Since Friday, August 30th, Brazilian users of the social media platform ‘X’ (formerly known as Twitter) have been unable to legally access the platform following its ban by the country’s Supreme Court, which was preceded by a legal battle with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. The row began back in earnest in April when Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered Musk to suspend dozens of accounts for the alleged spread of fake news, much of which was being spewed by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, originating with misinformation that was propagated in the build-up to the 2022 Presidential Election, in which Bolsonaro was defeated by current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula. Musk outright refused, taking to his platform to ask “How did @Alexandre de Moraes become the dictator of Brazil? He has Lula on a leash 😂”.
The Row’s Escalation
The feud went cold over the summer, until Musk closed X’s Brazilian office on August 18th, largely due to Moraes’ suspension requests, with the platform’s ‘Global Affairs’ account posting that “Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil (one of the workers at X’s office in Brazil) with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders (…) As a result, to protect the safety of our staff, we have decided to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately.”. Shortly after, Moraes imposed a hard deadline on X to remove the aforementioned accounts from the platform, threatening severe consequences if they were not complied with. After the deadline passed, on August 30th, Moraes ordered an “immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations (in Brazil…) until all court orders (…) are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country”, giving Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency 24 hours to impose the shutdown. For those within the country who refused to comply with the ban, Moraes “ordered that those who continued to access X via VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) be fined up to 50,000 reais ($9,000) per day.” Musk took to the platform, ranting that “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes”, adding that “One day, that criminal posing as a judge will occupy the prison cell of the people he has wrongfully convicted”. While the feud initially began due to Musk’s self-professed principles of ‘free speech absolutism’, he has seemed to take a severe dislike to Moraes’ character, which has frequently been the subject of Musk’s attacks.
An AI-generated photo posted by Elon Musk, owner of X, on August 29th, in response to Alexandre de Moraes’ ban of the platform in Brazil, depicting the Chief Justice behind bars, captioned “One day @Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words.”
Photo – Elon Musk’s ‘X’ Post (August 29th, 2024)
Brazilians Seek Alternatives
Four days later, the Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously upheld Moraes’ ban on the platform, with Justice Flávio Dino arguing that “freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility”. Many Brazilians instead took to the platform Bluesky, who announced that they had registered “half a million new users” on the day of and following the ban. These deserters included the country’s President, Lula, who posted links to his alternate forms of social media, with Bluesky top of the list, along with Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Threads, and Facebook.
On Wednesday, September 18th, X changed how Brazilian servers were accessed, leading to users in the country flooding back onto the platform, a flagrant violation of the ban. While X maintained that the network’s restoration was unintentional, and access was once again blocked hours later, a Brazilian court “fined the firm five million reais ($920,000; £695,000) for breaching the ban” the following day, with Moraes ruling that X and Starlink – one of Elon Musk’s other companies – are to be fined that amount for each day that X operated in Brazil.
X’s Imminent Return?
While Musk’s initial posturing and defiance of Moraes seemed to indicate that Brazilian X users could be in for an extended blackout, the company softened up its stance following Moraes’ fine imposition, with the company’s lawyers saying in a Friday court filing that the platform had complied with the suspension orders handed down by the country’s Supreme Court over 5 months ago. This about-face was confirmed by Brazil’s top court the following day, which said that the company had yet to file the correct paperwork, giving them 5 days to do so. This past Thursday, X released a statement saying that the platform is “committed to protecting free speech within the boundaries of the law and we recognize and respect the sovereignty of the countries in which we operate”, a subtle yet marked shift from previous rhetoric. In a document sent by X to the Brazilian Supreme Court, the company confirmed that they had permanently suspended nine accounts that were under investigation following a probe into hate speech and misinformation. Following these developments, X has formally requested to be reinstated in Brazil, with all signs indicating that a full return to service could occur within the next week, – when the company pays an additional fine of around $2 million for 2 days of ban non-compliance, the platform will be all set to go back online.
Featured Image: by – Mashable – Elon Musk’s X is now banned in Brazil (August 30th, 2024)
For the past few weeks, one of the world’s most popular social networks has been unavailable in the world’s 7th most populous country.
