Alex and Evelyn are joined by Carlos Affonso Souza, a Professor of Law at Rio de Janeiro State University and the Director of the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro, to talk about Brazil's ban of X, the local legal and political context, and how this is similar or different to other show downs between regulators and American tech platforms.
Alex Stamos: Pretty much no democracy in the world has free speech protections like the United States, right? Almost nobody else has anything as strong as the First Amendment. Is that an accurate statement Evelyn? Would you say that there's any other major democracy than the United States that has anything as strong as the First Amendment?
Evelyn Douek: No. I mean the First Amendment is famously exceptional in that regard.
Alex Stamos: Right, which is why it's hard to be a First Amendment scholar I guess, in any other country, right?
Evelyn Douek: That's right.
Alex Stamos: That would be ... So that's why you had to come to the U.S.
Evelyn Douek: Kind of walked in, right, exactly.
Alex Stamos: When you grew up as a little girl in Australia and you're like, "I want to be a First Amendment scholar," you really had no choice-
Evelyn Douek: That's it, I had to move.
Alex Stamos: -But to move, yeah.
Evelyn Douek: Welcome to Moderated Content's stochastically released, slightly random, and not at all comprehensive news update from the world of trust and safety with myself, Evelyn Douek, and Alex Stamos. It has been a big few weeks for regulators trying to bring social media platforms to heel. Last episode, we discussed France's arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and what that might mean about the shifting sands of countries trying to hold tech executives responsible for harmful content on their services.
And this week we're coming back over this side of the Atlantic and headed to Brazil, where yet another fight is happening about platforms' responsibilities to respect local laws. I'm sure all of our listeners know the basic contours of the fight between Elon Musk and the Brazilian Supreme Court, but this episode we want to do a little bit more of a deep dive and get into the local context. And in order to help us, we are joined today by Carlos Afonso Souza, a professor of law at Rio de Janeiro State University, and the Director of the Institute for Technology & Society in Rio de Janeiro. Thank you very much for joining us Carlos.
Carlos Alfonso ...: My pleasure, Evelyn, good to be here with you. Good to be with Alex as well.
Alex Stamos: Hi, Carlos. Thank you.
Evelyn Douek: All right, so let's start at the beginning. We are now recording on September 13th, about two weeks since the ban of X was first ordered. And I'm curious what happens if you were to go to your phone or to go to your computer and open up the X app or the X website, what do you see?
Carlos Alfonso ...: So I will see just a page letting me know that the posts are not being updated as they should. And probably the next thing I will do is to open up my Blue Sky or Threads app to get in touch with news and conversation and getting this up-to-date feeling that X used to provide with the trending topics and the way in which we used to use the app. And I think it's important to mention X in Brazil, it's not as big as it's in the U.S., but it's still a very large audience of something around like 20, 22 million users. So depending on the report, Brazil tends to be like the sixth or fifth larger audience for X, so we're talking about a huge impact on the operation, on the platform, and of course huge impact for Brazilian users as well.
Alex Stamos: In the United States. Twitter also was never a huge platform, but the users were of the elite, was the media, academics, rich people and celebrities. Is that true in Brazil too? Is those 22 million people over more influential and is that why this has been more important than perhaps other 22 million person social networks would be?
Carlos Alfonso ...: Alex, I think that's pretty much true for X in Brazil, but X had I think two other components. So first of all, a somewhat younger audience that dealing with memes, sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor there was very typical to Brazilian Twitter. So mostly I think you've got it right, you have journalists, you have influential people there, but you have as well the whole political conversation happening on Twitter. And that's important as well because since Elon Musk ended up buying the app, we end up seeing an uptick on a way in which people more towards the right, sometimes far-right, perspectives on political views end up getting really active on X, especially because the lack of proper content moderation on some content that, well, would probably be removed in other platforms.
