Brazil Judge Bans X as Musk Challenges Top Court’s Orders

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(Bloomberg) -- Brazil’s top court determined the immediate suspension of X in the country after its billionaire owner Elon Musk refused to name a legal representative for the social network in Latin America’s largest nation.

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The banning of the platform formerly known as Twitter caps a months-long feud between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is spearheading efforts to combat fake news and hate speech that he says are harming Brazil’s democracy.

X has been contributing to “an environment of total impunity and lawlessness in Brazilian social networks, including during the 2024 local elections,” Moraes wrote in his ruling, saying the company has repeatedly and deliberately disrespected court orders.

“Extremist groups and digital militias” have been using the platform for “massive dissemination of Nazi, racist, fascist, hateful and anti-democratic speeches,” he wrote, adding that anyone using VPN to access the platform would be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais ($8,900).

Minutes after the ruling was published, Musk lashed out at Moraes on his platform. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” he wrote. “The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people learning the truth that they will bankrupt anyone who tries.”

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post that today “is a sad day for X users around the world, especially those in Brazil, who are being denied access to our platform.”

“I wish it did not have to come to this – it breaks my heart,” she wrote. “I hope for a day when the Brazilian government will live up to the Constitution that the Brazilian people ratified. But until there is change in Brazil, X will be shut down.”

When asked for comment, X referred Bloomberg to a post from Thursday evening on its official Global Government Affairs page, which states the company plans to “publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency.”

The social media platform was still available Friday evening as Moraes’s ruling takes some time to take effect. Brazil’s telecommunications watchdog has 24 hours to implement the ban, the ruling said.

Later Moraes revoked part of the order saying Apple and Google had to block X in IOS and Android and remove the X and VPN apps from their online stores in five days, while Internet service providers must ban X over the same period of time.

Ahead of the decision, Brazilian celebrities, internet personalities and politicians, including President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, were bracing for the ban by tweeting social media handles on other networks to their audiences.

Musk shut down X’s office in Brazil earlier this month to protest against orders to remove certain accounts that allegedly spread misinformation. In response, the court notified the company on Wednesday evening, replying to a post on X, that Moraes had given it 24 hours to name a legal representative in the country or risk having its service suspended.

Brazil has historically been a key market for many of the largest social networking services, X included. It’s estimated that X has tens of millions active users in the country, according to external estimates, and Brazil has long been one of X’s largest hubs outside of the US and Japan.

Brazil is not the first country where X has been suspended. The service has long been banned in China, Iran, and North Korea, among others. In 2022, it was restricted in Russia after President Vladimir Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine. Former Twitter executives had paused advertising in the country, and begun labeling links from all state-backed Russian media outlets, eventually setting up a separate version of the service to help people access it despite government restrictions.

Misinformation or Freedom of Speech

Democracies around the world are grappling with the effects of social media on their elections and politics. But Brazil has taken some of the most aggressive action to hold companies accountable for content after its 2022 presidential vote.

During the campaign, former President Jair Bolsonaro took to the airwaves and online platforms to sow distrust about his nation’s electronic voting system. Baseless claims of hacking and vote stealing fueled the rage of Bolsonaro supporters that rioted in Brasilia on the false belief that Lula had lost the election.

In April, Moraes included Musk in a broad investigation into so-called digital militias, or organized groups accused of using social media to spread false information and vitriol, and slapped the company with fines for disobeying court orders to remove content.

The move only seemed to escalate the showdown between Brazil’s top court and the world’s richest person. While X initially complied with orders to take down accounts suspected of promulgating falsehoods, Musk later appeared to challenge Moraes, announcing he would lift restrictions even if it hurt his company’s bottom line.

In August, X issued a statement saying it would close operations in Brazil “effective immediately” after Moraes threatened its legal representative with arrest for not following court orders. All the while, Musk continued to rail against the judge on his platform, alleging the his efforts to police content amounted to overreach and censorship.

He responded to the order to name a representative in Brazil by posting picture of a bald man in black robes behind bars — an apparently AI-generated image of Moraes. “One day, Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words,” Musk wrote.

A self-declared free speech absolutist, Musk stripped the company of much of its content-moderating infrastructure and personnel since purchasing it in 2022. The company mostly relies on X users to police content for misinformation through Community Notes, a feature that adds labels to posts when users find them misleading.

Musk often uses his platform to rebut critics and chide world leaders, including Brazil First Lady Rosangela da Silva, whose X page was allegedly hacked last year. And the clash with authorities has won Musk praise within Brazil’s conservative circles, which have long accused the judiciary of attacking their cause.

If maintained, the judicial ban risks depriving X of one of its largest markets outside the US. It strips thousands of candidates of popular campaign tool ahead of local elections taking place in October across more than 5,000 Brazilian municipalities.

A December survey found that 29% of smartphone users in Brazil have X installed. As of the first quarter of 2024, the platform had about 20 million active users in the country, according to Sensor Tower, a data firm, down about 15% from the year prior.

Other social media platforms have previously run afoul of Internet regulations. Last year, a judge ordered that Telegram be temporarily shut down after the messaging service failed to share user data from neo-Nazi content that authorities say was linked to attacks in Brazilian schools.

WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Meta Platforms Inc., was also briefly banned in 2016 for failing to comply with court orders to share user data.