Brazil’s top court has ordered the immediate suspension of Elon Musk‘s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, in the country. This order follows the company’s failure to name a legal representative for the social network in Brazil.
The country’s Supreme Court told the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) to ban access to X within 24 hours and further gave Apple and Google five days to remove the social platform from their mobile app stores. Additionally, the court said that anyone using a VPN to access X would be subjected to daily fines of 50,000 reais (approx. USD$8,900, UGX33.2 million).
Before this move, Musk had been feuding with the Latin American country’s Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who had previously ordered X to remove content that is allegedly fake news and misinformation. Musk, and his company, however, responded by claiming that Moraes’s request was “censorship orders.” According to The New York Times report, many of the accounts de Moraes ordered X to block are linked to supporters of the right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro.
On August 17, the social media service through its Global Government Affairs account claimed Moraes had threatened its legal representative Rachel Nova Conceicao in secret and, to protect the safety of its staff, X decided to close its operations in Brazil. Hours before the suspension order, Musk himself quoted his global affairs team’s post calling Moraes “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge.”
While the micro-blogging platform did close its operations in Brazil, the service remained available and accessible to users in the country which on Wednesday prompted Brazil’s Supreme Court to order the company to appoint a legal representative in the country within 24 hours which X did not comply with calling it Moraes’s “illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
“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 company wrote in a statement on Friday anticipating a potential ban.
The social platform has threatened to publish the Brazilian top court’s demands in the coming days and says it will not comply with its orders.
In the past, Brazil has temporarily banned other major social platforms, including Telegram which was banned in 2022, and WhatsApp in 2015, both platforms’ ban lasted for 48 hours.
