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Journalism of Courage
A five-member panel of Brazil’s Supreme Court judges on Monday (September 2) upheld a decision by one of the judges to shut down the social media platform X, for not following an order to appoint a local legal representative as required by the law.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has been in a months-long feud with the judge, Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Starlink, Musk’s satellite Internet service, told Brazil’s national telecommunications agency on Sunday that it would not comply with the order to block the platform, The New York Times reported.
There are more than 20 million users of X in Brazil, making it the company’s fifth largest market in the world after Japan, India, Indonesia and the UK, The NYT said, quoting data from Statista.
The order to black out X came after a 24-hour deadline imposed by the court to name a representative in Brazil passed on Thursday evening local time. In August, X claimed Justice de Moraes had threatened its former legal representative with arrest if the platform did not comply with orders to block some accounts. The representative later resigned.
Earlier this year, Justice Moraes ordered X to block accounts allegedly spreading disinformation. This has been a longstanding concern in Brazil.
However, on April 7, X’s Global Government Affairs complained of being forced to block “certain popular accounts in Brazil” for unknown reasons, and Musk called for the impeachment of Justice Moraes. He has since targeted the judge repeatedly, and called him “the dictator of Brazil”.
On August 30, the GGA account said it “would not comply with his (Justice Moraes’) illegal orders to censor his political opponents…we will publish all of Judge de Moraes’ illegal demands and all related court filings in the interest of transparency”.
Musk has claimed to be a “free speech absolutist”, saying governments instructing blocking of accounts infringes on people’s free speech rights. But X has complied with some government requests earlier, like in the case of India. Musk was also accused of hypocrisy and silencing his critics when the X accounts of several journalists were suspended in January.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes said on April 7 that Musk was waging a “disinformation campaign”. He referenced Musk’s actions in his order, saying, “The flagrant conduct of obstruction of Brazilian justice, incitement of crime, the public threat of disobedience of court orders and future lack of cooperation from the platform are facts that disrespect the sovereignty of Brazil.”
Justice Moraes oversaw the case against former right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), over the January 8, 2023 riots in Brasilia. Bolsonaro’s supporters entered and attacked government buildings, a week after socialist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was sworn in after winning the 2022 elections. Musk has been a great supporter of Bolsonaro, who called him a “true legend of freedom”.
Many right-wing Brazilians see de Moraes as a biased judge. In 2022, he ordered a temporary ban on the messaging app Telegram for not complying with an investigation into neo-Nazi chat groups. However, a federal court later lifted the restriction, saying a ban was “not reasonable” for the freedom of communication for other users, DW reported.
The judge’s recent orders have come under wider scrutiny. For instance, he set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using virtual private networks or VPNs to access X. According to The New York Times, Justice de Moraes also imposed a fine of $3 million on Musk and froze the assets of Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service. In defiance, Musk told Brazil’s telecom agency that Starlink would not block access to X.
The ban on X also comes soon after the French government arrested Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, over crimes like child pornography on the app. Telegram said it was “absurd” to hold Durov responsible, bringing forth the tensions between governments and tech giants over regulations on speech.
