Brazil’s highest court has ordered internet providers to block the social media site X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk defied a court order to hire a new attorney to represent X in the country, as required by local law.
The order, issued Friday by Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, is the latest escalation in a months-long dispute rooted in the ongoing investigation into the Jan. 8, 2023 insurrection against the country’s government.
The investigation, still ongoing, eventually extended to include the social media activity of suspected individuals. This is where Musk enters the picture.
In April, he defied court orders from de Moraes to block the X accounts of several people suspected of involvement with the 1/8 attack against Brazil’s government. Earlier this month, Musk closed X’s operations in Brazil and eliminated all staff there after de Moraes threatened to arrest the company’s Brazilian attorney over the company’s continuing defiance of the law.
But Brazilian law also requires that any company doing business in Brazil — and X continued to provide users there with access — must have legal representation in the country. So on Wednesday, de Moraes ordered X to hire a new attorney to represent it in Brazil within 24 hours, or else the site would be blocked. Musk refused, and here we are.
De Moraes has given internet service providers five days to block access to X. After that, any individual or company who accesses the platform via a virtual private network (VPN) will be subject to fines of up to $8,900 per day if caught.
“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote.
The judge also referred to Musk as an “outlaw” who intended to “allow the massive spread of disinformation, hate speech and attacks on the democratic rule of law, violating the free choice of the electorate, by keeping voters away from real and accurate information.”
“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company said in a statement. “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”
Musk, for his part, insists that he is waging a fight over “free speech” and has claimed the court orders are effectively a form of censorship. In an earlier statement, the company called de Moraes’ directives “illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
However, Musk’s response to literal censorship demands made in other countries has been markedly different.
For example, in early 2023, India’s right-wing government ordered Twitter to block references to a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The company complied and when asked about it, Musk said, “The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict and we can’t go beyond the laws of the country.”
Meanwhile, in May 2023, Twitter also complied with demands by Turkey’s right-wing government to censor dissident accounts during the country’s presidential election. In a statement at the time, a company representative said, “We received what we believed to be a final threat to throttle the service — after several such warnings — and so in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend, took action on four accounts and 409 Tweets identified by court order.”
Musk later angrily told one critic, “The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?
Musk has also never spoken out about the tragic case of Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a retired teacher in Saudi Arabia who was arrested and sentenced to death last year for comments he made on X/Twitter criticizing the government. Coincidentally, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, is an investor in X.
Musk, who has become an open supporter of far right-wing politics in recent years, has not commented on the difference between Brazil and these other countries regarding “political opponents,” court orders, the law or blocking accounts.
In a bid to collect the $3 million in fines the judge set for X, he also froze the finances of Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, which is a subsidiary of his SpaceX company. Musk called de Moraes “an outright criminal of the worst kind” for this.
Starlink, which has more than 250,000 customers, has vowed to fight the order, saying in a statement that the fine is “unconstitutional” and was “issued in secret and without affording Starlink any of the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution of Brazil.”
Market research group Emarketer says that approximately 40 million Brazilians, or one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month, according to CBS News. The country is noted for having a particularly active social media base, with American companies holding large fan conventions there in attempts to generate excitement amongst fans around the world via social media, similar to San Diego’s Comic-Con International here in the United States.
Following his loss in the 2022 election, supporters of right-wing former president Jair Bolsonaro laid siege to the capital, Brasilia, in an attempt to restore him to power. The attack was inspired by the one Donald Trump incited two years earlier. Bolsonaro, who was in the U.S. on that day, denies any involvement, though military leaders have since confirmed he tried to persuade them to back him in a military coup shortly after the election.
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