Elon Musk was surprised when Judge Alexandre de Moraes of Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court tried to censor political opponents on Twitter. Moraes was angry that his “unlawful orders” that violated the Brazilian Constitution were rejected, and then retaliated. X Platform is banned in Brazil.
Technology lawyer Preston Byrne joins Jill Savage and the “Blaze News Tonight” panel to shed some light on the situation.
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“What's the reaction so far to Brazil banning X?” Jill asks.
“It depends on who you talk to. If you talk to people on the center-left, or European regulators, or Brazilian regulators, they tend to welcome this because they think Elon and X have caused problems for the global discourse and they want people who talk about X to shut up. On the other hand, if you talk to people on a more liberal side, they're not happy about it,” Byrne says.
Many of those who welcomed Brazil's decree are the same ones calling for Musk's arrest. Indeed, the idea that the modern world's free speech warriors should be behind bars has gone from mere whispers to ominous cries.
“Over the past month, the left-leaning UK newspaper The Guardian has published at least three editorials calling for the arrest of Elon Musk,” Byrne wrote in a recent article. Blaze Align Articles.
But despite the protests, Byrne believes Musk's arrest is highly unlikely.
“The US would never deport Elon for running X however he likes in the US,” Byrne said. “And the FTC is prohibited by federal law from levying civil penalties against Elon for allegedly failing to properly moderate content.”
But “there are political forces outside the United States, particularly in the European Union, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, that want greater control over the online information space,” he says. “But arrests are almost impossible. That doesn't stop people from proposing it. [though].”
Jill said,France arrests Telegram CEOThere is concern about British nationals being arrested for content they post on social media.
Byrne acknowledges that X is “the very first example of a global company, or a company of worldwide scale, resisting censorship by simply refusing to cooperate.”
“Regulators in Europe, Brazil and elsewhere are not in a very good position, because they're learning that if Americans decide to exercise their free speech in the US, there's not much they can do other than one of two options: either censor their own citizens, as Brazil has chosen to do, or invade the US militarily and seize the servers in Texas, which of course is unlikely to happen,” Byrne says.
But Blaze Media editor-in-chief Matthew Peterson isn't sure how much longer Americans like Musk will be able to exercise their First Amendment rights, especially with “America heading into an election” in which one political party is conspiring with tech companies to censor free speech.
To hear the rest of the discussion, check out the clip above.
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