Brazil bans X — and threatens daily $9,000 fine for those still trying to use it

This year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. The previous entry covered an array of internet takedowns around the world, censorship at the Olympics, and press freedom wins and losses in Russia and Hong Kong. In this entry, we’ll look at the criminalization of women’s self-expression in Afghanistan and a slew of internet speech stories from Brazil to India to Iran.

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Brazil’s ongoing X saga worsens 

Events in Brazil have rapidly devolved in recent weeks, culminating in deeply troubling moves by the country’s Supreme Federal Court to block the social media platform X and threaten high daily fines for those who access the platform using virtual private networks, which help users circumvent online surveillance and website blocks. These moves represent a serious threat to Brazilians’ right to freely speak and access information online.

So, how did we get here?

In August, Elon Musk announced the closure of X’s office in Brazil as part of his ongoing dispute with Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who threatened to arrest X’s legal representative in the country over the company’s noncompliance with his orders. 

For months, Musk has publicly challenged and defied orders from Moraes to suspend certain accounts. Musk, however, has not always rejected censorship orders — in fact, in most other cases, Musk has suggested free speech simply means what local law says it does. Since his takeover of the company, its compliance with censorship orders, particularly in India and Turkey, has soared.

But due to X’s noncompliance and refusal to provide an in-country legal representative in Brazil, Moraes ordered X to be blocked within the country at the end of August, affecting an estimated 22 million Brazilian users. This is far from Moraes’ first foray into blocking and banning apps. And in the past two years Moraes has regularly employed his authority to issue takedown demands, “often in sealed orders that do not disclose why a given account was suspended.”

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The story didn’t end there, though. Moraes also froze the finances for Musk’s company Starlink to try to put the internet company on the hook for fines levied against X. After the X ban came down, Starlink initially refused to assist in blocking access to X in the country but then complied. 

Worst of all, Moraes ordered that those using a VPN to flout the block against X would face daily fines of nearly $9,000, “an amount exceeding the annual income of most Brazilians.” As of this writing, the order appears to still be in place. This move should set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about free expression and information access online. VPN bans are typically associated with authoritarian regimes.

As of last Friday, Moraes lifted the freeze on the Starlink and X bank accounts after X paid fines owed to the country, but the restrictions on accessing the social media platform and VPNs remain.

Despite the threats, VPN demand has skyrocketed in the country “by as much as 1,600%.”

Another busy month in online censorship

This summer proved exceptionally busy for censors seeking to cut off internet access or punish online expression, so it was no surprise that the weeks leading up to autumn remain hectic. Here’s the latest:

• A “cybercrime” treaty is now headed to the UN General Assembly for ratification. As I wrote last month, the treaty is a gift to authoritarian governments and a real threat to free speech. The treaty allows governments to define cybercrime however they choose, as long as it’s a crime serious enough to warrant a four-year prison term, and then call on other states to help them surveil and police it. In many countries, free speech is a crime punished with long jail terms. Read the other entries below with this in mind. 
• Many questions remain about the veracity of the charges filed against Telegram CEO Pavel Durov after his startling arrest in France in late August, and free speech advocates have cause for concern. Among the charges against Durov is “complicity” with criminal activity taking place on Telegram. If this and other charges are solely based on Telegram’s failure to moderate expression, it may incentivize other platforms to more aggressively moderate to ensure they do not face similar charges. Durov’s prosecution will be one to watch closely.
• India’s Uttar Pradesh government put together a new social media policy offering to pay influencers and content creators who promote government projects — but there’s a catch. A big one. Creators who post “indecent, obscene and anti-national” material could face punishment up to imprisonment for life. 
• There may be more major internet freedom news to come in India. The Delhi High Court is threatening to block Wikipedia in the country in a defamation case over Wiki editors’ description of the news outlet Asian News International as a “propaganda tool” for the Indian government. In recent months, rulings from Indian courts have even impacted what the rest of the world, including the U.S., can read online. 
• Popular apps and websites like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Twitch, and others went dark late last month in Russia. Censorship agency Roskomnadzor blamed DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks, which interfere with online traffic) for the disruption, but local experts and activists suspect the shutdown was government-orchestrated. 
• Russia’s internet censorship campaign shows no signs of slowing, either. The country’s digital development ministry is planning to spend nearly $660 million over a five-year period to boost Russia’s web traffic censorship systems. 
• Iranian writer, activist, and government critic Hossein Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a variety of offenses after replying to a tweet from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a single period. Shanbehzadeh’s “dot” reply received significantly more likes than Khamenei’s original post. 
• A Hanoi court sentenced Vietnamese activist and reporter Nguyen Chi Tuyen to five years in prison on charges of “making, storing, or disseminating information against the state.” Tuyen ran popular social media and YouTube accounts. Weeks later, journalist Nguyen Vu Binh was sentenced to seven years on similar charges for comments made in YouTube videos.
• An Uzbek appeals court upheld the 30-month “restricted freedom” sentence meted out to a woman for online anti-constitutional activity. She had sent her mother a YouTube video clip of Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, who died in 2016, telling a crowd in 1991 that he might govern the country “according to the rules of Islam.”  
• A Pakistani blogger and activist was arrested on blasphemy charges after posting a poem on social media that offended religious clerics. The poem decried sexual assault.
• A Thai appeals court extended a clothing vendor’s 28-year prison sentence to a shocking 54-and-a-half years for lese-majeste charges this month. He “posted 25 times on Facebook, which were alleged to be critical of the monarchy” and “shared videos from foreign sources deemed harmful to the monarchy.”

