When Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes shut down the social media network X, it was reminiscent of the dystopian actions of the government depicted by Ayn Rand in her novel Atlas Shrugged. As Justice Moraes employed his new authority by dictating the imposition of ruinous fines and imposing tighter restrictions, one could almost hear the frustrated demand of Rand’s villain, Wesley Mouch, for “wider powers.”
What Brazil does is important globally. The country has nearly two-thirds of the population of the United States and is a significant player in the world economy. A few years ago, shutting down a major social media network such as X would have appeared to be the kind of action undertaken by authoritarian nations such as Communist China. By moving to shut down X and its owner Elon Musk, Justice Moraes breaks with the way Western democracies understand themselves. The overwhelming cultural precedent has been that free speech is guaranteed and that the answer to bad or incorrect speech is higher quality speech. Such a view reflects confidence in a nation’s citizens and guards against the temptations of regimes to protect themselves from criticism by regulating likely sources of it.
John Stuart Mill made the case for free speech elegantly in his famed essay On Liberty. He argued that unless thoughts, ideas, and information can be exchanged freely, then it is possible we will not have access to knowledge that may prove to be most true or valuable due to suppression. In making his case for capitalism, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman defended its superiority in part by pointing out that while the American at a New York City newsstand could buy both The Wall Street Journal and The Daily Worker, a resident of Moscow would have only ideologically curated options approved by the Communist Party. It was a given that American readers (and others in the free world) would find Friedman’s argument compelling.
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