We have long covered how Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has been issuing global takedown orders to American social media companies since at least 2020, demanding they delete accounts and posts worldwide, including for users in the United States.
But now, a new House Judiciary Committee report, built on nonpublic documents, maps the full scope of this operation and has given some more insight.
We obtained a copy of the report for you here.
The orders target political dissent. Moraes’s first documented global order, from July 2020, told Meta to delete 16 Facebook profiles everywhere to stop “continued dissemination of fraudulent news (fake news), slanderous accusations, threats and offenses imbued with animus . . . that affect the honor and safety of the FEDERAL SUPREME COURT.” The speech he wanted erased was criticism of his own court.
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The targets include Americans. Bruno Aiub, a Florida-based podcaster known as “Monark,” saw roughly 40 accounts ordered deleted across 24 platforms in June 2024, with daily fines of about $18,500.
Moraes also issued secret orders to Spotify between 2023 and 2024 demanding the removal of Aiub’s podcast. Brazilian journalist Allan Dos Santos, also US-based, triggered a harsher response. When X refused to block his account, Moraes froze the platform’s assets, cut off payment processing, and ordered X to cease operating in Brazil. Rumble was shut down for the same reason.
Brazil’s censorship agency, the CIEDDE, even flagged posts about US presidents for deletion. One April 2025 post was targeted because it said Trump was “going to expose that bandit dressed as a judge [Justice Moraes] here in Brazil, as well as the interference/fraud in the 2022 elections.” Others accused Biden and USAID of involvement in Brazilian election fraud. X refused to comply.
Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center hosted a September 2025 roundtable that brought together censorship officials from Brazil, Australia, the EU, and the UK. The event, revealed by a whistleblower, was framed as discussing “compliance and enforcement of existing regulations related to online trust and safety.” The attendees included officials who have directly targeted American speech.
Brazil’s Supreme Court also stripped platforms’ liability protections in June 2025. Justice Gilmar Mendes called the ruling a potential “paradigm for the world” for “how to deal with social media.”
If a foreign judge can order worldwide deletion of posts that criticize him, and platforms comply to keep market access, every government with a large consumer base holds a veto over speech in the United States.
