Elon Musk, the owner of X (former Twitter), has been on the news lately, tangled with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, in a surprising turn of events. So I thought it would be a good idea to give people some context about the agitated Brazilian judicial scene.

First, for the facts.

The recent polemic involves this tweet by Musk:

Over the last years, Alexandre de Moraes had issued orders requesting X to block the accounts of members of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s close circle. This happened in the course of investigations of fake news and “digital militias” promoted especially during the 2022 presidential elections. Now Musk has re-activated the accounts. Moraes in turn included Musk in the investigations.

Here are some of the owners of the accounts in question:

• Luciano Hang, businessman
• Allan dos Santos, blogger
• Daniel Silveira, former congressman (previously arrested, and pardoned by Bolsonaro)
• Monark, YouTuber
• Oswaldo Eustáquio, blogger
• Bernardo Kuster, journalist
• Roberto Jefferson, former congressman (now in jail after throwing a grenade at cops)
• Winston Lima, ex-military
• Edgar Corona, businessman

We could write a post about each one of these very interesting personalities of Brazilian politics (to say the least). But today I want to focus on one of the main characters in this dispute: Alexandre de Moraes.

Who is Alexandre de Moraes?

Alexandre de Moraes is a Brazilian Supreme Court judge who joined the court in 2017. He has been at odds with Bolsonaro and is deemed enemy #1 of the far-right in Brazil. But it wasn’t always like this.

I remember Alexandre de Moraes from my times in São Paulo, when he was Defense Secretary for the state of São Paulo, under a right-wing Governor. Those were the times after the so-called Brazilian Spring, and I was involved in the social movement against police violence.

Among people on the left, we nicknamed Moraes the “Governor’s Pitbull”. There was a series of occupations in schools with students demanding better education. He would sign orders for the police to remove the students by force.

After the 2016 impeachment, he was invited by then-President Michel Temer to be Minister of Justice. After one of the judges in the Supreme Court died in a plane crash, Moraes was appointed in his place.

The left was livid. The Worker Party described it as “a deep disrespect to the judicial spirit of the country” and said that Moraes was impartial because he had close ties with the main right-wing party (top judges in Brazil are expected to be uninvolved in politics).

So what happened? How did he go from a terrible choice to the left to enemy of the far right?

Well, Bolsonaro happened.

Bolsonaro and Moraes’ beef

Bolsonaro started to be at odds with Moraes back in 2020, when one of his sons, Carlos Bolsonaro, was being investigated for the creation of a “hate cabinet”, a group inside the government that specialized in spreading fake news about their political opponents. This group also was constantly preaching anti-democratic measures, such as the shutdown of Congress and the Supreme Court. As a top judge, Moraes was not in charge of the investigation, but he was authorizing several moves that needed court orders, such as search warrants.

It’s not the first time that a president has been at odds with the Supreme Court, but while the previous ones kept to public critiques of the judiciary power, Bolsonaro decided to declare Moraes his nemesis. And it was easy, considering that they had a group specialized in spreading rumours. Bolsonaro himself has preached against the judge many times, calling him a “scoundrel”, “tramp” and “dictator”.

Another of Bolsonaro’s sons (he has 4) got as far as saying that to shut down the Supreme Court for good you only need 2 low-rank police officers. That was the president’s son talking, in a country that spent a good chunk of the 20th century in military dictatorships. So you get the picture.

Things got even worse in the 2022 presidential elections. In August 2022, Moraes authorized an investigation and search warrants against a group of businessmen and also determined the blocking of their social media accounts. The ground of the investigation was a WhatsApp series of messages in which one of them said that he “preferred a coup to the return of the Worker Party” and that “the Independence Day parade would show which side the army is”.

All members of the chat group were included in the investigation, and that generated a lot of heat. Some said that Moraes had gone too far and people couldn’t be punished for expressing their opinions in private, even anti-democratic ones. The investigation was dropped a week later by Moraes.

In the same month, the top judge was elected president of the Electoral High Court. this is basically the institution that oversees the election in Brazil. Many accounts that were spreading fake news on social media were suspended. Moraes also expanded the powers of the Electoral Court, and social media companies would now have 2 hours to remove content. The decision started to be questioned by some as too rough, and the top judge held a meeting with the main social media giants (Google, Meta, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and Telegram) to discuss measures to combat the dissemination of fake news.

But other than fake news, Moraes also suspended accounts that were preaching violence against the Supreme Court members and asking for the end of the institution. It’s unclear how far these posts went since we don’t have a record of them. In June 2023 Bolsonaro was judged by the Electoral High Court and barred for running for any public office for misuse of state channels to promote disinformation. The decision was done by a panel of judges, but Moraes is the head of the institution.

Dictator or Defender of Democracy?

The top judge cracking down on groups that preached against democracy and the Supreme Court was not that off base if you consider the recent events. After losing the election, Bolsonaro and his team are now being investigated for plotting to use the military to remain in power. There are videos and documents proving the intent. In one of the documents, Bolsonaro ordered the arrest of Moraes. He was being followed for days by Bolsonaro’s men.

But aside from that very obvious crime, how far can a person or group go when disagreeing with the status quo? Where is the point at which a person goes from strongly opposing the government to plotting to end it? Should a person be held responsible for expressing in private that they want anything but a certain party in power? What if that person turns into a group that decides to act?

It’s hard to tell if Moraes’ decisions were going too far, especially without knowing each case closely. As I said in a previous post, the line between aggressively fighting tyranny and becoming a tyrant yourself is very thin. Blocking a social media account today has serious consequences for the reach that a person can have. But should people be free to spread disinformation? What happens when you have not only people but powerful groups doing that on purpose for their own political gain?

Part of me feels we’re still figuring out this thing called the internet, and the law and the moral systems haven’t caught up yet. There’s no way to tell how this last chapter will end.

But there’s one thing about this whole mess that I find fascinating: it’s how all the actors involved, Jair Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes and Elon Musk all brand themselves as defenders of democracy while being accused of being anything but the opposite.