Elon Musk’s X could reportedly face heavy fines for every day it evades a ban on its service in Brazil. statement It was issued by the country’s highest court on Thursday.
The fine imposed by Brazil’s Supreme Court amounts to $5 million in Brazilian real, or about $920,000 per day. The court said it continued to hold Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by Musk’s aerospace venture SpaceX, “jointly liable.”
The suspension of X’s accounts in Brazil was initially ordered by the country’s Supreme Court President Alexandre de Moraes in late August, and the order was upheld by a panel of judges in early September. The court found that under Musk’s ruling, X violated Brazilian law, which requires social media companies to employ legal representation in Brazil and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X failed to suspend accounts that were allegedly involved in leaking the personal information of federal officials.
X recently moved to a hosted server Cloudflare The company uses a dynamic Internet Protocol address that is constantly changing, which appears to make the site accessible to many users in Brazil. In its previous setup, the company used a static, specific IP address in Brazil, which was prone to being blocked by Internet Service Providers at the behest of regulators.
Musk, who owns the former Twitter user X, has been a vocal critic of De Moraes for months and has continued to do so since the executive order was issued, calling De Moraes a villain, likening him to Darth Vader and Voldemort, and has repeatedly called for De Moraes’ impeachment.
Brazil has already debited the fines it imposed on Company X from Company X and Starlink’s accounts at domestic financial institutions. The new fines will be imposed from September 19th, and the court will calculate the total amount based on the “number of days of non-compliance” with the previous order suspending Company X nationwide.
While Musk describes himself as a free speech absolutist, X has responded to requests to remove profiles and posts in countries including India, Turkey and Hungary.
Musk and X may also be in the process of complying with the Brazilian takedown order. Reported on Wednesday X began blocking accounts following a stay order issued by the country’s Supreme Court.
Among the accounts that appear to have been banned are those of internet figures reportedly under investigation for spreading misinformation and inciting attacks on Brazil’s democratic institutions.
Company X said it had no intention of restoring access to users in Brazil.
“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure serving Latin America became inaccessible to our teams,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change unintentionally restored temporary service to our users in Brazil. We expect the platform will become inaccessible again in Brazil shortly, but we continue to work with the Brazilian government to restore service as quickly as possible for the Brazilian people.”
Brazil’s state-owned telecommunications company Anatel has been ordered by President de Moraes to block Cloudflare, thereby preventing access to the platform. Fast Some of the servers, such as the EdgeUno server, the court said were “created to circumvent X’s suspension in Brazil.”
A Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company “does not enable or prevent blocking,” adding that “many Cloudflare customers choose to use Dedicated IPs, which is not uncommon in the industry.”
Before the outage, X had an estimated 22 million users in Brazil, Data Reporting.
clock: X is a financial “disaster”
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