On Friday, a Supreme Court justice in Brazil ordered Elon Musk‘s social media platform X to suspend operations in the country until it complies with court orders and pays existing fines, numerous outlets reported.
In a Wednesday statement, Judge Alexandre de Moraes gave the social media site 24 hours to name a new legal representative to respond to government requests to suspend accounts and pay 18.5 million reais ($3.28 million) in fines or face suspension, per Reuters.
The Thursday deadline to do so came and went without action from Musk or other company leadership, resulting in a new order for the “immediate and complete suspension” of company activities in the country, the BBC reported.
De Moraes also threatened any person in Brazil who accesses the site using a VPN with fines of up to nearly $9,000 per day and froze the accounts of a second Musk business — SpaceX’s Starlink — in an attempt to collect the fines he’d levied against X, The New York Times reported.
In a Thursday statement posted on the site, X’s Global Government Affairs office wrote that they expected de Moraes would order the site to be shut down “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil – simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents. These enemies include a duly elected Senator and a 16-year-old girl, among others.
When we attempted…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 29, 2024
“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment,” the Global Government Affairs office statement added. “Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts. 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.”
Earlier this month, de Moraes threatened to issue an arrest decree against Rachel Nova Conceicao, a representative for X, if the social media site did not comply with de Moraes’ orders to take down specific content on its platform.
De Moraes has specifically targeted content posted by “digital militias” that he says have been methodically spreading misinformation about far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro. Some of the far-right online groups de Moraes has targeted have suggested Bolsonaro’s loss in the 2022 election was due to election interference and supported a mob that stormed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court in an effort to start a military coup that would have seized control of the country’s government.
X’s Global Government Affairs office statement argues that the fundamental issue was X’s refusal to comply with de Moraes’ orders, which X suggested violated Brazil’s free speech laws.
However, The New York Times noted that after the 2022 election, de Moraes was granted expansive powers to crack down on digital threats to democracy. His tactics of ordering the suspension of social media accounts and launching investigations into the groups that spread misinformation have made him a hero among left-leaning Brazilians and a target of right-wing followers and those who support Bolsonaro.
Like the US, Brazil has enshrined speech protections in its constitution. However, the Brazilian government has wider discretion to ban certain kinds of speech, like hate speech, than the US government.
“Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders,” X’s Thursday statement continued. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.”
De Moraes’ order escalates a public feud between Musk and the Brazilian justice that has been simmering for months. Musk, in posts on X, has repeatedly suggested that de Moraes is “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge,” posting photos of the Brazilian judge alongside photos of Lord Voldemort from the “Harry Potter” franchise and suggesting it is “just a matter of time” before de Moraes is behind bars.
Less than two weeks ago, Musk ordered the closure of X’s office in Brazil. In a post on the platform, the company’s Global Government Affairs office announced that de Moraes had threatened to arrest a representative of X if the company did not “comply with his censorship orders.”
However, advocates for democracy quickly note that the issue is larger than simply Musk and de Moraes bickering.
Nina Santos, a postdoctoral fellow at Brazil’s National Institute of Science & Technology for Digital Democracy, told Business Insider that what’s happening right now in Brazil “is international interference — not from the US government, but from a US company and a US citizen billionaire that is trying to interfere on how we deal with our national issues and what our national legislation says.”
“And I think that is very dangerous,” Santos said, adding, “We cannot have a foreign billionaire saying that what our democratic institutions decide has no value.”
Representatives for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
