X’s fight with the Brazilian government is only complicated if you want it to be. Brazil made political censorship demands. Elon Musk refused to comply, citing free speech, and now his platform is banned in Brazil. X has, in recent years, honored certain takedown requests — from the governments of Turkey, India, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates — at a somewhat higher rate than before Musk’s acquisition. International internet platforms have long had to deal with these requests, deciding when to fight (as Twitter and X often have), when to submit, and when to risk a ban or pull out of a country entirely.
X, and Musk, insist that the nature of Brazil’s demands, and the manner in which they’re being made, are unprecedented and possibly criminal, which is one way to square this particular strategy with Musk’s previous statements on content moderation:
But, again, this is less persuasive than the far more obvious explanation, which is that Musk finds content moderation demands by Brazil’s left-wing government against right-wing figures much more galling than requests from, say, India’s government, on behalf of whom the company has banned numerous accounts (and a BBC documentary) associated with the opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
I don’t mean to suggest that this is unique to Musk or X — social platforms’ responses to foreign and domestic government demands are always informed by leadership’s ideology and business interests, and playing along with the nice story that they’re just working forward from fundamental rights and dedication to free speech has always been a mistake. Twitter was a publicly traded company with a strange mixture of crusading libertarian and technocratic tendencies, beholden to governments but also the anxieties and biases of its leadership, senior staff, advertisers, and shareholders; X is privately owned by a Bolsonaro guy who has declared, repeatedly, his intention to use it as a political tool. It is what it looks like!
But if the battle between X and Brazil is grimy but simple, the one between Musk and Brazil is more complicated, and more interesting. Per Reuters:
Tensions between Brazil and Elon Musk’s business empire ratcheted up further as the country’s telecoms regulator threatened to sanction his satellite broadband company Starlink hours after its top court stood behind a controversial decision to ban social network X from the country.
X has real but limited leverage over the Brazilian government, in that it operates a popular service in the country, and banning it might be politically unwise (in this sense, X in Brazil is crudely analogous to TikTok in the United States). Starlink, by contrast, is also an unusual sort of firm. Like X, it’s a service provider based in another country, registered to operate locally, and therefore susceptible to pressure from a government that has the capacity to regulate or ban it. Unlike X, it’s a satellite company capable of operating without the blessing of governments. As Jack Nicas notes in the New York Times:
…Starlink could try to continue to provide service in Brazil without a license, though that would violate Brazilian law. Unlike traditional internet providers, which typically work with a series of internet-infrastructure companies to deliver connections, Starlink essentially connects its satellites directly to customers’ antennas. That could leave fewer ways for regulators to try to disrupt service.
This would be a bad scenario for Starlink’s business. It would be difficult for the company’s more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, who use Starlink to connect to the internet in the country’s vast rural areas and jungle regions, to access and pay for the service; a government truly determined to ban it would make owning, importing, buying, or selling Starlink equipment illegal. But continuing to run an unofficial internet service provider — supplying equipment for free to circumvent a ban – is at least an option for a sufficiently motivated controlling shareholder. And a novel one! Starlink’s orbital advantage has already seen it pulled — and pushed — into messy, high-stakes geopolitical situations. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Starlink activated and subsidized service for the Ukrainian military before shifting costs back to the US Department of Defense; the Russian military, buying hardware through proxies and crowdfunding operations, has been using it as well. Starlink, with the blessing of the United States government, also activated service in Iran, where most foreign social media is heavily censored:
Using Starlink in Iran is risky and illegal, and the service hasn’t taken off there, although it remains active. A similar sort of deployment in Brazil is unlikely, especially considering that the company appears, as of Tuesday evening, to be on the cusp of relenting to the government’s demands. For now, Starlink is the dominant satellite internet provider but still a minor player in the global internet market. Musk didn’t have quite enough leverage this time. Ten years from now, the story might play out slightly differently.
The prospect of post-national communications networks hints at a future in which Starlink, and other entities like it, could play a strange and formidable new role in geopolitics. It’s a future that’s extremely appealing to exit-obsessed tech billionaires, for whom reaching space represents both infinite opportunity and, less romantically, final regulatory escape — a chance to colonize other planets, sure, but also a shot at recolonizing Earth from orbit, or at least to escape the grips of the Delaware Court of Chancery, the SEC, and the Supremo Tribunal Federal. Musk routinely threatens to move his companies to locales he sees as friendlier in regulatory and ideological terms and sometimes follows through. Why not eventually reincorporate in space?
