X Will Soon Be Blocked in Brazil
Brazilian readers may soon find it difficult to find this story, at least if they rely on Elon Musk’s X for their news. That’s because a judge has formally ordered the social media platform banned in the country following a months-long battle over restrictions on free speech on the site formerly known as Twitter.
The conflict between X and the Brazilian government began in April when Musk unblocked some popular accounts in Brazil that the government had previously ordered blocked in the country for spreading disinformation . The order was issued following the far-right unrest that Brazil faced on January 8, 2023 , and it is suspected that the targeted accounts were linked to the unrest . The Brazilian judiciary has spent time since the unrest cracking down on online disinformation, calling it an ” exceptional threat ” to the country.
Musk, for his part, restored the suspended accounts just an hour after they were taken offline.
Since then, the billionaire and South America’s largest country have clashed repeatedly, with Brazil’s Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes freezing the country’s Starlink finances . X’s ban followed an incident in which Musk closed X’s Brazilian offices , saying that de Moraes had “threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we did not comply with his censorship orders.”
Brazil’s Supreme Court said on Wednesday that the company would not be able to evade its orders so easily, threatening X with closure of the company in the country if it did not appoint a new legal representative within 24 hours. This is not unusual in the country as legal representatives are required for companies to operate in the country. Telegram and WhatsApp have faced similar bans in the past for circumventing their own court orders, albeit short-lived ones.
X’s grace period has already passed, and reports from Bloomberg and local news outlet Poder360 say Judge de Moraes has ordered the National Telecommunications Agency to restrict Brazil’s access to X for 24 hours. The judge also gave Apple and Google five days to remove X from their respective app stores, and Brazil’s G1 Globo store says the judge will issue daily fines to people or businesses who use a VPN to continue accessing the site while it is blocked.
In response, Musk continued to emphasize the “censorship” point, saying, “Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy, and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” X’s official response, formally given before the ban but written with the expectation that it would happen, was a little more muted. It simply states that the company believes that Judge de Moraes’ demands are inconsistent with Brazilian law and has stated its intention not to comply with the orders.
It is currently unclear how the situation will develop, but X users in Brazil can prepare for the outage by downloading their tweets and following an X alternative.