Brazil's Supreme Court Bans Rumble

Ruling comes two days after Florida lawsuit against Justice Alexandre de Moraes

Brazil's Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes has issued an order to ANATEL, Brazil's national communications agency, to work with internet service providers to block the Rumble social media platform from transmission in Brazil until the company agrees to obey Brazilian law.

The ruling, comes just two days after the Rumble and Truth Social filed a lawsuit against Moraes, alleging that he violated US freedom of speech laws, in a Florida federal court which (like US free speech laws themselves) has no legal jurisdiction in Brazil.

Moraes, writes that Rumble doesn't respect Brazilian law, and facilitates "massive dissemination of Nazi, racist, and fascist rhetoric."

Background

Like many countries around the world, including Germany and France, Nazism and other types of apologies for fascism are illegal in Brazil.

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 eschews absolutism in favor of a "harmony of rights". According to this legal concept, there is a core group of essential human rights in Brazil, including freedom of speech, but no single right can be used to deny citizens of other essential human rights.

One example of how this works is the issue of pedophilia. In the US, NAMBLA, which is defended by the ACLU, enjoys the "free speech" right of being able to publish guides instructing men how to seduce and sexually prey on young boys. In Brazil, this kind of behavior is not protected free speech because if violates the 1990 Statute of the Child and Adolescent, which guarantees children's rights to "freedom, respect and dignity."

Likewise in Brazil, as in Germany and France, Nazism is illegal. The legal justification is that it promotes racial superiority and incites violence against specific groups, violating their rights to equality and dignity as established in the 1988 Constitution and the Caó Law of 1989.

On Wednesday, February 19, Moraes issued an order giving Rumble a 48-hour deadline to designate legal representation in Brazil. In an act of disobedience reminiscent of X in August, 2024, the company refused to comply. Like X, this resulted in a nation-wide ban of the platform, which will only be lifted once the company agrees to obey the law, as X did last year in order to come back on line in Brazil.

In the ruling, Moraes wrote, "The attempt by Rumble to place itself outside the bounds of Brazilian law demonstrates its clear intent to maintain and allow the exploitation of social networks, with the massive dissemination of misinformation and the potential for harmful and unlawful use of technology and artificial intelligence, thereby endangering democracy, as has already been attempted in Brazil and in various countries around the world by the new extremist digital populism."

A passage in the lawsuit filed by Rumble and Truth Social on February 19 reads, "Judge Moraes' extrajudicial tactics are also in direct conflict with US public policy, as articulated in EO 14203, issued by President Trump earlier this month."

This illustrates a carefully crafted "authoritarian" judiciary narrative, first created by the Bolsonaro family in 2021 under guidance from Steve Bannon as a preemptive attempt to weave a "stop the steal" narrative against Brazil's Superior Electoral Court. It has bled into the US media, thanks to opportunistic pundits like Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson, and even creeped its way into the New York Times at the hands of former Silicon Valley reporter turned Brazil correspondent, Jack Nicas.

The fact of the matter, however, is that Brazil and the US are two completely different countries with different laws. Aggressively pushing the idea that the libertarian, absolutist interpretation of the the 1st Amendment that first came in vogue in the US during the late 60s is universal and should be obeyed by everyone in the World is another pompous chapter in the long history of US imperialism.

Meanwhile, the chance that Rumble and Truth Social will be able to ever impose a sentence from a US court against a foreign Supreme Court Justice seems slim. As a renowned Brazilian legal scholar told me off the record this morning, "In theory, if Moraes loses, they will try to execute the decision in Brazil, but our courts will probably not recognize it. I think Rumble just did this to sow confusion."

Rumble has to decide if it wants to enable a special, Nazi-free version of its platform for a Brazilian audience. As Brazil is the country with the world's fifth-largest number of social media platform users, it just may end up following Elon Musks lead and deciding to comply with the law.