Brazil suspends X after fight with Elon Musk

Brazil has become the first Western power to block X after a long-running dispute with its billionaire owner, Elon Musk.

The move comes after months of wrangling between Mr Musk and supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes over the latter’s investigation of extreme Right-wing content on X, formerly known as Twitter, including alleged hate and antidemocratic “fake news”.

Some of that was relating to the storming of Brazil’s congress in January 2023 by supporters of the outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro in events echoing the 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

On Wednesday evening, Mr de Moraes gave X 24 hours to name a legal representative in Brazil who would respond to his investigation.

He also froze the accounts of Starlink, Mr Musk’s satellite company that provides internet connections to many remote communities in Brazil, principally in the Amazon.

Earlier this month, Mr Musk closed X’s offices in the country – while keeping the service available – in a supposed attempt to dodge the investigation.

The Silicon Valley billionaire has repeatedly accused Mr de Moraes of authoritarian overreach and “censorship,” accusing him of being an “evil dictator cosplaying as a judge”.

On Friday morning, all eyes were on X in Brazil to see if the platform would remain operational.

Initially, it appeared as though Mr Musk had called Mr de Moraes’ bluff, but then the judge released a written ruling that could effectively shutter the platform within hours.

In the ruling, he gave app stores and internet service providers five days to remove and block X respectively. He also said that Brazilian Internet users who attempted to access the platform via virtual private networks, or VPNs, would face daily fines of 50,000 reais (£6,790).

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” Mr de Moraes wrote in his ruling.

Although X, Facebook-owner Meta and other platforms have from time to time been closed in authoritarian nations such as North Korea, Venezuela and Russia, this may be the first time that a democratic society has moved to put one offline.

It comes as legislators from Australia to Canada increasingly consider sanctions for social media companies for amplifying toxic content, from anti-Semitism to AI-generated celebrity porn.

Earlier this week, Pavel Durov, the Telegram chief executive, was arrested and charged by French authorities, who allege he permitted his online messaging app to be used for a range of illegal activities.

Officials alleged the 39-year-old was complicit in a number of illicit transactions and that the platform is being used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking. He denies the allegations.

Hate speech and disinformation is alleged to have proliferated on X. A wave of riots swept the UK this summer after online posts wrongly claimed the attacker responsible for stabbing three girls in Southport was a Muslim asylum seeker.

Mr Musk has hardly helped his own cause, critics have said, with his propensity to repost inflammatory and demonstrably false information, including his claim to his record 190 million followers on X, during the riots, that the UK was headed for “civil war.”

Mr Musk has styled himself a “free-speech absolutist”, sacking large numbers of moderators at Twitter, as it was called when he bought it for £33 billion in October 2022.

He has also allowed controversial far-Right accounts back online, including that of Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League.

X could yet comply with the judge’s order and reappoint a legal representative in Brazil.