes, friends with @LulaOficial : every Brazilian that post on X from now on will be fined R$ 50,000… — Marcel van Hattem (@marcelvanhattem) August 31, 2024

Musk has nearly as many followers on X as there are Brazilians

Musk has been at  loggerheads  with de Moraes over the latter’s demands that he cooperate in an investigation into online supporters of outgoing president Jair Bolsanaro. They helped organize the storming of government buildings in Brasília in an apparent attempt to destabilize the new administration  of opponent Lula da Silva almost  two years to the day  of the U.S.’s own Capitol riots on Jan. 6.

Unlike in India and  Turkey , where Musk caved to censorship demands, he has steadfastly refused to provide information about X’s Brazilian users. Musk has made it clear that any actions taken against him are politically motivated attacks to shut down free speech, and  told supporters  he would likely restrict his movement  following the arrest  of Telegram founder and French citizen Pavel Durov upon arrival in Paris.

Musk actively  incited grievances  among white working-class Britons who participated in race riots in the U.K. this summer and predicted civil war. The former chief of Twitter Europe, Bruce Daisley, has called for managers at X to “be held criminally responsible” if their  inflammatory posts  lead to violence or bloodshed.

In addition to being the world’s richest person, Musk boasts nearly as many followers on X as the entire population of Brazil.

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” Judge de Moraes wrote in his  decision  on Friday. 

Critics argue however that de Moraes’s investigation is a veiled attempt at cracking down on political opponents. Brazil is considered a “flawed democracy” by the standards of the Economist Intelligence Unit, and failed to make it into the top 50 in the EIU’s latest  annual global index  ranking democracies, published in February. 

X fired back by arguing it was acting in accordance with local laws the entire time.

“The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws,” X claimed in a  post  on Friday from its official public policy account, called Global Government Affairs. “We simply won’t do that.”

Musk and X were not reachable by Fortune for further comment.

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