By Ana Cavalcante

While the United States sees no problem in banning or severely restricting access to Tik Tok, the mouth pieces for the empire still talk about free speech on social media as a higher value to be exported and protected internationally. The most emblematic figure playing this role is probably Elon Musk.

Musk is not just a mouth piece like many mainstream journalists, but a capitalist that directly protects the interests of his capital and the interests of imperialism. He is the owner of a number of technology companies such as SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink (technology he did not develop himself, we must always remember) and since 2022 he is also the owner of Twitter (now X).

He purchased the company under the banner of free speech, offering to reinstate previously banned accounts such as that of former American president Donald Trump. Soon after the purchase, he initiated what became known as the Twitter Files – a project which aimed to bring to light the supposed lack of free speech on the platform by reporting on the censorship of mostly right wing accounts.

It is unclear if the material was curated before being shared with journalists. Musk, however, also removed journalists from the platform and eventually fell out with the leading journalist working on the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi, who abandoned the project when Musk forbade him from publishing on Substack.

Brazil

Recently Musk and his chosen journalists Michael Shellenberger and David Agape took over news cycles in Brazil and elsewhere by threatening to defy a Brazilian Supreme Court ruling. The court  requested that accounts be blocked if they profit by spreading misinformation online or by spreading fabrications that have directly threatened Brazilian democracy – for example, those relating to the coup attempt on January 8, 2023, where supporters of former president Bolsonaro, rejecting the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, broke into parliament and the Supreme Court, causing millions of dollars of damage and resulting in thousands of arrests. Musk and his chosen journalists have spread rumours and accusations repeatedly since the Supreme Court request, including calling President Lula complicit in creating a totalitarian state and pushing the fabrication that the Supreme Court in Brazil threatened to arrest X’s lawyers.

In the American media, liberal and conservative commentators alike (Glenn Greenwald and the entire team at The Hill, for instance) sometimes question Elon Musk’s sincerity in his commitment to the cause of liberty. But they do not question the idea of free speech as the supreme moral value for all, their imperialist outlook that a first amendment protection of free speech is suitable and desirable in every country, or that anyone that is not doing democracy the American way is doing it wrong. This way of thinking means that Brazil, or any other country that imposes demands on American social media companies, is perceived as undemocratic even by the alternative media in the US, opening up a space to question further decisions by the same governments.

We are not simply discussing free speech here. After all, while most social media companies have opposed regulation in many countries (most likely more as a way to avoid paying taxes than for ideological reasons), in this case it is clear that the priority is for X to be a company that can exist only on the condition that it does not prevent the advancement of all the other companies in Musk’s portfolio. Case in point: he has accepted all the regulatory rules imposed by the Indian government, possibly not only because it is an extreme right-wing government, but because of agreements surrounding Tesla’s factories that can help him in his regional competition with BYD, the Chinese company which manufactures passenger battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

In Brazil, the strategy implemented by Musk seems to be the opposite of that in India. Instead of hiding X to push Tesla, they push X to destabilize the country and secure favourable contracts for their other companies. It works, since this free speech/anti supreme court attitude finds considerable support from Bolsonaro supporters and the extreme right, including members of the Brazillian parliament. An entire week of threatening tweets and reports from the Twitter files in Brazil (that had to be retracted as fast as they could be published), combined with online live streaming from prominent right-wing figures, and the result is palpable. Elon Musk has not violated any legal decision yet, but the law for the regulation of social media in Brazil had its voting suspended in the Brazilian parliament on the 16^th April, and it is not likely to be put to a vote again any time soon.

Elon Musk’s interests are well aligned with those of his adopted country, the United States. It serves their interests to undermine Brazilian institutions and democracy, so that Brazil remains a country with no social media regulation and where American social media companies can spread their ideas and secure their profits without fear. But that is not all. Imperialist interests lie in securing access to Brazilian lithium reserves, in continuing to expand Starlink contracts with the Brazilian government (as Elon did during the Bolsonaro government in the Amazon) and in getting Tesla in Brazil (a brand not sold there) while BYD dominates the market and is opening three factories in the country’s northeast.

The fact that Musk is not worried about becoming a comic book villain stereotype does not turn him into a hero. In 2019, when he was just a billionaire twitter user, he tweeted his support for the coup that deposed Evo Morales and aired his belief that the US should back any coup aimed to secure access resources they see as desirable, without any concern for abstract concepts such as sovereignty. Back then the lithium was the catalyst for this statement, as the mineral is fundamental for the development of many new technologies. But imperialism can be observed in all facets of this story; the fact that Musk cannot bother to hide it does not make it any less relevant. No imperial power cares for your free speech if it does not advance their power.