Tomorrow, I will fly to São Paulo to participate in a free speech rally on Saturday, which is Brazil's Independence Day. After that, I will travel to Brasilia to meet with pro-free speech lawmakers.
I’ve done nothing illegal and will do nothing illegal, and so the chances are probably low that I will be arrested for publishing the Twitter Files - Brazil. In banning X, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has already undermined Brazil’s standing in the eyes of the global community. If he or President Lula were to order my arrest at the airport, the incident would attract even more attention to the government’s growing repression of dissent.
Unfortunately, the Brazilian government has shown little hesitation in arresting independent journalists for things they’ve published. In February, the Brazilian government detained a Portuguese citizen journalist, Sérgio Tavares, at the São Paulo airport. They took him to a room and interrogated him for four hours about the things he had written on social media.
And, unlike Tavares, I am already under criminal investigation by the Brazilian government. Last April, Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) published two reports about the “Twitter Files - Brazil.” Three days later, Brazil’s Attorney General urged the Supreme Court to pursue “criminal prosecution” and investigation to “identify and punish the possible culprits.”
It is rather startling to read police reports about what you’ve written, followed by a report by the Attorney General urging the Supreme Court to prosecute you for having written those things. At least the reports capture some of the irony of the situation. One of them included a screenshot of my X profile and the banner that reads, “Defund the Thought Police.”
With the strong support of President Lula, Moraes is making up laws as he goes along. He now leads at least nine illegal and secret investigations against people he does not like. Many people under investigation only discovered they were targets after the information leaked to the media. I could be one of them.
And when you consider that Moraes has issued arrest warrants for “preventive detention” of people who “disseminate fraudulent news on social media” and have an “international passport to enter and leave the country without submitting to national authorities, it’s reasonable to ask why I am even taking the risks of going.
