Contents – Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced
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Meta bans Brazilian left-wing influencers
Brazilian left-wing influencer Thiago Torres, best known as Chavoso da USP (roughly translated as the University of São Paulo’s swaggy chav), has faced increasing political persecution in the last months. This reached international levels last month when Thiago’s main Instagram profile, with more than one million followers, was taken down by Meta.
Thiago then started using an old backup Instagram account with 385,000 followers, which was also taken down after allegations that it had been created to circumvent the previous block. Arbitrarily and without possibility of appeal, Meta blocked all access to his accounts and is set to permanently delete their content. A warning on Instagram said that the account “does not follow Community Standards” although the company did not specify which specific rules had been breached. Even after a preliminary injunction was issued on the morning of 20 November that forced Meta to return Thiago’s main account under threat of a fine, three other accounts were taken down later that same evening.
By maintaining the block on the influencer, Meta is involved in yet another case of big tech insubordination to Brazilian justice according to politicians. Federal Congresswoman Sâmia Bomfim, from PSOL (Freedom and Socialism Party), classified the event as a “direct attack on freedom of speech and the work of those who denounce injustices within Brazil.” Thiago sees it as “an offensive against progressive, mainly radical, left-wing voices”.
This is not the first time Meta has taken down accounts with large numbers of followers linked to the Brazilian left. In August this year, historian and influencer Jones Manoel, former candidate for governor of Pernambuco with the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party) and the Brazilian influencer with the most growth on the platform since June, was arbitrarily banned from Instagram. In October, activist and comedian Tiago Santineli also had his 850,000 followers account blocked, following online comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.
Since 9 December 2025, members of parliament from PSOL, PT (Worker’s Party), and left-wing news outlets have reported that their profiles “don’t appear in searches, can’t be tagged, and [that] their reach has plummeted in an orchestrated manner”, according to Federal Congresswoman Fernanda Melchionna. This is known as shadow-banning.
The bans follow a dispute between big tech companies and the left wing government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva which dates from January 2025, when Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office sent an extrajudicial notification to Meta because of the company’s decision to stop using independent fact-checkers. The concern was that this would further exacerbate the problem of “fake news”, which became prevalent in the 2018 and 2022 election processes, particularly on the part of the Brazilian right wing. A major dispute between the Brazilian judiciary and Elon Musk’s X also took place last year, resulting in the social network being blocked in the country until Musk complied with court orders.
The regulation of big tech companies – largely similar to what the EU has instigated – is considered by the current government as a matter of national sovereignty. In July, President Trump sent a letter to Brazil’s president, Lula, imposing a massive 50% tariff that rendered the export of a range of Brazilian products to the USA unfeasible. According to the letter, the measure came as retaliation for the sanctions against big tech and in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a representative of the Brazilian far right and ally of Trump who was convicted for attempted coup d’état.
In his speech at the UN General Assembly in September, President Lula said that “even under unprecedented attack, Brazil chose to resist and defend its democracy. There is no justification for the unilateral and arbitrary measures against our institutions and our economy. The aggression against the independence of the judiciary is unacceptable.”
It is not only in Brazil that US intervention in favour of big tech been felt. Back in January, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly stated on the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast that “the US government has a role in basically defending [big tech] abroad”.
In the same week that Brazil hosted COP30 and witnessed the preventive arrest of Bolsonaro, the suspension of five accounts belonging to a left-wing influencer shows that big tech might also have a role in defending the US government’s interests abroad in Brazil.
Researchers like the Brazilian academic Walter Lippold denounce what they call “digital colonialism”, the interconnection between imperialist interests and big tech. To Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Amadeu, “online social networks and platforms controlled by big tech companies are geopolitical structures increasingly aligned with the far right.” In June, at seminars held by Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal party (PL), executives from Meta gave workshops teaching how to use AI and achieve greater reach on the platform.
Born and raised in Brasilândia, an outlying neighbourhood of São Paulo, Thiago Torres first rose to prominence as a social sciences student at the University of São Paulo.
Ranked many times as the best university in Latin America, the University of São Paulo subscribes to a national public education project aimed at social development. Despite this, USP remains elitist in the social and racial makeup of both its faculty and students. Thiago spoke about the way this composition shaped the production of knowledge within USP, and used his platform to share social theory with a wider public.
Now graduated and a teacher, Thiago has become known for denouncing cases of political corruption and police violence. Overtly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, it’s not surprising that his head is wanted by public officials and companies who benefit from the country’s social division.
In August this year, Thiago was called to testify in the controversial CPI dos Pancadões, a parliamentary commission inquiring into street funk parties. Under the pretext that they disturb public order, it is common for the military police to raid pancadões, using extreme violence and murdering the young people present, many of whom are from racial minorities and come from lower social strata.
Thiago’s account dedicated to police violence, @fim.da.pm (“End the Military Police”), is among those blocked by Meta. The company had until 28 November to return the influencer’s main account, but this didn’t happen.
“Instagram will face a daily fine for each day it fails to comply [with the judiciary decision]”, Thiago explained. “But it’s a relatively small fine for them, so it’s possible they might disregard the court order.” Unfortunately, this seems to be the case.
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A further crackdown on dissent this year continues the Supreme Leader’s bloody rule
The price to be paid for making films in Iran
The line between fact and fiction often overlaps in Jafar Panahi’s films.
