Elon Musk’s ongoing war against the Brazilian judiciary is more than just another high-profile feud between arguably the world’s most prolific right-wing troll (who also happens to be one of its richest men) and the liberal governments that vex him. By going after Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes after he ordered numerous right-wing accounts removed from X in that country, Musk has turned a debate over Brazilian censorship into a global conservative cause celebre. He’s also, perhaps unintentionally, giving a voice to one of the great unspoken transformations in the global politics of tech. World governments have taken their first tenuous steps into a new, fraught role: “the mods.” That is, the moderators: The people responsible on forums and social media platforms for policing speech online, banning users, removing posts and generally reducing conflict in digital arenas. This puts governments squarely into a decades-old online power struggle that has been brewing since before the “internet” per se existed — and the shape and persistence of that fight should give them pause about what exactly they’re getting into here. In Brazil, this government censorship is now so explicit that leading Brazilian newspapers have begun to protest it as well. Brazil’s National Congress gave de Moraes, national elections chief in addition to his role on the Supreme Court, authority to demand the removal of digital content if platforms don’t comply with initial requests. (If the platforms continue to decline, they face suspension of their services in Brazil.) As the Brazilians are learning — and the White House has learned as well — playing “mod” isn’t the same thing as enforcing laws, which is what governments normally do. Until recently, online speech has mostly been subject to the laws governing speech in whichever country it originates. But as the line between the digital world and the “real” world in politics has increasingly blurred — maybe all but disappeared — liberal governments have begun to move beyond their underlying speech laws, and push back against forms of online speech deemed harmful or misleading, whether by jawboning social media platforms into self-censorship, or in cases like Brazil’s outright bans on certain forms of political advocacy. The position of “moderator” is not exactly a desirable one. Digital lore is littered with the hatred, tears and strife wrought by disputes over moderation. Take Wikipedia, arguably the most valuable open platform for speech in the world, which has a lengthy entry dedicated to its own moderation controversies. Something Awful, the humor website whose forums are a long-running, influential, notorious cesspool of some of the internet’s most juvenile and offensive content, requires some of the most stringent moderation policies around in order to function “smoothly.” “Mods are asleep” is an informal internet rallying cry to behave in the deranged, id-driven manner that anonymous internet posting tends to invite. During an early dispute in the 1970s over whether criticism of a private company should be allowed on the then-government-owned and operated ARPANET, one free speech-minded computer scientist wrote “Until such time as people start suggesting the overthrow of our government, I don't think any sensible topic should be off limits.” This is exactly what is now being discussed on the internet, whether by the conspiratorial-minded supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro kicked off X by de Moraes, or the internet users in America who believe that former President Donald Trump didn’t really lose the 2020 election (or that the U.S. is a violent settler-colonial state that must be upended by any means necessary). Those are all private, online arguments. The key difference now is that in a politically volatile, post-Jan. 6 world, partisans across the political spectrum have argued that the time for private policing of the internet is over, and government should have more direct control over online speech that could harm its citizens or even destabilize democracies. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering a slate of cases related to the government’s incursions (or alleged incursions) into online speech. Some laws would ban private social media companies from removing some posts. One, a reaction to the Biden administration’s efforts to persuade platforms to remove false content related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, would allow lawsuits over contact between the federal government and those platforms. All of these efforts, both from the Biden administration and aggrieved conservatives, are an attempt to play mod — to impose one’s desired speech norms in the digital sphere. Once you’re the mods, you are more or less locked into a permanent war with the users. Speech norms online are formed through the informal back-and-forth between these two parties, marked by recrimination, threats to resign, popularity contests and what old-school internet users would have once called “flame wars.” This is a far cry from the government’s traditional role of simply enacting and enforcing laws. And if governments do decide to take it on, they’ll end up fighting a war on two fronts. One, the culturally contested, personal judgment-driven world of private moderation, and the other the highly legalistic world of global speech law. After the election of the former President Donald Trump, American Civil Liberties Union legal director David Cole wrote in the New York Review of Books that while “The classical liberal conceptions of free speech and free press may not be enough to produce a fully informed electorate or to redress the social and economic ills that skew public debate,” to abandon it in favor of more assertive speech policing would be not just illiberal, but almost certainly ineffective. In other words, as any veteran forum-dweller would tell you, to be an effective mod is in effect to be a dictator. And as most unreadable terms of service documents would tell you, moderation decisions are final; there is no higher law to which one can appeal. On a forum dedicated to indie rock, or Southeastern Conference college football or dipping mustards, that’s no big deal. After all, people generally want moderation: The creation of safe, palatable, predictable online spaces is what transformed Facebook from a college lark into the world’s digital home base, and it’s kept even noxious forums like Something Awful from devolving into full-on 4chan-style anarchy. In that sense, Musk and his crusading fanboys might be onto something. The history of moderation tells us that as valuable as it is, the work is inherently a thankless, unsatisfying quagmire, a never-ending exercise in subjectivity and sleight-of-hand. Governments aren’t wrong to notice that even the most free speech-oriented societies want, or even deserve, for their digital spaces to be free of the worst slime that’s increasingly oozed back into Musk’s deregulated X. But to step into that role themselves turns online governance into something that looks less like traditional policymaking, and more like a never-ending guerilla war against their own citizens.
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