What’s At Stake in the Censorship War

The fight for a free Internet is raging globally.

The censorship war has hit a flashpoint. Late last month, Brazil banned Elon Musk’s social media site, X, after Musk refused a government order to suppress seven dissident accounts. Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes responded by restricting access to the platform across the country. This story has direct implications in Brazil and also reveals the hidden stakes of the global censorship war.

One way to measure the influence of a political regime is to trace the flow of money, goods, people, information, and force. These are the raw materials of politics, and the form that these materials take helps to shape the form of the political regime.

When the Cold War ended, many Western elites invested their hopes in the “open society”: a global system of democracies that ensured the free transmission of trade, capital, migration, and data, with limited use of force. But this system, which seemed to be consolidating through the world, was challenged by the rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere—including in the United States.

Elites responded by cracking down on right-wing voices to prop up the progressive status quo. In Brazil, for example, the government wants to restrict the flow of right-wing opinion, which dominates on X, so that it can solidify support for its left-wing government. For opponents of right-wing populism, controlling the flow of information is critical because it influences the flow of all other goods. If you cannot freely transmit information, you cannot shape political life.

The Brazil conflict reveals that the crucial locus of resistance to the consolidation of the “open society”—in reality, a system of left-wing hegemony—is technology. Prior to Musk’s takeover of X, governments had developed a working relationship with the major social media platforms, which were, through incentives and aligned interests, restricting the speech of conservative journalists, activists, and political figures, including that of a sitting president, Donald Trump.

Musk, however, has disrupted this consensus not only by purchasing the most important social media platform but also by exposing the collusion between the government and the company’s previous leadership to censor political opinion. And he has refused to bow to foreign governments’ demands of further content moderation.

This battle is being fought around the world. In the United States, a heated conflict over censorship, disinformation, and free speech rages on. In England, the police are shutting down speech and arresting citizens who publish disfavored opinions online. The European Union has passed the Digital Services Act, which will further restrict the range of opinion under the guise of “fighting disinformation.” And like Brazil, other nations have blocked certain platforms entirely.

Suppressing dissent is the ultimate goal. Elite opinion around the world is remarkably consistent; the rise of populist ideologies, formulated and disseminated online, has become a major threat to these elites’ worldview and power.

What comes next? Conservatives in Brazil and elsewhere fear that pro-censorship institutions will move from soft to hard power—that they will “dismantle democracy to save democracy.” We can see this transition in real time, from soft versions of censorship, such as politically motivated fact-checking, to more aggressive means, such as restricting the accounts of dissidents, to the most extreme form: arrest and expropriation, which has already become a reality in countries such as England and Brazil.

The bottom line is that Elon Musk’s fight for a free and open Internet is our fight. It is critical to preserve at least one platform capable of resisting the transnational consolidation of power and the censorship of its ideological enemies. We must fight to win, not only in Brazil, but everywhere. This means supporting Musk’s X and resisting draconian censorship laws wherever they emerge. The coming months and years will be decisive.

This article was originally published in City Journal.