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A Brazilian Supreme Court judge on Friday ordered Elon Musk’s social media platform X to suspend operations in the country until it complies with a court order and pays existing fines, multiple media outlets reported.
Judge Alexandre de Moraes, in a statement on Wednesday, gave the social media site 24 hours to appoint new legal representatives to comply with the government’s request to suspend the accounts and pay a fine of 18.5 million reais ($3.28 million) or face suspension, according to Reuters.
Thursday’s deadline passed but no action was taken by Musk or other company executives, resulting in a new order to “immediately and completely suspend” the company’s activities in the country, the BBC reported.
According to The New York Times, de Moraes also threatened to fine Brazilians who use VPNs to access the site up to about $9,000 per day, and tried to freeze accounts for Musk’s second business, SpaceX’s Starlink, in an attempt to recoup fines he had imposed on the company.
In a statement posted on the site on Thursday, X’s global government affairs department said it expected De Moraes to order the site shut down “simply for refusing to comply with unlawful orders to censor his political opponents.”
Soon, Judge Alexandre de Moraes is expected to order the closure of X in Brazil, simply because we have not complied with his unlawful orders to censor his political opponents, including 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 to jail our Brazilian lawyer,” the Global Government Affairs statement added. “He even froze all of her bank accounts after she resigned. Our challenges to his clearly illegal actions have been dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ Supreme Court colleagues are unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”
Earlier this month, De Moraes threatened to issue an arrest warrant for the head of social media site X, Rachel Nova Conceição, if the site did not comply with De Moraes’ orders to remove certain content on its platform.
De Moraes especially:Digital Militia“They have systematically spread disinformation about far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro,” he said. Some of the far-right online groups targeted by de Moraes suggested that Bolsonaro’s loss in the 2022 election was due to electoral interference and supported the rioters who stormed Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court and plotted a military coup to seize power in the country.
A statement from X’s Global Government Affairs office said the underlying issue was that X refused to follow de Moraes’ orders, which X claims violated Brazil’s freedom of speech laws.
But The New York Times noted that President de Moraes was given broad powers to crack down on digital threats to democracy after the 2022 elections. 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 Bolsonaro allies.
Like the United States, Brazil has a constitutional provision protecting speech, but the Brazilian government has broader discretion than the U.S. government to ban certain types of speech, including hate speech.
“Unlike other social media and tech platforms, we do not secretly comply with unlawful orders,” X continued in a statement Thursday. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to defending freedom of speech.”
De Moraes’ order escalates a public feud between Musk and Brazil’s judiciary that has been simmering for months. In posts on X, Musk has repeatedly suggested that De Moraes is “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge,” posting a photo of the Brazilian judge alongside one of Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series and suggesting it’s “just a matter of time” before De Moraes ends up in prison.
Less than two weeks later, Musk ordered the closure of X’s offices in Brazil, after the company’s global government relations department said in a post on its platform that De Moraes had threatened to arrest X representatives if the company “did not comply with the censorship order.”
But democracy advocates quickly realized this issue wasn’t just about a spat between Musk and de Moraes.
Nina Santos, a postdoctoral researcher at Brazil’s National Institute of Science, Technology and Digital Democracy, told Business Insider that what’s happening in Brazil right now is “international interference — not from the US government, but US companies and billionaire US citizens trying to interfere in how we deal with national issues and how we write our national laws.”
“I think that’s very dangerous,” Santos said, adding that “we cannot allow foreign billionaires to say that what our democratic institutions have decided has no value.”
A representative for X did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.