🇧🇷⚖️🔓🖥 — Minister Cármen Lúcia, of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF), once again repeated in a plenary session her formula for voting in favor of censorship—while claiming to oppose it—by stating that Brazil is home to “213 million little tyrants”

“Censorship is constitutionally forbidden, it is ethically forbidden, morally forbidden, and I’d even say spiritually forbidden. BUT we also cannot allow ourselves to be in an agora [public square] with 213 million little sovereign tyrants. The sovereign is Brazil, the sovereign is Brazilian law.”

❗️ Cármen Lúcia had already used this formula when she voted in favor of censoring a documentary about the attempt on former president Jair Bolsonaro’s life. The film was set to be released shortly before the 2022 election but had its premiere postponed by order of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE).

“One cannot allow the return of censorship under any argument in Brazil,” she stated. “BUT I see this as an extremely exceptional situation."

❌ According to the minister, every citizen has “the right to criticize,” “the right to boo,” and “yes, the right to curse,” but “does not have the right to silence and lead to the death of people, of institutions, and of democracy”—whatever that might mean in the subjective interpretations of STF ministers, which will now need to be anticipated by reinforced content moderation teams from big tech companies.

“You can shout ‘I hate Minister Cármen Lúcia’; what you can’t do is shoot me in the street with a revolver—that you cannot do,” she said as an example, despite the fact that the court was not judging the criminal act of murder, but rather the limits of free speech.

A historical method of tyrants is to accuse others of tyranny in order to justify their own.

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