Take Taxi Tehran from 2015 for instance. The film takes place inside a cab with three hidden cameras. Panahi, an internationally acclaimed award-winning Iranian director, plays himself. He just so happens to be driving a taxi around the Iranian capital. What initially seems like an improv documentary eventually turns out to be a satirical conceit. Namely: the director is using the safe space of a private car to freely discuss what would ordinarily be off limits to discuss publicly in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Among the passengers that Panahi picks up is the Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh. Over the last 15 years she has been imprisoned twice in her native country. Her last stint was for defending women prosecuted for appearing in public without a hijab. Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, is also now serving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for voicing public opposition to Iran’s compulsory hijab laws. In Taxi Tehran, Sotoudeh speaks about defending human rights and free speech in a theocratic-totalitarian-police state. “First they mount a political case,” Sotoudeh explains. “They beef it up with a morality charge, then they make your life hell.”
In that same scene, Sotoudeh notices the director looking at his back window.
“Looking for someone?” she asks.
“I heard a voice … I thought I recognised my interrogator,” Panahi replies.
Sotoudeh mentions how her clients often say this. “They want to identify people by their voices,” she says. “Advantage of blindfolds.”
“This reference in Taxi [Tehran] to prisoners hearing sounds is a communal experience shared by all prisoners of conscience,” Panahi told Index from Los Angeles, via a Farsi translator. “In my current film I wanted to talk about a [similar] experience. This time, however, the sound is coming from a disabled [prosthetic] leg, which becomes the moving engine of the film.”
Panahi’s latest movie, It was Just an Accident, won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas this coming Friday, 5 December. The story begins in a mechanics’ workshop, where a man named Vahid is convinced he has just encountered Eghbal – a prison inspector who once caused him great pain and suffering. Vahid hears Eghbal before he sees him. He can never forget the eerie squeaking sound Eghbal’s prosthetic leg makes in motion. He remembers it from prison, where “Peg Leg” was known as a sadistic torturer. The traumatised Iranian mechanic later kidnaps Eghbal and even considers killing him. But has he got the right man? To tease out his doubts, Vahid rounds up a group of former prisoners to seek their advice.
What follows is a brilliant farcical black comedy-road trip movie. Despite the light-hearted banter, the film poses two serious ethical questions. One, how far will an individual – or a group – go to seek revenge on former enemy? Two, at what point does revenge violence make the victim the victimiser?
It was Just an Accident has been selected by France as its official nomination for the Academy Awards this coming March. It may be Panahi’s most overtly political film to date. But the 65-year-old Iranian moviemaker disagrees.
“I don’t make political films, which typically tend to divide people into good and bad,” he insists. “I make social films, where everyone is a human being.”
The film’s script was inspired from several conversations Panahi had with inmates he befriended while serving time in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. In March 2010, Panahi was convicted by a Revolutionary Court in Iran of propaganda for his film-making and political activism. He subsequently spent 86 days behind bars, he explained: “For the first 15 to 20 days I was in a small cell in solitary confinement, where I was interrogated.”
That same year, the Iranian regime handed Panahi a 20-year ban that forbade him from directing films or writing screenplays. “This [censorship] I experience presents many challenges to keep making films, but a social filmmaker is inspired by the circumstances in which they live,” said Panahi. “If I lived in a freer society what would inspire me? I don’t know.”
Despite the ban, Panahi is a prolific filmmaker who never stops creating. Many of his films have focused on the complications of making films with a state-imposed censorship hanging over his head. They include the ironically titled, This Is Not a Film (2011), which was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick concealed inside a birthday cake, and No Bears (2022).
No Bears has two stories in it. The first is about migrants heading off to Europe and the second is about Panahi, who is stuck back in Iran, as his film crew attempt to complete the film they are shooting just across the border in Turkey. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Panahi was unable to collect the prize. He was then back in Evin prison, after a Tehran court ruled he must serve the six-year sentence he was handed more than a decade before for supporting anti-government demonstrations.
“According to the law [in Iran] if a sentence is issued but not gone into effect for ten years, it should not be executed,” said Panahi. “However, [the regime] said that this is not true about political prisoners. They were lying though.”
During this second prison term Panahi was in a public ward with 300 or so prisoners, of whom roughly 40 were prisoners of conscience, he said: “On that occasion I did not face interrogations or solitary confinement, which meant I could speak and listen to the prisoners’ stories.”
Panahi remained in prison until the following February. After his release, he noticed many changes in Iranian society. The previous September, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, was beaten to death in Tehran by Iran’s so-called morality police after being accused of defying the country’s hijab rule. The state sanctioned homicide inspired the Woman Life Freedom uprising, which saw an estimated two million take to the streets across Iran. Many ripped and burnt posters of their political leaders, while others openly chanted, “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Iranian security forces, meanwhile, responded by killing hundreds of protesters.
“The history of the Islamic Republic [will eventually] be divided into before and after the timeline of this movement,” said Panahi. “The impact has been enormous and even made its way into cinema.”
Specifically, Panahi was referring to the fact that many women who appear in It Was Just an Accident – including actors and extras – are not wearing the hijab. “Much of what you see in the background of the film is people being filmed as they are in daily life in Iran today,” said Panahi. “For example, one woman who agreed to be in the film as an extra said to me: ‘If you are going to force me to wear the hijab, I am not going to do that.’ I told her: ‘You appear as you wish’.”
It’s not a view the authorities in the Islamic Republic endorse. Just days after Index spoke to the Iranian director, he was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against Iran. The news was broken via the French news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP), who cited Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili, as a source.
At the time of writing, Panahi remains outside Iran. Prior to news of his new prison sentence being issued, Panahi told Index he could not imagine living somewhere in which he has only a touristy outlook and superficial understanding of the people and culture: “I have lived in Iran for 65 years and I make films about Iranians. I don’t want to stop making films because life without cinema has no meaning to me.”
“[In Iran] when you work you will have problems as a filmmaker there and anywhere in the world the Iranian authorities can get their hands on you,” Panahi concluded. “But you accept this is the price to be paid, and you get through what you have to in order to make the film you want to make.”