Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, and Alexandre de Moraes, the minister of justice in Brazil, have been at odds over content removal and user blocking on the social network. The struggle between these two powerful figures has received attention from American Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio.
Jordan, who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, has been instrumental in resolving this issue. He has called for Musk’s company to forward to his committee all of Moraes’ decisions that determined content removal or user blocking on Twitter. As a company based in the United States, X (formerly Twitter) is subject to American regulations and therefore needs to comply with Congressional requests. With this material in hand, Jordan was able to produce a report released by his committee this week.
The report includes 88 letters sent by Moraes to Twitter via the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) and STF (Supreme Federal Court). Most of these letters do not provide justification for removing content. According to Jordan’s report, Moraes’ actions constitute censorship in the name of combating “hate speech” and “subversion” of “order.” The document exposes a concerning case study of how governments can justify censorship without proper legal grounds. In response to Jordan’s report, the STF press office only commented that all STF decisions are substantiated and that the documents presented in the report are simply court orders sent to platforms.
Despite criticism from some quarters for being uncompromising and even overly aggressive, Jordan is known as a staunch conservative who collaborates with fellow Democrats when it makes sense politically. He has never lost an election since his first public position as state representative for Ohio in 1994 and has served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee since 2019. His district represents a mostly conservative region of Ohio that tends to vote Republican but is not always supportive of Trump-like policies like censorship.
Jordan has strong views on free speech and has written about it extensively on social media platforms like Twitter before he became involved in this controversy with Elon Musk and Alexandre de Moraes. For example, he wrote: “Two things