Censorship in Hong Kong has broader implications   

Two recent censorship flare-ups in Hong Kong have implications beyond the increasingly unfree city. In May, Hong Kong’s government finally succeeded in banning the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” after an appellate court called the song a “weapon” against national security. 

While the ruling is only applicable within Hong Kong, that hasn’t stopped overseas corporations from choosing to comply with it. The song’s producer Dgxmusic now says distributors in the U.S. and elsewhere, like Spotify and Apple Music, “bowed” to the ruling and removed the song from their platforms globally. 

And in another incident last month, a Hong Kong court found two editors of the shuttered news outlet Stand News guilty of conspiring to publish seditious materials. The ruling is a major development in the city, where press freedom has taken a nosedive since China imposed the National Security Law on the city in 2020. But it may also force international press outlets operating in Hong Kong to confront the mismatch between their values and their work in Hong Kong. 

This summer, Hong Kong journalist Selina Cheng alleged she’d been fired from her position at The Wall Street Journal because her press freedom advocacy proved uncomfortable for the outlet. Cheng is reportedly one of a number of journalists at international outlets who say their employers are unwilling to defend press freedom values in the city because it could imperil their access. 

Suppression of government critics in China — and the US 

Chinese artist Gao Zhen has lived in the U.S. since 2022 but was apprehended by state authorities in late August while visiting family in China. Gao was arrested on “suspicion of slandering China’s heroes and martyrs” in decade-old works critiquing Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Those works were created years before the “heroes and martyrs” law was enacted in 2021. 

And in news closer to home for many readers, two stunning reports this month reveal further efforts to stymie criticism and protest against the Chinese government in the U.S. Linda Sun, an aide to former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and later deputy chief of staff to Gov. Kathy Hochul, was charged with acting as an undisclosed agent for the Chinese government by federal prosecutors in an indictment unsealed this month. Among the many allegations against Sun is that, on orders from a Chinese official, she successfully pressured a speechwriter to remove mentions of abuse of China’s Uyghur population from Hochul’s 2021 Lunar New Year comments.

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And in a new investigation about President Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, The Washington Post found that while protesters across the board engaged in aggressive behavior, “the most extreme violence was instigated by pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activists.” As part of that violence, anti-CCP demonstrators “were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces,” and “pro-Xi forces also stalked protesters and used gloves with metal knuckles, metal rods and flagpoles in various scuffles.” 

The Washington Post also found evidence of Chinese consulates’ involvement. The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles provided funding for pro-Xi protesters’ hotels and meals, and at least four consular employees from Los Angeles and San Francisco were “among the crowd of pro-CCP protesters, sometimes directly interacting with aggressive actors.”

The events are reminiscent of what police called a “brutal attack” on protesters in Washington, D.C., in 2017 by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security team.

The Taliban’s sweeping censorship of women

When you read enough censorship stories, you occasionally start to think no act of suppression can shock you anymore. And then something comes along like the Taliban’s wholesale censorship of women. 

In mid-August, the hardline Islamist group running Afghanistan announced new “vice and virtue” laws, including ones affirming that women’s bodies and faces must be fully veiled and their voices should not be heard whenever outside their home: “Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face, and body,” as these features could lead men to “temptation.” 

Women already faced severe restrictions on their rights under the Taliban’s rule, but the blanket ban on speaking in public is a shocking escalation. The Taliban also announced a crackdown on media in its morality campaign, banning the publication of material that insults Muslims or Sharia law. 

The future for free expression in Afghanistan looks unimaginably grim, but some courageous protesters are speaking out despite the significant risks.