After Rumble and Truth Social filed a major lawsuit in Florida against a secret censorship order issued by pro-censorship Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, two journalists, one of them reportedly targeted by the order, have spoken out.
Brazilians Allan dos Santos and Paulo Figueiredo, both now US-based, appeared on political commentator and comedian Steven Crowder’s show to discuss their experiences with censorship in Brazil, but also to accuse the Biden administration of using its foreign policy as a tool for bringing censorship to other countries.
Figueiredo has just been indicted along with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for their alleged role in a coup plot after Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election – the accusations he dismisses by referring to “the Disney World coup d’etat.”
But the indictment is another example of how dissenting journalists are treated by the authorities in the South American country, a situation which, according to Figueiredo, is “pretty scary” – and had not been made better by the previous US administration. Quite the contrary.
He claims that Moraes was one of the beneficiaries of the Biden White House’s policy of “exporting” the kind of censorship that the journalist believes helped the former US president get in office in 2020.
A “product of US foreign policy” is how Figueiredo described Moraes – which coincided with the years during which the Brazilian justice system went after some of the social platforms that the former US administration disliked as well – X and Rumble.
According to Figueiredo, more and more proof is now emerging of USAID’s involvement.
“The rest of the world’s still feeling the results of this disastrous foreign policy that the Biden administration implemented during four years,” the journalist said.
He also commented on the Associated Press asserting that their First Amendment rights were violated for not being invited to travel on Air Force One, by sarcastically suggesting they should go to Brazil, criticize Moraes, and see if that results in “VIP treatment.”
But, according to Figueiredo, the reality is that Santos and himself, as critics of the Brazilian government, are not in prison only because they are abroad, i.e., in the US.
Figueiredo also slammed Brazil’s mainstream media for supporting the government targeting him and his colleague, and in the process abandoning free speech.
“Brazil’s mainstream media is just as dead as it is the mainstream media in the United States. I think it’s even worse there. They don’t care for free speech anymore,” he said, and remarked:
“There used to be a consensus in the Western world until five years ago that you should not silence dissidents and different political opinions.”
He also made a point of the attempts by legacy media to discredit the credibility of independent reporters and creators as “not journalists” – even when they, like Figueiredo, are in fact formally trained in journalism.
Another “use” of this tactic, which is not limited to Brazil, is to justify censoring and pressuring journalists as allegedly not being representatives of the media (but rather “bloggers,” “YouTubers,” “entrepreneurs”….), in that way trying to present that freedom of the press is not under threat.
Allan dos Santos spoke about the rapidly changing political climate regarding of free speech and corruption in the US since the new administration took over.
But while the Brazilian authorities – and events in that country, especially around elections, mirrored Biden’s policies – the same is not true now when it comes to those implemented by Trump and his team.
Santos would like to see changes of that kind in Brazil as well, but for now the positive development is the lawsuit which, according to him, is holding Moraes accountable for his orders that violate US law.
Santos believes that the work he and Figueiredo have done in exposing corruption in their native country – that got them censored and in legal trouble – should contribute to holding “every criminal” in Brazil accountable, comparable to what is starting to happen in the US.
And while the two journalists are critical of the way the free and independent press and free speech were treated during the previous US administration, Santos made a note of things in Brazil being even worse – precisely because the top echelons of the judiciary, of which Moraes is a poster child, are dominated by those aligned with the government.
Crowder made a point that some of orders issued by Moraes are in effect trying to “reach into the US” to catch the journalists and content creators he is unable to prosecute in Brazil, describing this as “scary” and an attempt to “extradite these people digitally for the crime of speech.”