Evelyn Douek: Okay, so whatever way you slice it, this is a pretty big deal and a pretty significant restriction on speech, on the internet and speech in Brazil. And so how did we get here? What's the justification for the ban? What laws did X break that led to this blocking order in Brazil?
Carlos Alfonso ...: So I think it's important to understand that of course free speech is one of the entry points to this whole conversation, but as far as we understand, X has been reliant to comply with judicial orders on several grounds, not only political disagreements or postings that have been made by the former President Bolsonaro supporters. So I think it's important to mention for instance, that just very recently there was this report that there was a lot of doxing going on on Twitter in Brazil, including the name, the address, salaries, contacts of police authorities that got involved in the actions ordered by Justice Moraes. So people who got the police authorities on their homes to confiscate their cell phones, to do search and warrants, they were exposing the names of those police officers. And that's something that as far as I understand, it's pretty much against the Twitter anti-doxing policies. So Twitter has been refrained to comply with judicial orders from sometime now and well, I think we can all agree that it's not up to a company to say what it is constitutional or not in the country. This is up to the Supreme Court of the country.
But then we been leaving Brazil in this very divided, I think, perspective on this whole place because there is one discussion going on in social media and then you can see the fight between Elon Musk against Justice Moraes. But on the other hand, you have the legal procedures in which the Supreme Court tried to get the company to comply. And then by the end of the day, Musk ended up firing all the employees on Twitter in Brazil, closing down the offices in the country, and then ultimately failing to have a legal representative in the country. So that ended up leading for the irregularity such to say of the situation of X in Brazil. So it's a bit about freedom of expression and political disagreement. There is a lot of infringing content in the platform that getting gap removed, and there's the whole conversation about the irregularity of the situation of the company in Brazil right now.
Alex Stamos: This isn't the first time though Brazilian judges have tangled with American platforms, is it?
Carlos Alfonso ...: No Alex, that's true. If we go down the memory lane, late 2006, early 2007, YouTube got blocked in Brazil because of this one viral video containing intimate scene about an influencer in Brazil at the time. This blocking ended up lasting just a couple of days, especially because the judge who ordered the blocking suddenly realized that when he decided to block YouTube in Brazil, he was blocking not only this one video but blocking the live broadcasting of the Supreme Court judgments because it's important to mention the Supreme Court in Brazil and that doing live broadcasting of the decisions on a regular basis.
We had the blocking of called Secret back in 2013, and this blocking was quite unique because it was not target to the infrastructure of the internet, but to the app stores. So it ordered Google and Apple to remove this app from the app stores.
And we have probably the most famous case is about WhatsApp. Back in 2015, 16, we had four blocking orders of WhatsApp in Brazil. Those were cases in which the judiciary failed to understand that the company could not hinder the content of the messages of the communications being sent through the application. So it was a huge discussion about end-to-end encryption. And those four blocking orders, they were suspended by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court end up receiving two lawsuits contesting the blocking of WhatsApp back then.
Those two cases are still pending judgments, and for our conversation of today, it might be interesting to mention that those judgments had begun somewhat like three years ago, but the judgment was stopped by Justice Moraes himself who claimed that he needed a little bit more time to examine those cases. So I think it's important for people to know that the Supreme Court in Brazil has those two cases about the blocking of apps in Brazil, the constitutionality of blocking of apps in Brazil, there is still pending decision. And then we have, well, the blocking of Telegram that was not end up being implemented as a whole because Telegram was failing to communicate with Brazilian authorities, but suddenly they decided to, after giving a very interesting answer, that all the Brazilian authorities' communications were not going through the email that was being read at the time. And then we have the blocking of X. so that lead us to the present time so that we can discuss the blocking of X itself.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, so I think that's a great segue because I think it highlights a couple of things. I mean one is that there's this longer history of a pretty different legal context, and obviously one of the things that platforms have to grapple with in the modern world is different standards of free expression around the world and how they respect local countries' laws. And so in one way we can situate this current blocking of X within that longer context, but one of the things that I'm trying to grapple with is some of the things that seem unique or different about this current showdown. And one of the things that you just highlighted, and one of the things that all of the headlines have been talking about, is the way in which it really seems or has been painted as this showdown between Musk on the one hand and this single particular justice on the other hand, Justice Alexander de Moraes of the Supreme Court in Brazil.
