2024-04-21 05:32:37
The former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro will lead an event this Sunday in Rio de Janeiro to defend freedom of expression in his opinion threatened in the South American giantin the middle of a fight between justice and tycoon Elon Musk over censorship and misinformation.
The rally is called at 10 in the morning (local time) on the emblematic Copacabana beach. “The whole world is aware of how threatened our freedom of expression is, how close we are to a dictatorship“said the far-right leader, 69, in a video published on Thursday on his social networks. “Let us carry out our peaceful act, in defense of democracy, for our freedom, without posters or banners,” he asked.
After questions from Elon Musk, the social network X announced that it will comply with the orders of the Brazilian justice system
Authoritarians don’t like this
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a fundamental pillar of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe they are the owners of the truth.
Bolsonaro resorted to the argument of defending freedom to rally his followers, after Musk, owner of platform X (formerly Twitter), harshly attacked the judge of the Brazilian Supreme Court Alexandre de Moraes. In this regard, in the name of combating misinformation, Moraes ordered to block user accounts on Internet platforms, including Xespecially against attempts by Bolsonaro supporters to discredit the voting system during the last electoral campaign.
The American tycoon, who did not hide his harmony with Bolsonaro, He called Moraes a “dictator” and said he should be removed. He also threatened to disobey his court orders to suspend accounts. In response, the magistrate ordered an investigation into Musk, accusing him of “criminal instrumentalization” of the platform.
The escalation of tension in Brazil due to the dispute with X
The fight between the two extended to the entire political and legal sphere in Brazil. Along these lines, other members of the high court spoke out in support of Moraes, while the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva He stated in a recent event, without referring to Musk directly, that “if I could, I would make a decree to prohibit lying” and “imprison anyone who lies.”
Moraes, who has multiplied his public speeches these days, indicated on Friday that Brazilian justice is used to “fighting foreign mercantilists who treat Brazil as a colony”. In parallel, the Public Defender’s Office asked the court that platform
Elon Musk called Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes a “dictator” for his orders on blocking X user accounts.
For their part, Bolsonaro legislators and other supporters They accused the Supreme Court of being aligned with Lula’s government and to undermine democracy and freedoms. Even a committee of the United States House of Representatives intervened in the fight, making public on Thursday a report of hundreds of pages with confidential decisions by Moraes involving X and other digital platforms.
The judicial investigations into Bolsonaro
The Bolsonaro demonstration will take place two months after Bolsonaro returned to the public arena, with a show of force in Sao Paulo, which brought together some 185,000 people, according to researchers’ estimates. Disqualified from contesting elections until 2030 for having misinformed about the electoral system, the former president (2019-2022) In recent months he dedicated himself to traveling the country to meet his supporters.
Several judicial investigations are planned on him. The most serious suspicion is that he conspired to prevent the leftist Lula from taking power after the October 2022 elections. In that sense, investigators are handling a document that would have been in the hands of Bolsonaro and intended, as they said, to “prevent access to the power of the legitimately elected president”, call new elections and arrest Moraes, also president of the Superior Electoral Tribunal.
This draft decree is “the biggest fake news in the history of Brazil”, indicated the far-right leader in the video in which he called to demonstrate this Sunday. The former president always proclaimed his innocence and calls himself the victim of “persecution.”
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