patrick.net

Something weird has gone wrong with the narrative. Yesterday, I reported an unexpected, even if half-hearted, defense of Twitter/X and free speech appearing in the weekend’s Economist. Now it has happened again. Yesterday, the Washington Post’s full editorial board ran its op-ed under the unlikely headline, “In this free speech fight, Musk’s X has marked the right position.”

My best guess is the polls show strong support for Elon in his battle with Brazil’s unhinged Supreme Court and its villainous, Darth Vader-like mouthpiece, Alexandre de Moraes. So instead of attacking Musk this time, they’re siding with him. Consider this astonishing paragraph from WaPo’s editorial board:

If this sounds authoritarian, it is. Whatever the threat to democracy that
the accounts Mr. Moraes wanted gone might have posed, the threat from
one government official limiting the speech of 220 million people is
greater. Taken together with Mr. Moraes's choice to freeze the assets of
internet-provider Starlink, a separate company of Mr. Musk's, this
move aligns Brazil not with the free world but with the likes of China
and Russia.

In contrast with the Economist’s weak defense, the WaPo didn’t mince its words. It even agreed, and I am not making this up, Elon has the right to speak his own mind:

For all that, Brazilians shouldn't have to put up with a government
suppressing political viewpoints, however abhorrent a court might think
those opinions are. Mr. Musk himself has a right to speak his mind, and
to legal due process, notwithstanding Brazilian President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva's demagogic take to the contrary: "The world is not obliged
to put up with [Mr. Musk's] far-right free for all just because he is rich,"
he has said. This response reflects badly on the democratic vocation of
Mr. da Silva, who was indeed legitimately elected in 2022. And the
entire episode is turning into a cautionary tale for democracies that
believe the answer to troublesome online expression is to suppress it.

WaPo may someday regret admitting Elon has the right to speak his own mind. But how could this happen? Maybe it’s because Brazilians seem to be ignoring Justice Moraes’s recent Twitter ban. Despite the threat of apocalyptic $10K/day fines, X remains the top downloaded app on the Brazilian app store. If most Brazilians defy their Supreme Court, as Musk has done, the lawfare system will fail as a practical matter, and the court will lose its authority.

After all, de Moraes can’t lock them all up for tweeting.

Maybe de Moraes went too far? True, banning all Twitter posts in Brazil with a single judicial order is much more economical than censoring them one by one. But was it a stretch too far, even for the Washington Post? Have the narrative spinners declared defeat, retreating to fight again another day? Is Constitutional common sense winning the day? (Haha, not likely, I know.)