Brazil’s telecommunications regulator said on Friday it was banning access to Elon Musk’s X social network in the country to comply with a judge’s decision following a months-long f+ght with the billionaire investor.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to ‘adopt all necessary measures’ within 24 hours to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil. He also said that people who use VPNs to circumvent the block and access X could face fines of nearly $9,000 a day. VPNs, which can make internet traffic appear as though it was coming from a different country, are commonly used software for privacy and cybersecurity.
Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes thr3at3ned arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws. The popular social media platform missed a court-imposed deadline on Thursday evening to name a legal representative in Brazil, trigg3rimg the suspension.
X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destr%ying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.
Justice Moraes issued multiple orders on Friday. In the first, he also ordered Apple and Google to prevent downloads of X as well as popular VPN apps. “They’re shutting down the #1 source of truth in Brazil,” Musk said in a post on X on Friday.
The judge’s ruling could cause X to lose one of its largest and most coveted markets, at a time when Musk has struggled with advertising revenue for the platform. X remained accessible in Brazil late on Friday, though some Brazilians posted on other platforms that their access to X was already being blocked. Three of the country’s top telecommunications carriers said they would begin blocking access from midnight (0300 GMT on Saturday), according to a report by local news outlet UOL.
The feud has led to the freezing this week of satellite internet provider Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX.
In his ruling, Moraes ordered that X, formerly Twitter, be suspended in Brazil until it complied with all related court orders, including the payment of more than $3 million in fines, as well as the designation of a local representative, as required by Brazilian law.
Tech giants Apple and Alphabet’s Google were initially instructed to remove X from their app stores and implement so-called anti-VPN obstacles that would make it more difficult for users of Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android to open the X app on phones or tablets. But Moraes later reversed that part of his order, saying it would not be needed.
