A judge of the Supreme Court in Brazil ordered it on Friday Elon Musk‘s social media platform X to suspend operations in the country until it complies with court orders and pays existing fines, multiple outlets reported.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes said this in a statement on Wednesday social media sites 24 hours to appoint a new legal representative to respond to government requests to suspend the accounts and pay 18.5 million reais ($3.28 million) in fines or face suspension, according to Reuters.
Thursday’s deadline came and went without intervention from Musk or other company executives, leading to a new order to “immediately and completely suspend” the company’s activities in the country, the BBC reported.
De Moraes also threatened anyone in Brazil who accesses the site using a VPN with fines of up to nearly $9,000 per day and froze the accounts of Musk’s other business — SpaceX’s Starlink — in an effort to collect fines imposed by X, The New reported York Times.
In a statement posted on the site on Thursday, X’s Global Government Affairs office wrote that it expected de Moraes to order the site shut down “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
We expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes to soon 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, among others, a duly elected senator and a 16-year-old girl.
When we tried…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) August 29, 2024
“When we tried to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian counsel with imprisonment,” the Global Government Affairs office added in a statement. “Even after she resigned, he froze all her bank accounts. Our objections to his clearly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. De Moraes’ fellow Supreme Court justices are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”
Earlier this month, de Moraes threatened to issue an arrest warrant against Rachel Nova Conceicao, X’s representative, if the social media site did not comply with de Moraes’ orders to remove specific content on its platform.
De Moraes specifically targeted content posted by user “digital militia“that they are said to be methodically spreading disinformation about the extreme right-wing former president.” Jair Bolsonaro. Some of the far-right online groups de Moraes took aim at the suggestion that Bolsonaro’s loss in the 2022 election was due to election meddling and supported a mob that attacked Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court in an attempt to launch military coup which would take control of the country’s government.
A statement from X’s Office of Global Government Affairs claims the underlying 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 elections, de Moraes was given sweeping powers to suppress digital threats to democracy. His tactics of ordering the suspension of social media accounts and launching investigations into groups spreading disinformation have made him a hero among left-leaning Brazilians and a target for right-wing supporters and those who support Bolsonaro.
Like the US, Brazil has speech protections enshrined in its constitution. However, the Brazilian government has broader authority to ban certain kinds of speech, such as hate speech, than the US government.
“Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not secretly comply with illegal orders,” X’s statement on Thursday continued. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.”
De Moraes’ order escalates the public dispute between Musk and Brazilian justice which boiled for months. In posts on X, Musk has repeatedly suggested 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’s “just a thing.” time” before de Moraes is behind bars.
Less than two weeks ago, Musk placed an order closure of the X office in Brazil. In a post on the platform, the company’s office of global government affairs announced that de Moraes threatened to arrest X’s representative if the company “does not comply with his censorship orders.”
But democracy advocates are quick to note that the problem is bigger than just the bickering between Musk and de Moraes.
Nina Santos, a postdoctoral fellow at Brazil’s National Institute of Science and Technology for Digital Democracy, told Business Insider that what’s happening in Brazil now “is international interference — not from the US government, but from an American company and a billionaire American citizen, which seeks to interfere with how we deal with our domestic problems and what our domestic legislation says.”
“And I think that’s very dangerous,” Santos said, adding: “We can’t have a foreign billionaire saying that what our democratic institutions decide has no value.”
Company X representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.