And to foreign listeners, this seems quite remarkable, right, the idea that this single justice could be playing such a large role in ordering investigations, ordering blocking orders, crafting those orders, and wearing many different hats all at once. That's not how the American legal system or the Australian legal system for that matter works. And it seems different to maybe some of these previous legal showdowns that you were talking about. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that. What is the role of this particular justice and how did he come to occupy such a prominent stature in this debate?
Carlos Alfonso ...: Right. So one thing that is pretty much peculiar on the Brazilian judiciary system is that a single judge can decide on something with a nationwide scale, and especially a single judge from the States for instance, can order the blocking of an app that well could be performed throughout the country. This is something that you don't need in specific legislation on internet for that. Our civil procedure codes has this provision that every single judge has the power to determine the actions that might be needed for the judicial order to be complied with. So usually what we see on a daily basis is judges ordering fines if the judicial decision is not complied within certain days. This of course can escalate to issues such as the blocking of an app, the closing down of a service. So that's something that you have on the civil procedure code.
But on the other hand, we have a law in Brazil called the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights that was approved back in 2014 that deals with a wide range of topics concerning cyber law from net neutrality to data protection to liability of intermediaries. But especially there is this one provision in the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, Article 12, that says that if you fail to comply with the Brazilian law on data protection, you could have your data collection activities suspended. So what we have been seeing in the last at least 10 years is that when this Article 12 mentions that suspension of activities that were supposed to be the suspension of data collection activities in Brazil, this provision has been interpreted on a broader way. So to suspend not only the processing of personal data but suspending the app itself. So the whole discussion that we have in the Supreme Court nowadays is on the interpretation of this provision of the Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, but to mention that that's the reasoning that Justice Moraes is using to block X in this particular case.
And just to answer your question about how Justice Moraes got himself in situation, it's important to highlight that he was the President of the Brazilian Electoral Court, which is another peculiarity of the Brazilian legal system. So the judiciary power in Brazil when it comes to elections, we have a separate set of courts and judges that will serve as judges. So the judiciary power in Brazil not only judge on the cases regarding elections, on content on platforms as well, but also organizes the election, so it exerts like this assertive power to organize elections in Brazil. So Justice Moraes in the 2022 elections, he was the one who was the President of the Electoral court, so he was the one that ended up supervising the elections and ended up seeing what happens after the elections.
So just to get everyone on the same page, after the elections of 2022 in Brazil, we had attempt of a coup d'etat in Brazil. Like as the U.S. has January 6th, we have January 8th. On January 8th, 2023, people stormed public buildings in Brasilia in an attempt to get the army to fall on their sides and for the results of the elections being overturned. That never happened, but that ended up not only spotlighting the role of Justice Moraes as someone who has just overseen the elections, but also since 2019, he was the one appointed by the {resident of the Supreme Court at the time to spearhead some investigations on attacks on the judiciary and attacks on the Democratic regime. So he right now end up having those two positions as a former President of Electoral Court and as someone that in the Supreme Court is the one responsible for the investigations on the attacks on the judiciary and anti-Democratic acts as the name goes for this investigation.
Evelyn Douek: And that power can include personally issuing orders to platforms to take down certain posts or accounts, is that correct? On the basis that they're spreading what we might call fake news or misinformation, is that right?
Carlos Alfonso ...: Yes, certainly those investigations and the focusing a lot on tackling this information online.
Evelyn Douek: Yeah. And are those orders all public or are they secret? How does that work?
