As the U.K., Europe and Australia draw international alarm for seeking to censor online content far outside their borders, House Judiciary Committee Republicans are pointing the finger back at the Western Hemisphere for threats to Americans’ speech.Brazilian officials led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes “regularly issue global takedown orders to social media platforms demanding the platforms remove content, including specific social media accounts, or face daily noncompliance fines,” frequently targeting criticism of its high court, according to “nonpublic documents” the committee obtained.
They even ordered X to remove posts praising President Trump and criticizing former President Biden and the previous administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the committee, citing a Jan. 7 letter from X – the most recent exhibit among the 85 described in the interim staff report — and three Portuguese-language posts.
“Combined with the recent decision by Brazilian courts to degrade social media platforms’ legal protections, American companies are effectively required to engage in mass censorship to continue operating in Brazil,” the report says.
“The chilling effect could be global: Companies have to consider removing more content, including non-Brazilian content, proactively to avoid liability,” which is the regime’s intent, according to the report.
It cites remarks by Brazilian Justice Gilmar Mendes to broadcasters last year, as reported by Gazeta de Povo. Gilmar called the court’s invalidation of statutory social media liability protections for user-generated content a possible “paradigm for the world.”
To fight this international threat to American speech, “the Committee will continue to conduct oversight and develop legislative remedies,” it says.
It’s the committee’s third interim staff report on Brazil’s attempted and successful censorship of social media, but the first in nearly two years. The spring 2024 reports focused on Brazilian authorities, including de Moraes, censoring Brazil’s federal lawmakers, judiciary members and civil society and removal orders to X and Rumble, respectively.
The five-time World Cup winners have an American partner in Stanford University, which has “shifted from enabling domestic censorship to aiding and abetting foreign censors” after winding down its Stanford Internet Observatory, which co-led the Biden administration’s outsourced election misinformation policing, the committee said.
Silicon Valley’s talent engine hosted a Sept. 24 roundtable featuring foreign officials who have “architected the burgeoning global censorship regime,” including Brazil’s deputy consul in San Francisco, to “coordinate a global digital censorship initiative” under the guise of discussing compliance and enforcement of “online trust and safety” rules, the report says.
The keynote speaker was Australian eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, an American expat known for temporarily forcing X to ban a video worldwide that shows a Muslim man stabbing a Christian bishop during a church service or pay $500,000 in daily fines. She justifies global takedowns as necessary to stop workarounds by virtual private networks.
“Other officials from some of the entities with the worst track records of extraterritorial censorship” included a senior adviser to the U.K.’s Office of Communications, the European Commission’s Digital Services Act policy officer in San Francisco and deputy head of the European Union office in San Francisco, the report says.
Stanford did not answer queries for its response to its portrayal in the report.
Gag orders on platforms for information on Bolsonaro’s son
The report identifies 57 specific orders by de Moraes going back to 2020, 23 of them described as requiring one or more platforms to block specific accounts or prevent users from creating new ones, and 21 described as “conditionally revoking the blocking of certain accounts” for meeting his requirements.
Several orders from September 2025 to February 2026 targeted “a key advocate for the United States to impose sanctions on Justice Moraes,” U.S.-based Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and brother of leading Brazilian presidential challenger Flavio Bolsonaro.
The de Moraes orders and related information requests from the Brazilian Federal Police include gag orders against the targeted platforms, “making the orders secret from both the public and the target of censorship,” according to the report.
The September 23, 2025, order against Eduardo Bolsonaro accused him of “the crime of spreading false information about Banco do Brasil” after Bolsonaro allegedly told the bank’s customers to take out their money following U.S. sanctions on de Moraes last summer.
