Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court officially pounded its gavel on X last Friday, ordering an “immediate and complete” suspension of the service throughout the country.
As PC Mag reports, the decision by Judge Alexandre de Moraes orders Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency to take measures to ensure X’s suspension and directs Apple and Google to block use of X’s apps, including removing them from their app stores. It also sets a daily fine of 50,000 Brazilian reals, about $8,900, for people and companies that use “technological subterfuges” (presumably, VPNs) to evade the ban.
The original order came after X announced that it would shut down operations in Brazil instead of complying with an order by de Moraes to suspend accounts allegedly posting disinformation to undermine Brazil’s democracy. Since April, the judge has led an inquiry into the role the former Twitter may have played in helping “digital militias” plot the January 2023 insurrection in Brasilia in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
The rioters who stormed the capital’s presidential, legislative, and judiciary buildings sought to overturn Bolsonaro’s defeat in the October 2022 election by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Many hoped the military would join their efforts and stage a coup–as Brazil’s armed forces did in 1964 before embarking on 21 years of military dictatorship rife with extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, and execution.
The January 2023 insurrection has been widely compared to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol–except that in Brazil, courts and other government bodies have not bent over backwards to shield Bolsonaro from accountability. In June 2023, the Supreme Federal Court banned the former president from running for office until 2030.
This is not the first time Brazilian authorities have threatened a ban on a social platform for noncompliance. In March 2022, de Moraes ordered Telegram to shut down in the country for failing to meet legal obligations to combat disinformation; Telegram founder Pavel Durov, now facing a series of criminal charges in France, blamed that on staffers overlooking emails from Brazilian officials, and the shutdown ended after two days. In January 2023, a court imposed another brief shutdown of Telegram for failing to disclose information on alleged neo-Nazi activity on the platform.
Musk, however, has taken this treatment more personally, criticizing de Moraes in increasingly hostile terms that Bolsonaro supporters have cheered. Meanwhile, Musk has walked away from X’s anti-disinformation efforts, invited such misinformation magnets as disgraced conspiracy liar Alex Jones back on X, and has shared fake images himself. And Musk posted another generated image of de Moraes behind bars, tagged with the handle from which the judge hasn’t posted anything since Jan. 11, under the text “One day, @Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words.”
As for the latest order from Judge de Moraes, Musk reacted by continuing a quote-posting spree that earlier saw him elevate a baseless conspiracy theory about voting machines in Brazil. A typical comment from him Friday evening: “The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people learning the truth that they will bankrupt anyone who tries.”
Earlier Friday, de Moraes issued an order freezing the finances and blocking domestic transactions of SpaceX’s Starlink service. That satellite broadband service now connects “more than a quarter million customers in Brazil,” according to an update it posted Thursday that said it was “committed to continue providing service to you.”
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