Carlos Alfonso ...: Some of them are public, some of them are under seal, and that's a huge issue because especially when you have Elon Musk coming up with this whole scheme of discussing how this is pushing the platform into the limits of removing content that is supposedly legal, when we don't know what type of content we're talking about. The whole conversation about the actions of Musk and Moraes tend to be a little murky, but from the decisions that we know and the blocking decision of X was publicized, we can see that on the way that Justice Moraes describes the decision, it's all focused on Elon Musk and how he ended up turning to this political actor that ended up using X as a platform for people who are attacking the judiciary, contesting electoral integrity, end up finding a place without proper content moderation so they could gather, they could say whatever they want, and how that has been damaging for the whole political discussion in Brazil.
And especially, and this is a very controversial thing in Justice Moraes' decision, I think it's important to mention Starlink, it's really key in Brazil to offer connectivity in remote places such as in the Amazon Forest and in other areas in Brazil. So if you go through the decision of Justice Moraes, Starlink is included in the decision on a very controversial way in which Justice Moraes ended blocking some assets of Starlink in Brazil for they to be used to comply with the judicial orders because thinks X is leaving the country, there's a lot of pending judicial decisions of people claiming damages that X might be well supposed to pay. So who's going to pay for that if X is leaving the country?
So the decision of Justice Moraes is this far-reaching decision in which he end up painting this picture of Elon Musk as the single person that is using this conglomerate of different companies such as internet provider in Starlink and a social media platform in X to advance a political agenda and failing to comply with the judicial order and creating this whole damaging effects on the way in which people end up seeing and respecting authorities in Brazil.
Alex Stamos: So I think this is a good point to make. So I think we could separate what's going on here into what's kind of a standard conflict between non-U.S. democracies and American social media platforms that almost pretty much no democracy in the world has free speech protections like the United States, right? Almost nobody else has anything as strong as the First Amendment. Is that an accurate statement Evelyn? Would you say that there's any other major democracy than the United States that has anything as strong as the First Amendment?
Evelyn Douek: No, I mean the First Amendment is famously exceptional in that regard.
Alex Stamos: Right, which is why it's hard to be a First Amendment scholar I guess in any other country, that would be-
Evelyn Douek: That's right.
Alex Stamos: So that's why you had to come to the U.S.
Evelyn Douek: Kind of walked in, right, exactly.
Alex Stamos: When you grew up as a little girl in Australia and you're like, "I want to be a First Amendment scholar," you really had no choice-
Evelyn Douek: That's it, I had to move.
Alex Stamos: -But to move. So this is a conflict that is faced by American companies all over the world. And I think what you normally see here of the trade-off is you have different trade-off in democracies versus autocracies. So in democracies what you often see is every democracy has a different kind of set of things that they specifically block. In Germany famously and in many European countries famously it is pro-Nazi content, of which they define in very different ways. It could be actual content that is pro-national socialist party swastikas and such, all the way up to actual sometimes historical images and such, they won't let you post. And especially in Germany for obvious reasons, that gets problematic. Also too more controversially, things that are seen as pro-Nazi that actually infringe upon current political parties all the way to then all these local laws like you have here in Brazil that have to do with your historical issues in Brazil around your very young democracy.
As we've talked about, Brazil had a military dictatorship within our lifetimes, or maybe not Evelyn's, but yours and mine Carlos, our lifetimes. Brazil's democracy is quite young and you have these laws to protect it, and this incident comes out of the potential military coup that was being fermented by a loser in election. So this is something that happens all the time with these platforms and kind of the standard thing that happens is the platforms resist, they fight it within the legal system of that country, and then they usually within a democratic system at least, they give up under protest and then they block it only within that country. The line almost always is, "But we will not take it down globally," and the global reach issue has been the big fight.
And as Evelyn talks about all the time and our other colleagues at Stanford, that is the big fight and that is what all these democracies are always fighting is like this happens in Austria, this happens everywhere, it's like, "No, no, no, we want you to take it down everywhere," and that's where the line gets drawn and that's where you then bring in other court systems and you say, "Oh, well I've got an order over here that I have to keep it up and we've got treaties and all that kind of stuff."
