Post-X Ban, Beware the Brazilian Model of Institutional Mistrust

As democracies grapple with misinformation, Brazil’s hardline approach is seen by some as a potential model. The country has taken extreme measures to police online discourse – recently banning X (formerly Twitter) and fining citizens using VPNs to access it. These moves highlight its boldness but also underscore the dangers of empowering the state to treat mistrust as merely a crisis of information.

Institutional mistrust – Operation Car Wash

Brazil’s crisis of institutional mistrust can be traced back to the “Car Wash” operation, a sweeping corruption investigation that began in 2014. Car Wash revealed deep entanglements of bribery within the highest echelons of the government during the Lula administration in the early 2000s. The judiciary, seen as the last bastion of integrity, gained unprecedented public trust, with judges and prosecutors becoming national heroes.

However, as Car Wash extended its reach, the judiciary itself came under scrutiny. In 2019, the magazine Crusoe published allegations implicating Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli in the very corruption schemes Car Wash aimed to dismantle. Toffoli’s response – to launch an investigation against the magazine for allegedly spreading fake news – marked the beginning of a dangerous conflation of misinformation and dissent.

Appointed to lead this campaign was Alexandre de Moraes, another Supreme Court Justice, whose actions would push the boundaries of judicial power in Brazil. Moraes used his role to clamp down on misinformation, a term that increasingly became a catch-all for any speech critical of the government or judiciary. Under the banner of defending democracy, Moraes initiated a series of measures that would culminate in the digital censorship we see today.

Judiciary as arbiter of truth

Initially, the press decried this move as censorship. However, as concerns about misinformation grew and Moraes began targeting supporters of then-President Jair Bolsonaro – who were increasingly skeptical of Brazilian democracy – the initiative gained support among Brazil’s elite. This signaled a critical shift: The judiciary was now positioning itself not just as an arbiter of law but as the arbiter of truth.

Moraes’ approach has been defined by his willingness to bypass due process in the name of combating misinformation and anti-democratic opinions. The crackdown led by Moraes’ courts on perceived threats has included jailing individuals without a fair trial for social media posts, suspending social media accounts without explanation, freezing assets for private conversations deemed anti-democratic, and even suspending elected officials from office. These actions were often carried out with minimal transparency and no avenue for appeal.

Banning X didn’t solve a crisis of institutional mistrust

The escalation of judicial overreach peaked in recent days, when Moraes ordered a ban on X in Brazil. In the preceding months, under Elon Musk’s ownership, the platform had refused to comply with demands to ban accounts and remove content, even exposing these censorship orders. Facing the threat of legal action and the arrest of its staff, X fired its employees in Brazil and ceased operations, leading Moraes to take even more extreme measures. He froze the assets of Twitter’s former legal representative and extended this to Starlink – a move widely criticized as a violation of Brazilian corporate law. Finally, Moraes banned X, cutting off more than 20 million citizens from the platform. He also imposed a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reais (about $9,000) on any citizen using a VPN to access it, an amount exceeding the annual income of most Brazilians, effectively criminalizing attempts to access information.

And yet, did repression actually help solve a crisis of institutional mistrust? The evidence suggests otherwise. Recent polls show alarmingly low levels of trust in key institutions, with only 23% of Brazilians expressing strong trust in electoral courts and a mere 15% in the Supreme Court. Paradoxically, political figures often labeled as sources of “misinformation” by the judiciary have gained popularity, with one such candidate leading in the race for mayor of São Paulo.

One cannot mandate trust from above

Mistrust is not misinformation, but it is often its cause. Treating a crisis of institutional trust solely as an information problem overlooks the deeper societal fractures and risks intensifying the very tensions it seeks to resolve. Authoritarian information control erodes democratic norms and further diminishes public confidence.

Ironically, the very platform targeted in Brazil’s crackdown – X – offers a glimpse of a possible alternative approach to addressing misinformation. Its Community Notes feature allows users to collaboratively fact-check and provide context to contentious content, a decentralized approach also envisioned by other platforms such as Ethereum.

Whether decentralized technologies point to a promising future or not, the path to restoring trust in institutions lies not in censorship or judicial overreach, but in embracing transparency, accountability, and a renewed commitment to the principles of free and open discourse.

Let Brazil’s experience be a reminder that trust cannot be mandated from above. Only a culture of open dialogue and collective problem-solving can help democracies build a more resilient and trustworthy public sphere – one that strengthens rather than undermines the foundation of a free society.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.