The front line of the global attack on free speech these days is Brazil where Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes is waging a war against ‘misinformation’. As we have come to see all over the world, waging a war against ‘misinformation’ in practice means silencing anyone who dares to question the official narrative.

In Brazil, it means anyone who opposes censorship on X/Twitter, anyone who expresses the view that the last election was not a paragon of integrity and transparency, or anyone who supports former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. In other words, it comfortably embraces at least half the country.

In the latest chapter in this saga, Brazil’s Supreme Court seized $3 million from Elon’s Musk’s Starlink in retaliation for the refusal by X, a completely separate company, to pay the fine imposed on it by the court for refusing to censor critics of the government.

Elon Musk has been fighting back with his trademark panache, dubbing de Moraes ‘Brazil’s Darth Vader’. Brazilians threatened by the legislation are not impressed. Almost 50,000 protested the government’s attacks on free speech at a rally earlier this month.

Brazil has never been seen as a bastion of democracy or free speech; indeed, it is better known for harbouring Nazi war criminals, memorably evoked in the gripping novel and film The Boys from Brazil. So, it is more than a little disturbing that the G20 used a meeting in Brazil last week on the Digital Economy to breathlessly announce that, ‘For the first time in the G20’s history, the agenda of tackling disinformation and promoting information integrity will be part of the forum’s ministers’ declaration’.

Are we meant to be grateful? Tackling disinformation is what the Biden-Harris administration did in the US during the pandemic – suppressing the social media accounts of self-help groups formed by the vaccine-injured and the grieving voices of parents whose children were killed by the vaccine.

Tackling disinformation is what US government officials did when they secretly got Facebook and Twitter to suppress the social media accounts of the New York Post four years ago when it published Miranda Devine’s brilliant expose of Hunter Biden’s ‘Laptop from Hell’.

Tackling disinformation was what the FBI did to help Biden get over the line when it publicly claimed with much fanfare that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. In fact, it had had the laptop for over a year and knew it was genuine.

We’ve had firsthand experience of what tackling disinformation means thanks to South Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic who exposed the censorship of the social media accounts of Australians who dared to point out that the pandemic vaccines were not safe and effective, censorship that was authorised by the Morrison Coalition government. More recently, any criticism of the Albanese government’s Voice to parliament was deemed ‘misinformation’ and censored by Facebook. There are many other examples.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (owner of Facebook) now says that he regrets censoring the social media accounts of people on his platforms – Facebook and Instagram – when his moderators were put under enormous pressure from US government bureaucrats.

We also know that this was far from an isolated example. As Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger revealed in the The Twitter Files, there is a Censorship Industrial Complex that reaches around the world including Australia. And it is not giving up the fight to silence its critics.

In the UK, the Starmer government is, as predicted, even worse than its Tory predecessors with the criminalisation of memes and prayers proceeding apace.

Albanese’s legislation represents the third attempt in Australia, once under the Morrison government and now twice under the Albanese government, to ‘regulate’ digital platforms using the threat of fining them into bankruptcy to coerce them into censoring anyone who doesn’t toe the official line.

It now seems that the G20 is taking an enthusiastic and not insignificant role in making censorship respectable. Of course, censorship is respectable in authoritarian states in the G20 such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia.

Making it respectable in the West should be harder but the pandemic has played a pernicious role. Governments learned that they can censor shamelessly, coerce mercilessly, count on corporate complicity and media duplicity and relentlessly fear-monger until people surrender their freedoms.

Whatever else you say about the recent US censorship jamboree, it was not conducted proudly in public but secretly, not presumably because the architects were ashamed of what they were doing but because government censorship of Americans is a violation of the First Amendment.

Americans have a proud tradition of defending free speech. Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech’. Mark Twain quipped, ‘Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it’. Harry S. Truman warned, ‘Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear’. As Democrat hero Walter Cronkite put it, ‘Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.’

In the EU, censorship has had an easier ride, although Thierry Breton, the EU bureaucrat who threatened to censor X was forced to resign this week. Where did his announce it? On X, of course. Musk’s schadenfreude must know no bounds.

When the G20 announced its historic foray into censorship it must have reassured the Albanese government. But to choose Brazil gives heart to those with a finely honed sense of irony. After all, what better setting conjures up the dystopian surveillance state it wants for us than the country which shares its name with Terry Gilliam’s darkly hilarious portrayal of just such a world in his cult classic film Brazil.