So that is kind of the standard part here, and I think we need to point out that this is where Twitter has had this line and has had this fight over and over again and until this moment, Musk's decisions were not totally inconsistent with Twitter's overall fight, which is that they have complied with orders. This year, he has taken down speech that would've been protected in the United States that directly is against the ruling party in places like India, did it very quickly in India. He does it in places where the ruling party is in some cases trending towards authoritarianism, but doing so in a way that he seems to agree with politically, and/or it seems that he might have other economic interests. India is a place where he really wants his other companies to have access where he has visited and met with the Prime Minister many times. There's lots of pictures of him shaking the prime minister's hand. And so he might have other proprietary interest and he's using X as a mechanism to demonstrate his fealty to the Indian ruling party where perhaps he's not as interested in Brazil.
So it certainly doesn't politically agree with the current ruling party, but that's pretty standard. There's some other parts of this though that aren't standard that I think we need to explore. And so one was the VPN blocking, right? Now that I think goes well beyond what you normally see here and then infringes directly upon the rights of individual Brazilians, so I think we should talk about that. And then the second is the going after the other companies, which I do not think we've ever seen that anywhere else. And then that starts to get really problematic because also then if you're talking about attacking SpaceX, you're talking about then the rights of individual Brazilians to have, especially in a country as widespread as Brazil with people living in rural areas and such, you're talking about really infringing about the rights of Brazilians have high speed internet access. So how is that being seen by Brazilians, both the VPN blocking and the SpaceX issue?
Carlos Alfonso ...: So Alex, very quickly, just to agree with your point, we are not facing our usual internet company fighting back a judicial order on different standards about free speech and then complying with the order within a couple of months with a geo-blocking approach. This is way beyond this point. I don't think we saw it on this scale to have the owner of a social media company turn to a political actor favoring political candidates in different countries. So this is quite new because once Elon Musk turns into the owner of X, he can pick his allies and his adversaries on the local level. And if you think about countries in which Starlink provides the only way for people to connect the internet, people might not know the name of his or her representative on the local council, but the person might know the name of Elon Musk. So he turns into a very important political actor, and I think this end up putting us on a new ground to discuss those issues.
But turning back to the judicial order to block X in Brazil and how people are reacting to that, so this order, we can separate it in three parts. So first one is the ordering of the blocking of X in Brazil nationwide, ordering the telecom agency in Brazil to communicate with the operators to block access to X in Brazil. So that's something that ended up dealing with the infrastructure of the internet in the country. The second part is ordering Google and Apple to remove the application, the X app, from the app stores, from the App stores and from the Play store respectively.
And it's important to mention that this second part on the original form of the decision used to even ban VPN apps in Brazil, and Justice Moraes changed his mind. So originally this decision ordered not only the removal of X from the app stores, but also the removal of every single VPN app from the app stores in Brazil. And this is something that is really, really remarkable because remarkable on how to fail to understand what a VPN is, especially because Justice Moraes ordered Google and Apple to remove VPN apps and then mention three or four examples and that set-
Alex Stamos: Right, there's like 500 in those-
Carlos Alfonso ...: Yes.
Alex Stamos: Plus you mentioned, this is where it also gets crazy, is like Brazil is the second-largest economy in the Americas. You have all of these large industrial companies. I didn't mention this before, I'm actually traveling to Brazil this weekend totally coincidentally, I'm giving the keynote at the largest cybersecurity conference in Latin America. It's called [inaudible 00:28:40] in Sao Paolo, and I'm going to meet with all of these companies, huge manufacturing companies, huge tractor companies, huge banks, they all use VPNs, right? So if you take out Cisco and Palo Alto and all the Juniper's VPNs, your humongous multi-billion dollar companies cannot operate, right? That is just, like you said, it is a complete misunderstanding of how the modern internet works and the fact that Brazil is a spectacularly important country in the world economy and that VPNs are a critical part of how that works.
