Barroso, speaking in Rio de Janeiro on the sidelines of the J20, a summit of the heads of G20 supreme courts, said the far-right movement was “trying to create a problem that doesn’t exist” with claims of censorship.
“For the truth, visit X.com!” Musk said in an email when contacted about Barroso’s comments.
Musk’s earlier comments were seized upon by the Brazilian right, including supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who have adopted the Tesla chief executive as a talismanic figure.
After Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X to block several accounts last month, without specifying the precise grounds for the order, Musk responded that the justice was a “dictator” and posted images mocking him online.
Musk initially said the platform would not comply with the court orders, arguing they violated Brazilian laws. X later reversed course and agreed to comply, but is appealing against the court’s decision.
Musk’s initial threats not to comply led De Moraes to include the billionaire in a long-running investigation into the activities of so-called “digital militias”.
Over the past several years the Supreme Court has pushed to tackle far-right movements, focusing on ordering social media platforms to remove disinformation and accounts seen to be inciting violence or actions against the democratic state.
This, however, has given rise to claims of judicial over-reach and censorship, particularly as those who have their accounts taken offline have little or sometimes no way to appeal against the decision.
Coup plot
As evidence of the risks to Brazilian democracy, Barroso pointed to a recent federal police investigation, which alleges that Bolsonaro and several senior military officers developed detailed plans for a coup d’état following the former president’s election defeat in 2022.
The alleged plot eventually fizzled out and Bolsonaro denies any wrongdoing.
Barroso also highlighted the riots in Brasília in January last year, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed and vandalised Congress, the supreme court and the presidential palace.
Many of the rioters demanded the military intervene to overturn the election of current left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“People that think we exaggerated must know what kind of forces we had to fight. We are talking about people that prepared a coup d’état. We are talking about people that invaded [Brazil’s institutions] with fury,” said Barroso.
Free speech activists have raised concerns that the Supreme Court’s demands to remove content have continued long past the country’s 2022 election cycle.
Fernando Schuler, a professor of political science at Insper in São Paulo, who has been critical of the supreme court, said: “An idea has been created [by the court] that it is up to them to defend democracy. The mistake is the assumption that in order to defend democracy you must allow or tolerate the infringement of fundamental constitutional rights.”
Barroso admitted it was difficult to know where to draw the line between freedom of expression and attacks on democracy, saying “it will always depend on the risks you are running”.
But he said incitement to violence against the state was unacceptable.
“You can criticise the Supreme Court and say I don’t like it. Or you can even say [worse]. But you cannot say ‘let’s invade these buildings and remove these people’. There’s a clear line between these two things,” he said.
Written by: Bryan Harris in Rio de Janeiro. Additional reporting by Hannah Murphy in San Francisco
© Financial Times
