From Free Speech to National Sovereignty: How U.S. and Brazilian Media Frame Brazil’s Platform Crackdowns and its Consequences for Europe

Social media platforms may not dictate the content of users’ speech, but they profoundly shape public discourse through their governance choices (Gillespie, 2018). As they expand globally and consolidate power, the shortcomings of their self-regulation have become evident: companies invoke a vague defense of free speech while failing to curb harmful content that violates local laws (Gorwa, 2024; Klonick, 2017). Despite appearing to support free expression, these platforms restrict speech through moderation guidelines rooted in U.S. law and jurisprudence (Klonick, 2017), without effective accountability (Suzor et al., 2019), often arbitrarily suppressing benign speech and amplifying malicious voices (Díaz & Hecht-Fellela, 2021). As countries turn to regulation, some struggle to counter flawed platform governance democratically, constrained by U.S. corporate power (Salles et al., 2025), while others edge toward authoritarianism (Metodieva, 2025). Against this backdrop, our research seeks to understand the perceived role of public authorities when platforms themselves become a security threat. This issue is particularly salient in Brazil, where national institutions faced resistance from X in cooperating with law enforcement and public security policies – a conflict that culminated in the platform’s brief suspension in mid-2024 (Oxford Analytica, 2024). This dispute created unique conditions to analyze how far state and corporate actors can go when invoking democracy to legitimize their positions: while X denounced the measures as censorship in a campaign built around leaked documents, the contested requests concerned not only political expression but also criminal activity under Brazilian law, including the coordination of armed groups and attacks on state institutions (Coutinho & Araújo, 2024). To investigate this, we will gather and analyze textual data from public documents, press releases, and media coverage, focusing on The New York Times and O Globo. Our study aims to show how Brazil’s responses to platform misconduct, ranging from fines to temporary suspensions of access, were framed in U.S. and Brazilian media. We highlight the perceived limits of public and private actors to arbitrate between freedom of expression, user safety, national security, and corporate interests (Carr, 2016; Gorwa, 2024). By situating the case within broader struggles where U.S. state power and Big Tech interests converge, we show how norms of democratic sovereignty and resistance are being renegotiated (Klonick, 2017). Finally, because much of online security governance is privatized, we argue that greater platform transparency and improved regulatory technological literacy are essential to managing these delicate relationships (Suzor et al., 2019). This analysis is highly relevant in a European context. The forceful imposition of U.S. interpretations of free speech in Brazil reveals that such moves are, in part, predicated on core assumptions of asymmetry and power. Similar moves have been deployed against EU legislation, including the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act–which has already borne concessions. As social media company priorities are increasingly mirrored by US foreign policy, the intense lobbying efforts in Brazil–and the pushback it generated therein–can help to contextualise current challenges faced by Europe, while providing insights into the forms of resistance that are possible and/or effective in these spaces.