Carlos Alfonso ...: It felt to me that Justice Moraes failed to understand this on a technical level. He might have felt that VPNs are a resource that are only used for you to access websites pretending to be some other place and that might be used for illegal purposes or something like that. And by the end of the day, once he orders something like this, he turned his decision into a cyber security problem. If we are up to remove VPN apps from Brazil, even your regular anti-virus app would have a VPN a feature embedded into it, so how could one see that?
Alex Stamos: Well, the operating system has a VPN, right?
Carlos Alfonso ...: Yep.
Alex Stamos: You go both Android and iOS have [inaudible 00:30:05] and often now they have Wire Guard and Open VPN support. Yeah, it's nuts. And it's also, I mean even if it wasn't a big corporate issue, it is the kind of thing you see out of the People's Republic of China or Iran, which I'm surprised that ... I mean this is I think where you have a structural issue in Brazil of the power these individual judges have that just as, I keep on saying this podcast, as an American I got some crap for this, but I to just have to proceed, I see this, I am recognizing that I have a bias here, but as an American it just seems kind of nuts that this is the power one human being has over 200 million other human beings, that his complete ignorance of how computers work can then be applied to 200 million other human beings without any kind of checks and balances.
Carlos Alfonso ...: [inaudible 00:30:52].
Evelyn Douek: Yeah, well, and just I'm curious to get your reaction to that Carlos sort of more broadly because I think another unique aspect of this order here compared with the other showdowns that we've seen in places like India and Turkey is that you might have governmental overreach or political orders to remove certain content from American platforms, but ordinarily they will come from the executive branch of the government or the Prime Minister or something along those lines and then the tech companies have the option of going to court and there might be issues around the independence or otherwise of the judicial system. But we have seen in some of these countries, even in some of these trending authoritarian countries, American tech platforms have been successful in getting courts to overturn the orders of the political party.
And that introduces some aspect of due process. The idea is that no single person should be able to make these decisions and even if they are political or apolitical, at least there's going to be some other independent third party injected or can be asked to come in and adjudicate the case. And that's what's so unique here is that there's these orders to these companies from this individual justice that some of them might be orders involving doxing content or things that maybe we all might agree should be something that the platform taken down. But some of them are in secret and some of them might be political content and some of them might be about the whims of this individual justice who as we've been talking about also has suddenly found himself in quite a personal battle with Elon Musk. It's all become quite personal and he's been prone to overreach in that context. Whatever we think of him and his politics, that's exactly the recipe for a situation where we would want to be checking those orders and to say, "Well, then the platform should go to court," well he is the court.
And I'm just curious for you as a law professor how you think about that, whether that's something that you have concerns about or whether that's just so sort of inherent in the Brazilian judicial context that it's not something that worries you?
Carlos Alfonso ...: So Evelyn, two quick comments. So first of all, I think it's important to highlight that those decisions by Justice Moraes, they can and some of them have been already analyzed by either the plenary or one chamber of the Supreme Court. So the first blocking order got confirmed by a group of other four justices and Justice Moraes, so it's a chamber of five justices, but we have some other lawsuits that have been brought to the Supreme Court directly challenging this order. So I think it is expected that the plenary of the Supreme Court will analyze this whole case, and even the chamber, even though the other four justices end up agreeing with Justice Moraes, there was this one justice, Justice Fux, that said that the VPN order, because there is a third element of the blocking order that is blocking every Brazilian user from using VPN to access Twitter in Brazil, which is something that by the end of the day I think fails to understand that Brazilian users have been using Twitter for like 12 years now, 15 years now.
