Brazilian readers might soon have some difficulty finding this story, at least if they rely on Elon Musk’s X for their news. That’s because a judge has officially ordered a ban on the social media platform in the country, following a months-long battle over the limits of speech on the the site formerly known as Twitter.
Conflict between X and the Brazilian government kicked off in April, when Musk unblocked certain popular accounts in Brazil that the government had previously ordered blocked in the country for spreading misinformation. The order came in the wake of far-right riots Brazil faced on January 8 of 2023, and it’s suspected that the targeted accounts were linked to the unrest. The Brazilian judiciary has spent its time after the riots cracking down on disinformation online, calling it “a singular threat” to the country.
Musk, for his part, restored the banned accounts just one hour after they were taken offline.
In the time since, the billionaire and South America’s largest country have butted heads on multiple occasions, with Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes freezing Starlink’s finances in the country. The X ban follows 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 do not comply with his censorship orders.”
The Brazilian Supreme Court said on Wednesday that the company could not evade its orders so easily, threatening X with shutdown in the country if it did not appoint a new legal representative within 24 hours. This is not wholly unusual for the country, as legal representatives are required for companies to operate there. Telegram and WhatsApp have faced similar bans for skirting their own court orders in the past, although brief.
X’s grace period has now passed, and reports from Bloomberg and local news outlet Poder360 both say that Judge de Moraes has told the National Telecommunications Agency to limit Brazilian access to X within 24 hours. The judge had also given Apple and Google five days to remove X from their respective app stores, and Brazilian outlet G1 Globo is reporting that the judge will impose daily fines on people or businesses that use VPNs to continue to access the site while it’s blocked.
Musk’s response continued to play up the “censorship” angle, saying “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”
X’s official response, technically given before the ban but written with the expectation that it would go through, was a bit more muted. It simply argues that the company believes Judge de Moraes’ demands don’t comply with Brazilian law and stated its intention to not comply with the the orders.
It is currently unclear how the situation will proceed, but X users in Brazil can prepare for an outage by downloading their tweets and singing up for an X alternative.