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X Stops Operations in Brazil after ‘censorship orders’ from Judge Alexandre de Moraes
Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders.

He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions. Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process.

As a result, to protect our staff's safety, we have decided to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately.

The X service remains available to the people of Brazil. We are deeply saddened that we have been forced to make this decision. The responsibility lies solely with Alexandre de Moraes.

His actions are incompatible with democratic government.

The people of Brazil have a choice to make - democracy, or (Judge) Alexandre de Moraes.

British man who quit job to care for wife sentenced to 3 years for mean tweets ... come see the words that sent him to prison

Three years in prison for, at least in part, violating the Communications Act of 2003, section 127:

Improper use of public electronic communications network

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he —

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he —

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b) causes such a message to be sent; or

(c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

(4) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to anything done in the course of providing a programme service (within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1990.

https://x.com/mtracey/status/1826657225924022662

In more good RFK news, MSN (citing the Daily Caller) ran an op-ed about a story completely ignored by corporate media, headlined “Judge Finds RFK Jr. Can Bring Censorship Lawsuit Against Biden Admin After Supreme Court Rejects States' Challenge.”

The Supreme Court disappointed many folks earlier this year by vacating an anti-censorship preliminary injunction, because the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden failed to show direct censorship, instead of sneaky government euphemisms and official “suggestions” to take down posts that weren’t really suggestions.

But Kennedy separately filed a companion case, and the evidence in his case is clearer than was the evidence in Missouri. Kennedy’s emails show the government being much more obvious about wanting his anti-vaccine posts deleted.

Yesterday, Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty found that Kennedy’s case meets the new Supreme Court “direct censorship”’ standard and may move forward toward a new injunction. Progress.

Kathy Boston
6 hrs ago

I tried to post Kennedys speech on my page and it got blocked by Facebook. "goes against their community standards"

"You're violating my First Amendment rights": Arizona woman goes viral for getting arrested at city council meeting

Fun fact of the day: You can be arrested in Surprise, Arizona, for making complaints about a city employee during a city council meeting. Not an exaggeration, not a joke, just plain reality in the City of Surprise.

Here's the city policy which is printed on the back of each public speaker form that citizens hand in before council meetings:

Oral communications during the City Council meeting may not be used to lodge charges or complaints against any employee of the City or members of the body, regardless of whether such person is identified in the presentation by name or by any other reference that tends to identify him/her.

And here's what happens when you break this rule and speak freely about your public servants — in this case discussing their salaries:

Rebekah Massie, 32, was arrested Tuesday night and cited on suspicion of trespassing, a class 3 misdemeanor. The arrest came after she was removed from the meeting at the behest of Mayor Skip Hall who accused her of breaking the city's rule against complaining about city employees while making public comments. ...

Arrested for her free speech.

This one's definitely going to a higher court, and I'll wager that Mrs. Massie will win.

Because making a rule that you can't complain about a public employee during a city council meeting is 100% a violation of the First Amendment.

More well-covered was an astonishing letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent this week to Congressman Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Remarkably, the letter has received wide media coverage, such as in a USA Today op-ed headlined, “Republicans were right: Zuckerberg admits Biden administration censored your Facebook feed.”

Like Marianne’s clip, Zuckerberg’s letter was similarly confessional, since it began by admitting that during the pandemic, Facebook allowed the government to control the information it was permissible for U.S. citizens to receive. From Zuck’s letter:

"In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree. Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of this pressure. I believe the government pressure was wrong, and regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn't make today."

Although Zuckerberg commendably owned the blame for bowing to the pressure, it’s not quite that simple. The government strongly suggested censorship, and Facebook understandably yielded to that pressure. This two-stepping was just a thinly disguised charade designed to give Biden’s officials plausible deniability that they never directly censored anybody. It’s just a dumb cover story and nobody believes it.

What big tech company could resist focused government pressure? That’s a nice platform you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it, cough, TikTok, cough. TikTok resisted and failed. Musk continues to resist, and he’s paying the price.

Anyway, and this may be the more significant point, Zuckerberg also expressed “regret” about demoting the true Hunter Biden laptop story, and disclosed that the FBI’s warning was not about the laptop per se, but more broadly about “Russian disinformation” related to the “Biden family and Burisma.”

Meaning, Biden’s bribery problems.

In other words, just like in any tinpot dictatorship, the Biden Administration successfully misused its domestic police force, the FBI, to control information about any politically embarrassing topic, not just “dangerous health misinformation” related to the pandemic.

Browstone’s terrific Jeffrey Tucker published a thought-provoking piece yesterday headlined, “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess?” One suspects that, especially given Zuckerberg’s recent personal re-branding efforts, the social media billionaire’s timing is less about complete charity and more about self-service. But still.

In his essay, Jeffrey Tucker made the enormously important observation that the government’s pandemic censorship interfered in literally thousands of U.S. elections, federal, state, and local, by suppressing anti-mandate candidates and promoting pro-narrative candidates. Tellingly, Tucker explained how Minnesota got its China-loving governor Tim Walz, since his electoral opponent, Republican Dr. Scott Jensen, was savagely suppressed on social media.

Tucker linked Dr. Jensen’s outraged reaction to Zuckerberg’s letter of confession:




https://x.com/drscottjensen/status/1828532297613639814

In the clip, Jensen explained, “when Mark Zuckerberg decided to come out and say, ‘my bad’ — this is huge. They got involved in political collusion. American citizens were treated like pawns, exhibiting Lemming-like behavior, massing together, not believing something like this was possible. Mark Zuckerberg just told you and me and billions of people around the world that Facebook made a mistake. The governments around the world created most of the conspiracies.”