So once you have the blocking order, I think it's only natural that people want to go back, even for people to get their stuff back to begin with. So there was this one Justice that mentioned that on his point of view, the banning of VPN should only apply to people that would use VPN to access Twitter and then there post some types of contents that could be handled illegal. But then again, even by saying this, he ended up agreeing with the blocking of the platform on a more global scale. So we have this due process I think requirements that we wound up leading Justice Moraes' decisions to be reviewed by a larger group while looking forward for the plenary to review this decision and see how the Supreme Court will end up agree on the blocking or not, how the Supreme Court will end up analyzing the VPN ban. I think that will be important because we never saw the Supreme Court in the plenary deciding on VPN, so I think this will be important as well.
And I think that's the natural outcome. Of course we can agree or disagree with some of Justice Moraes' decisions. I myself have been doing this for a while now, but as I said, I think we are in entirely new scenario right now on this U.S.-based company with this particular owner deciding to go rogue. Twitter is not posing itself as a good example for the other U.S.-based companies, tech companies in Brazil, like failing to come up with any trust and safety measure whatsoever and having your owner turning to a political actor. That's something that we never saw. And well, we can agree that that decision by the Supreme Court is extreme, of course it is, but I think we are in a very different situation and my fear is that Brazil serve as a testing ground for owners of social media that might want to turn into a political actor and that Elon Musk is just like a test in the waters with this.
Well, but this is just to say that does not exempt to the Supreme Court for being as technical as possible and analyzing as a whole the decision of the blocking order.
Alex Stamos: So this is an interesting question. Because of the breadth, are other companies getting involved? Because it's an order that's actually against Apple and Google, so have Apple and Google responded? And have you seen Brazilian companies come back and say, "Hey, this is crazy. You cannot take away our ability to use cryptography to do normal day-to-day business."?
Carlos Alfonso ...: I think this reaction's coming up, but it hasn't happened in real time. X end up taking the blame for this blocking order and the very particular way in which Musk is acting, but I think it's just natural that the private sector, and I would say the civil society and academia itself, especially focusing on cybersecurity and the usage of VPNs, will get together to provide some pushback on how this decision might end up creating some really bad effects on the way that we understand technology and especially cybersecurity technology in the country. I think this is a natural followup, but it has yet to come up in the Brazilian context.
Alex Stamos: Well, because Moraes is also going to have to understand the only country that's been at all successful about fighting VPNs is the People's Republic of China. And to do so, they have hundreds of thousands of people who work for the Cybersecurity Authority of China who operate the great firewall and it requires them to run a massive infrastructure of blocking systems that do active probing. They have a massive amount of probably billions of dollars of hardware now to monitor all connections, to probe every single long-lived TCP connection, to actively probe every system on the outside, to cause all cloud computing providers to operate their cloud systems in a joint venture. I mean it's like ... And still you can beat the Chinese if you know what you're doing. So the idea that Brazil can actually win this fight is just ludicrous, so he's going to lose technically, and clearly nobody's telling him that, so it's just a question of how embarrassing is that loss and how much damage does he do to the Brazilian economy and to Brazil's standing as a democracy before he loses?
And I think that's like unfortunately he and the other Supreme Court justices need to understand that. Because I mean from where I see this, you now have two men who are in a personal match here. I was going to use a not appropriate metaphor here. I'm sure there's something in Portuguese that you can use-
Carlos Alfonso ...: I'm pretty sure.
Alex Stamos: -That won't get me in trouble, yeah, but there's this personal match and then 200 million people are being held hostage for this. But Musk has made this a personal political decision because he's making a decision that he was totally happy to implement in other places where he politically agreed. But Moraes has decided to now use authoritarian tactics to enforce his will in a way that now is going to bring a bunch of innocent folks and he is technically going to lose because he's not going to be able to actually win this battle. And in doing so, he is both going to infringe upon the rights of individuals as well as cause potentially significant amount of damage to Brazilian business.
