Liquid Censorship and the Judicialization of Speech: Power, Democracy, and the Regulation of Digital Discourse in Brazil

This paper examines the concept of “liquid censorship” as a framework for understanding contemporary threats to freedom of expression in Brazil’s digital public sphere. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity and Manuel Castells’s network society paradigm, it argues that censorship in 21st-century Brazil has ceased to be a purely statist, top-down phenomenon and has instead dispersed horizontally across juridical, institutional, and civil-society actors. The judicialization of speech—whereby Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) has assumed unilateral authority over the moderation of online discourse—is analyzed as a structural risk to democratic checks and balances. The paper also addresses the compounding threat of organized crime’s rapid appropriation of information networks, a dynamic Castells anticipated as early as 1996 in his seminal analysis of the emerging networked state. We conclude that meaningful sovereignty requires attending to these internal fragilities rather than reducing the debate to an opposition between the state and Big Tech platforms.