Brazilians who use VPN to access the app could be fined US$8,874 per day, says the Supreme Federal Court
Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court, ordered the suspension of X (formerly Twitter) operations. “immediately suspended” and threatened to impose draconian fines on anyone who tried to circumvent the ban.
De Moraes demanded that X censor several accounts that “spread misinformation” criticizing it, but the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, refused.
On Friday, the judge ordered the platform banned in Brazil, giving Google and Apple five days to remove X from their app stores. He also threatened a fine of around 50,000 Brazilian reais (approximately $8,874) per day for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent the ban.
“Freedom of expression is the basis of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Musk said in response to the order.
Musk also called Moraes “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge” and accused President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva to be yours “lap dog.”
On Thursday, de Moraes froze the accounts of Starlink, a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, saying it was necessary to ensure payment of fines levied against X for failing to appoint a legal representative. Musk opposed the “absolutely illegal action” taken without any due process, pointing out that X and SpaceX are “two completely different companies with different shareholders.”
According to X’s Global Government Affairs team, de Moraes “threatened our Brazilian legal representative with arrest. Even after she resigned, he froze all her bank accounts.”
“Our challenges to their manifestly illegal actions have been rejected or ignored,” the company said, promising to make all related legal proceedings public in the interest of transparency. “Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not secretly enforce illegal orders.”
The US embassy in Brazil said only that it was “monitoring the situation”, adding that “Freedom of expression is a fundamental pillar of a healthy democracy.”
The dispute began earlier this year, when Moraes ordered X to suspend the accounts of several supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, calling them “digital activists” that spread “disinformation” about himself and the court. Musk refused, calling the order a violation of Brazilian law.
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