Brazil started blocking Elon Musk's social media platform X, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through mobile apps early on Saturday after the billionaire failed to name a legal representative in the country.
The move, which escalates a monthslong feud between Musk and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation, came after Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the suspension on Friday.
To block X, Brazil's telecommunications regulator, Anatel, told internet service providers to suspend users' access to the social media platform. As Saturday morning after midnight local time, major operators had begun doing so.
The company hasn't had a legal representative in the South American nation since earlier this month. Foreign companies that operate in Brazil are required to have local representation to make sure someone can be notified of legal decisions and is qualified to take any requisite action.
De Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X services in Brazil could be shut down if he failed to comply, and established a 24-hour deadline. In response, the entrepreneur has fired back at the judge with insults and accusations of authoritarianism. De Moraes said the platform would remain blocked until it complies.
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 in his decision.
The justice gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders. He established the same deadline for app stores to remove virtual private networks, or VPNs, and set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using them to access X.
Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the former Twitter in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month.
X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late on Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.
X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users.
Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro's right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X's lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court in April, saying that since 2019 it had suspended or blocked 226 users.
In his decision Friday, de Moraes' cited Musk's statements as evidence that X's conduct clearly intends to continue to encourage posts with extremism, hate speech and anti-democratic discourse, and to try to withdraw them from jurisdictional control.
Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist," has repeatedly claimed the justice's actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil's political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant.
De Moraes' defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court's full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time it is imperiled. He wrote Friday that his ruling is based on Brazilian law requiring internet services companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are relevant court decisions and take requisite action - specifying the takedown of illicit content posted by users, and an anticipated churn of misinformation during October municipal elections.
The looming shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil.
Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta's WhatsApp, the nation's most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company's refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities' requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.
X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries - mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the Twitter revolution, but it has since been restored.
A search on Friday on X showed hundreds of Brazilian users inquiring about VPNs that could potentially enable them to continue using the platform by making it appear they were logging on from outside the country. It was not immediately clear how Brazilian authorities would police this practice and impose fines cited by de Moraes.
“This is an unusual measure, but its main objective is to ensure that the court order to suspend the platform's operation is, in fact, effective," Filipe Medon, a specialist in digital law and professor at the law school of Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro, told The Associated Press. As a general rule, there are no provisions in Brazilian law that prevent users from using VPNs, since they are not the subjects of the blocking and suspension orders, but rather the companies.
Even so, Mariana de Souza Alves Lima, known by her handle MariMoon, showed her 1.4 million followers on X where she intends to go, posting a screenshot of rival social network BlueSky.
X said that it plans to publish what it has called de Moraes' illegal demands and related court filings in the interest of transparency.
