Brazil just gave Elon Musk’s X the boot.
On Friday, Brazil’s top court ordered that Musk’s social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, be banned in the country.
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The move comes after Musk has feuded with Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has previously ordered that X remove content that spread fake news and misinformation. Musk and company classified the judge’s requests as “censorship orders.”
Musk himself has recently attacked the judge on X, calling Moraes an “evil dictator.”
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Earlier this month, X closed its operations in Brazil, alleging that the judge threatened X representative Rachel Nova Conceicao with arrest if the company did not comply with the content removal orders.
While X the company exited Brazil, the platform still remained available and accessible to users in the country. On Wednesday, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to appoint a legal representative in the country within 24 hours. Failing to do so, X shared a statement on Thursday night anticipating a potential ban.
“Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil – simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” the statement reads.
Losing its user base in Brazil will likely hurt X. The platform is popular in the country, with Brazilian users accounting for tens of millions of X’s monthly active user base.
As the New York Times reports, many of the accounts that Judge Moraes ordered suspended belonged to supporters of Brazil’s former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. Some of the accounts that were ordered to be removed questioned the results of Brazil’s 2022 election, which Bolosonaro lost.
Brazil requires that tech companies have a legal representative located within the country in order to operate there. The country has previously banned platforms, such as Telegram in 2022, for failing to comply with local laws. (Telegram has since resumed operating in Brazil.)
On Thursday, one of Elon Musk’s other companies, the SpaceX-affiliated Starlink, shared that Brazil’s Supreme Court had frozen the company’s finances. Starlink’s statement claims that the judge did so after he had determined that Starlink should be responsible for fines against Musk’s X.
