WASHINGTON — The White House issued a rare rebuke of Brazil Tuesday for banning the country’s residents from accessing X in a free-speech struggle with the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.
“When it comes to social media, we have been very clear that we think that folks should have access to social media. It’s a form of freedom of speech,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in response to a press-briefing question from reporter Raquel Krähenbühl of Brazil’s TV Globo.
Brazil blocked the country’s more than 200 million residents from using X on Aug. 30 after Alexandre de Moraes, a powerful member of the country’s supreme court, demanded the censorship of a large number of accounts featuring alleged hate speech or misinformation.
Musk refused, describing the diktat as anti-democratic and calling the judge a repressive “dictator” and “Brazil’s Darth Vader.”
X pulled the company’s reps out of Brazil when de Moraes threatened to arrest them for not censoring the list of users ahead of the blanket ban.
“Social media is not a no man’s land!” de Moraes wrote in an April ruling as his fight with Musk escalated.
Ordinary Brazilians can still access X using VPN providers, but they can be fined for doing so under de Moraes’ policies.
Musk, 53, purchased Twitter in 2022 with a goal of restoring the platform’s pro-free speech principles — after prior management engaged in rampant political censorship, including of accurate information, such as The Post’s reporting in late 2020 on documents from first son Hunter Biden’s laptop that showed his father, President Biden, was involved in foreign business relationships in China and Ukraine.
Jean-Pierre urged unrestricted access to social media despite President Biden signing bipartisan legislation requiring the sale or closure of Chinese-owned social network TikTok by January 19, the last full day of Biden’s term.
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, whom Musk supports in the Nov. 5 election against Vice President Kamala Harris, opposes the ban on TikTok.
“Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in April after Biden signed the law. “He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party.”
