Pushing back at Musk's hybrid war on Brazil's judiciary
Documenting the last 3 weeks as a foot soldier in the hybrid war to protect Brazil's sovereignty
On April 7, 2024, Elon Musk shared a tweet thread by public relations company owner Michael Shellenberger that had tens of thousands of shares and immediately viralized around the world. Thanks to a research team at Rio de Janeiro Federal University, we now know that 48% of the accounts that liked and shared Musk's initial endorsement of what Shellenberger dubbed, "Twitter Files Brazil" were bots, representing a kind of censorship by flooding out dissenting opinions by non-millionaires who don't have their own bot armies and creating a critical mass which led to a snowball effect as casual users put more legitimacy to his comments due to the artificially exaggerated appearance of popularity.
I'm writing this post to document how I responded. In his Twitter Files Brazil thread, Shellengberger claimed that Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Morais had threatened criminal charges against Twitter Brazil for refusing to de-platform "political enemies", which is the term he used to describe suspects in a criminal investigation on the Jan. 8, 2023 coup attempt - an attempt which aimed to install a military dictatorship, cancel the 2022 presidential elections and dissolve the Supreme Court. He accused Brazil's Supreme Court of violating free speech laws, but his basis for making this claim was US law, as Brazil has a very different Constitution and interpretation of free speech rights, in which they can't be used to infringe on other essential rights, like the right to free and fair elections.
In order to explain this key flaw in Shellenberger's argument and to push back against a few 5th column types in the Brazilian left, I immediately wrote an article, published on Brazil's 9th largest online news site, Brasil 247, on April 8, called "Debating freedom of expression today is a smokescreen orchestrated by the far right: freedom of expression is important, but the issue at play is sovereignty."
Elon Musk's algorithms were stacked against me but I went to work for hours a day pushing back at Shellenberger and the right wing billionaires, politicians and celebrities who were pushing his "totalitarian Brazil" narrative with a series of tweet threads, 7 of which garnered over 1000 likes and hundreds of shares, examples of which I will link here (click on the images to see the threads):
On April 10, I did an interview on Radio Cultura Nordeste about Twitter Files Brazil. That day, I published the transcript in English on Substack here, and two days later it ran in Portuguese, on Brasil 247, here.
On April 10, lawyer and former Secretary of Digital Rights in Brazil's Justice Ministry under Flavio Dino, unmasked the central lie in Twitter Files Brazil. Shellenberger had cherry picked paragraphs from a series of unrelated Twitter internal communications and manipulated them to make it look like Alexandre Moraes had pressed criminal charges when, in fact, the only criminal charges filed against Twitter in the time period that the communications were taken from were made by GAECO, the Sao Paulo DA's Office's organized crime unit, after Twitter refused their request to turn over user data on a leader of the PCC organized crime group. Confronted by Aranha, Shellenberger admitted that he had no information proving his statement about Moraes, apologized, asked for donations from Brazilians on Twitter, then left the country.
I immediately recorded a report detailing this information for TeleSur's TV news program "From the South", which was broadcast in over 50 countries, which you can watch here.
While continually posting information to push back at the false narrative that was gaining steam internationally, thanks to bad faith actors like Glenn Greenwald, I interacted with a user who turned out to be Maya Morris, a union leader from Shellenberger's home town of San Francisco, who had been following his disinformation campaign work for years. I interviewed her for a Brazilian audience who had never heard of him before Twitter Files Brazil, circulated it with contacts in the Brazilian Workers Party and published it on Brasil 247, where it was widely read and circulated.
Meanwhile, I got in contact with Estela Aranha and conducted a long interview with her about differences between Brazil and US speech laws and how she discovered that Shellenberger was lying. It took 3 days to properly transcribe, translate to English and edit, and ended up being published in the following portals:
1) My substack blog;
2) Counterpunch;
3) Brasilwire;
4) FAIR;
5) Progresive International; and
6) Tribune.
Meanwhile, as I was working on the interview, Aranha forwarded me a lot of supporting information and sources, including video footage from an April 10, 2023 meeting that she participated in between lawyers from social media companies and directors of Brazil's "Safe Schools" emergency task force. The task force had been set up in response to an epidemic of school shootings that was being cheer leaded and egged on by fake profiles named after white supremacist school and church shooting terrorists, and the Federal Police had discovered that most of them were being operated by illegal neo-Nazi cells. As the video shows, Twitter was the only social media company that pushed back against de-platforming them. I cut a 2 minute clip, subtitled it and ran it on Twitter, where it was seen by 136,000 people and watched by 39,000. Watch it here.
On April 20, I interviewed Kit Klarenberg, the Grayzone journalist who was de-platformed by Twitter in February, 2024, about his opinion on Elon Musk's commitment to fighting censorship. Conducted for a Brazilian audience, I translated it and it ran on the same day at Brasil 247.
After Musk started his war against Brazil's Judiciary, Brasil 247 ran a campaign to encourage all of its readers to migrate to BlueSky. I opened an account, got 2200 followers within the first week, and posted all of the information and article links I mentioned above there as well, with some article links being more widely shared than on Twitter, despite my much larger number of Twitter followers.
I have posted all of this to share tactics, but also to point out how exhausting it is to work voluntarily in these types of moments, as I did during the 2015-2021 period of the coup against Dilma Rousseff and the political imprisonment of Lula. The only above-mentioned activity I was remunerated for was the TeleSur report. Therefore, I would like to ask readers who appreciate the type of activist work I do who can afford it to take out a paid subscription to this Substack account.