(MAY 14, 2024) NYT's Bad Reporting on Brazil Predictably Used by GOP to Attack Democracy There

MAY 14, 2024

BRIAN MIER

The Republican-led US House Judiciary Committee released a report on April 17 titled “The Attack on Free Speech Abroad and the Biden Administration’s Silence: The Case of Brazil.” The report accused the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court of censorship, based on an interpretation rooted in US law and Twitter company policy.

The GOP report criticizes the court’s investigation and series of rulings that resulted in the deplatforming of 150 Twitter accounts. Many of these accounts belonged to individuals under investigation by Brazil’s Federal Police for their roles in a coup attempt on January 8, 2023, which tried to close Brazil’s National Congress. Its ultimate goal was to shut down the court, arrest three of its judges—including Justice Alexandre de Moraes—and install a military dictatorship.

The report came on the heels of a campaign promoted by Twitter owner Elon Musk. The ultra-billionaire had started to attack Brazil’s highest court days after Michael Shellenberger, a former PR executive who now calls himself an investigative journalist, posted a thread titled “Twitter Files—Brazil.” Shellenberger claimed to show that de Moraes—a conservative appointed by right-wing President Michel Temer—had pressed criminal charges against Twitter (rebranded as X) for refusing to turn over user data on political enemies. Musk viralized the “Twitter Files,” along with a Portuguese-language video in which Shellenberger called de Moraes a totalitarian tyrant.

Days later, Brazil’s former secretary of digital rights, Estela Aranha, unmasked the fraud. Confronting Shellenberger publicly on Twitter, she demonstrated that he had cut and pasted together paragraphs selected from the company’s internal communications on a variety of different issues to create a false narrative (FAIR.org, 4/18/24). The paragraph about criminal charges referred not to de Moraes, but to GAECO, the Sao Paulo district attorney’s office’s organized crime unit, which pressed charges after Twitter refused to turn over user data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine-trafficking organization. Shellenberger apologized in Portuguese, admitting he had no proof that de Moraes had pressed charges against Twitter, then left Brazil.

The eight-page congressional report parroted Musk and Shellenberger’s criticism of the deplatforming of Twitter users, and claimed that ordering the removal of specific posts constitutes “censorship.” Surprisingly, for a report authored by a committee chaired by inner-circle Trump ally Jim Jordan, the most cited journalistic source for the document is the New York Times.

More:
https://fair.org/home/nyts-bad-reporting-on-brazil-predictably-used-by-gop-to-attack-democracy-there/