Popular social media site X was suspended by a top judge in Brazil on Friday after Elon Musk refused to name a legal representative there.
The action escalates the two men’s months-long debate over misinformation, far-right accounts, and free speech.
Musk was given a 24-hour deadline Wednesday night by Justice Alexander de Moraes to comply with his decision to appoint a representative, failing which X could be blocked in Brazil. As of earlier this month, the corporation has no representative in the country.
De Moraes ruling states that Internet service providers and app shops have five days to impose restrictions on access to X. If they don’t, the platform will remain banned. Additionally, he added that consumers or businesses that access X through virtual private networks, or VPNs, will be fined 50,000 reais ($8,900) per day.
Elon Musk established himself as a truly international entity unaffected by the laws of any nation, according to De Moraes, showing his complete disregard for Brazilian sovereignty and especially for the judiciary.
For X, which has suffered a loss of advertisers since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Brazil is a key market. About 40 million Brazilians, or about a fifth of the country’s population, use X at least once a month, according to market research firm Emarketer.
Late Thursday night, X announced on its official Global Government Affairs page that it expects De Moraes to be taken offline “simply because we don’t comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
When we tried to defend ourselves in court, Judge De Moraes threatened to imprison our Brazilian attorney. It froze all his bank accounts even after he resigned, the firm claimed. “Our objections to his blatantly illegal behavior were either ignored or ignored. Supreme Court justices who disagree with Judge De Moraes are either unable or unwilling to do so.
De Moraes and X have a disagreement over X’s failure to follow instructions to restrict customers.
Activists accused of undermining Brazil’s democracy and parliamentarians linked to former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party were among the accounts the site previously shut down at Brazil’s demands.
Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has maintained that justice measures amount to censorship on multiple occasions, and the political right in Brazil has supported his claims. On his platform, he has often disparaged de Maurice, calling him a usurper and a tyrant.
Moraes’s defenders have said that his actions against X were legal, supported by a majority of the court’s bench, and helped to save democracy at a time when it was threatened. His Friday order is based on Brazilian law, which mandates that international businesses maintain a presence in the country to inform them of any legal action taken against them.
According to Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro, “the X could be offline as soon as 12 hours after receiving its instructions,” provided operators are aware of the widely publicized outage. I am and their obligation to comply with De Moraes’s order, and the fact that doing so is not complicated.”
WhatsApp, Brazil’s most popular messaging service, was shut down by judges several times in 2015 and 2016 after the firm refused to cooperate with authorities’ requests for user data. De Moraes warned messaging app Telegram could be shut down across the country in 2022, claiming it had ignored numerous demands from Brazilian authorities to block information and profiles. In the end, Telegram complied with his directive and went online ordering the corporation to nominate a local representative.
Many nations—mostly with authoritarian regimes, such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela, and Turkmenistan—have outlawed X and its previous iteration, Twitter. Earlier, X was also briefly suspended by Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, generally to quell dissent and instability. Following the Arab Spring upheaval, which some have dubbed the “Twitter Revolution”, Twitter was outlawed in Egypt, but has since been reinstated.
A search on X on Friday revealed hundreds of Brazilian users asking questions about virtual private networks (VPNs), which could allow them to continue using the site by pretending to log in from abroad. It was not immediately clear how the Brazilian government would monitor the conduct and how the fines mentioned by de Moraes would be applied.
Sharing a screenshot and captioning it, “I’m going there,” Mariana de Souza Elves Lima, better known by her handle MariMoon, announced to her 1.4 million X followers that she’s competing.
X announced that it would make De Moraes’s “illegal demands” and related court documents public “in the interest of transparency.”
Additionally, Musk’s satellite Internet service firm StarLink announced Thursday night on X that De M Moraes had frozen its funds this week, barring it from doing business in the country where its 250,000 There are more users.
“This order is based on the false assumption that StarLink must pay the fines imposed against X for violating the Constitution. It is done so secretly and without providing StarLink with due process of law. Issued which the Brazilian constitution guarantees. We intend to take legal action against the offending party,” Starlink said in a statement.
In response to those spreading the frozen reports, Musk insulted De Moraes. He said, “This guy @Alexander is a criminal masquerading as a judge. He is an outright criminal of the worst kind.”
SpaceX, the company that operates Starlink, will offer free Internet service in Brazil “until the matter is resolved.”
De Moraes said in his ruling that he had ordered the suspension of Starlink’s assets because there were insufficient funds in X’s accounts to pay the mounting fines, citing the two businesses’ shared economic ties.
Ada Spark is a tech explorer and creative content creator with 6+ years of experience. Appreciate teamwork and creative strategies to promote content. Always looking to work according to the latest trends and create content that makes a difference. Also familiar with infographics and other forms of content.