On an aside, some of the country’s highest public servants have repeatedly assured me that election interference is the worst conceivable crime. I can’t wait for all the prosecutions.

Yesterday, CNN ran a story headlined, “Brazil begins to block X as Elon Musk’s feud with judge deepens.”



Straight from central casting (villains department) comes Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, who appears to be a Brazilian law unto himself. The dispute began last month when Moraes ordered Twitter/X to subject itself to government controls or face criminal prosecution.

In response to those threats, Elon Musk refused to comply. The space billionaire promptly closed X’s offices in Brazil, to protect the company’s workers from being arrested. Judge de Moraes then ordered all of Starlink’s Brazilian bank accounts to be frozen, even though StarLink is a completely different company than Twitter with a completely different ownership structure—apparently just because Musk was involved.

Now it’s personal.

Musk then announced that StarLink, now unable to collect user fees, would provide internet service to Brazilians for free. De Moraes responded by ordering a bankrupting daily fine against any Brazilian citizen who accesses Twitter through StarLink or any other way. No Twitter for you!

“De Moraes’ defenders,” CNN reported, “have said his actions aimed at X have served to protect democracy.” Because, of course, the last thing democracy needs these days is citizens informing themselves outside of official government-controlled channels.

How did we get here? First of all, during the pandemic, the government of the freedom-loving United States of America taught all these other governments how it’s done. Second, when you give unaccountable bureaucrats any laws to censor citizens, such as pandemic-era disinformation laws, they will always twist the speech laws to conform to whatever political shape is required to meet the needs of the controlling party’s next election cycle.

For instance, just two weeks ago, we watched EU technocrats try to twist their hate speech laws to stop Europeans from watching Elon Musk’s interview with President Donald Trump. They threatened Musk with the vague charge of “amplification of harmful content.” Fortunately, Musk told them to bugger off. ...

The fact that any speech law, sooner or later (usually sooner) will ultimately be abused is the precise reason why the Founders were so very perfectly clear when they drafted the First Amendment of our Constitution. In relevant part, it says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

No. Law. Zero, zilch, nada.

None. No laws. Not for hate speech, disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, or any other kind of speech inconvenient to the narrative, no matter how unfairly critical of the government it may be.

That’s why the U.S., more and more, once again, despite all odds and internal enemies, is becoming the world’s final, shaky redoubt of freedom. Because outside America, where our Constitution’s grace does not extend, the dark night of fascism falls once more, dimming the light of liberty to a faint flicker.

That’s why the upcoming U.S. election is also the most important election facing Brazilians, English, French, Germans, and all the rest, even though they won’t get to vote. (Well, not unless they illegally crossed the border and got hooked up with a good NGO, but that’s a different story.) ...

Having failed to cough up a new pandemic with which to plague the 2024 election cycle, global censorship has become the globalists’ last gasp. To me, it resembles another pandemic-style overreach, and, I believe, is doomed to fail. But they’re not going down without a fight.

The best news of all is that the enemies of freedom are terrified of free speech because it works. It’s our most effective weapon, and it’s the easiest weapon to deploy, because all we need do is keep talking.

They want a fight? A fight is exactly what they are going to get. Bring it.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

—Mark Zuckerberg

What are the implications of this admission from the CEO of one of the largest social media platforms in the world?

Jeffrey Tucker, Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute, an organization that puts out excellent editorial commentary regularly, takes a hard look at the repercussions of our current administration’s unprecedented actions against the freedom of expression in an article (full text below).

Here are the some of the big takeaways:

Outright censorship is only part of the problem. By limiting engagement with a piece of content, users will mistakenly believe that what is offered does not resonate with most people. In other words, if a ton of people have taken the time to watch, listen or read something it will motivate others to check it out. I can personally attest that this is continuing today on another massive platform, YouTube (see below)

Those of us who have been trying to express the problems with the lockdowns, mandates, etc. may have wrongly concluded that the public was too ignorant to understand what was transpiring. The reality is that by limiting exposure to such opinions, people were unaware that there were a lot of qualified voices offering a counter narrative.

The fallout of this form censorship is in our faces right now. Democratic nominee for VP, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz beat Dr. Scott Jensen in a gubernatorial race in 2022. Jensen is a highly credentialed physician who saw through the simplistic “safe and effective” mantra. He lost to Walz by 8%, a substantial margin, but one that likely existed because of the broad suppression of counter narrative voices like his. Had platforms like Zuckerberg’s stayed out of the public debate we would have likely had a different Democratic ticket today as well as a completely different public discussion around the upcoming election.

Independent candidate for POTUS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has sued the Biden administration for the very same attack on free expression that Zuckerberg is confessing to. While that case continues to be swatted around with injunctions being enforced and then dropped, the FB CEO is publicly confirming Kennedy’s allegations.

It’s my hope that Zuckerberg’s candid letter will prompt other platforms to admit to their complicity in this egregious assault on the foundation of democracy. The reality is that this is a big but first step. The distortion of public debate continues right now.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes.

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. ...

What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate.

We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this.

People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced! ...

A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.

Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election. ...

And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.

When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said. ...

Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. They see the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to 1 support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart.

It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should they take back the White House. ...

At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception, and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year.

Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times.

It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be. ...