Evelyn Douek: Well, and I guess one other obvious difference between the PRC and Brazil is the role of public opinion and political backlash, and I'm curious to hear a little bit more about that Carlos. How is this playing out politically on the ground? Because you could imagine on the one hand the idea of this egomaniac American tech billionaire coming into your country and telling you, "Here's what the law is and I know what the constitution means," would drive the average Brazilian crazy. On the other hand, you are losing access to a platform that brings you joy and maybe money or is a source of connection and your pastime. We've seen the blowback here, for example, about threats to ban TikTok from young people who just like the platform and using it. So I'm curious, the average, is it an extremely polarized debate around this order or how is this playing about in public debate, the politics of this move?
Carlos Alfonso ...: So Brazil, politically speaking, is very much polarized. So I think that when Musk decides to start a campaign against Justice Moraes, almost automatically he got a good chunk, like half of the active internet users on the platform, to support him. Because if you go back and see the presidential elections and how things stand on the political standpoint in Brazil, we probably never been that much polarized. And that ended up giving anyone who stands against Justice Moraes and the Supreme Court who former President Bolsonaro portrayed as his enemy for as long as the four years of his mandates. So Musk is just plugging in in a political context that he was pretty much aware that once he stands up against Justice Moraes, he gets what, 40 to 50% of people supporting him.
So I think this whole political polarization in Brazil plays a role because those who are supportive of the current administration would stand with Justice Moraes, those who are supporters of former President Bolsonaro will support Elon Musk, and then seeing him, this global champion of free speech, offer some standard of free speech that was never the standard supported by the Brazilian legislation to begin with. And then just to say, when you ask me about how the users are reacting to this, I will go back to my first answer, which is how they are reacting to this, they are being super active on Blue Sky and on Meta's Threads and the number of Brazilian users are growing larger and larger on those two platforms.
And especially something that, I don't know if this is going to stay this way, but something that is really interesting is that you have these very grassroots communities of Twitter are now flocking to Blue Sky. So Blue Sky is full of memes and humoristic content, and all the journalists and influencers, they are all flocking to Threads, so you have this forking of how people are forging communities on those two apps. Not sure how this is going to play out, but as long as it takes for X to return in Brazil if ever, people will find other ways to communicate and other platforms will profit from the blocking of a once preeminence application such as X was in Brazil.
So it's remarkable to see the growth of Blue sky and Threads in those last 15 days, but of course I don't think this is something that would excuse us to discuss the complexities of this blocking order and the whole political consequences of going down this lane. But I would say that for the regular Brazilian internet user, well you have those who are using VPNs and are still there on X fighting against Justice Moraes. And Elon Musk itself created this [inaudible 00:45:11] official Twitter accounts in which he's posting those decisions under seal by Justice Moraes.
And something that is fascinating is that one of the decisions that Twitter has just posted is this decision about the doxing of police officers. You cannot claim to be the champion of free speech by saying that you're not complying with judicial order that are exposing the names and the address of police officers. And then you go through the decision, you see that those police officers are being threatened on their houses, so this is something that you should remove this type of contents in the first place. But that's what's happening right now on X. So there is still some Brazilian users on X using VPNs, there is this whole discussion about the decisions happening on X, but the regular Brazilian user is living their lives on Blue Sky and Threads right now.
Alex Stamos: Yeah, and I mean that is kind of stuff that goes against the stated doxing policies of Twitter and that I believe X still has.
Carlos Alfonso ...: Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
Evelyn Douek: All right, well, that has been a fantastic overview and deep dive into the local context in Brazil, and I'm sure that there will be lots more play by plays and chapters in this story as it continues to unfold over the coming months and years. And we'll have to get you back Carlos to help us work through those as well. But for now, it's been a real pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for joining us.
Carlos Alfonso ...: Hey, sure thing. Thanks for the invitation, it was so good to be here with you Evelyn. Thanks Alex.
Alex Stamos: Thanks Carlos.
Evelyn Douek: And this has been your Moderated Content Weekly Update. This show is available in all the usual places and show notes and transcripts are available at law.stanford.edu/moderatedcontent. It is produced by the wonderful Brian Pelletier, and special thanks to Lily Chang and Rob Huffman. Talk to you next week.