Brazil Supreme Court Orders Shutdown of Elon Musk’s X

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X, attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023. Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

The Supreme Court of Brazil has ordered the full suspension of Elon Musk’s social media platform X in the country for refusing to name an in-country legal representative.

Brazil’s Justice Alexandre de Moraes issued the order on Aug. 30, putting millions of users of the platform in Latin America’s biggest economy on track to be cut off.

De Moraes’s order, which gives internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, also announced a daily penalty of $8,900 for users in Brazil who use a virtual private network to evade the ban.

In his decision, de Moraes said X will remain blocked until it complies with his orders.

“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,” de Moraes wrote.

The suspension was widely anticipated as X said on Aug. 29 that it expected to be shut down in Brazil because of what it described as “illegal orders” to censor 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,” X said in a statement, in which the platform claimed that de Moraes had threatened X’s Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment and later froze all of her bank accounts.

Musk, who has accused Brazil of censorship, was included in a criminal inquiry into individuals who allegedly spread false information about Brazil’s election and justice system.

The Aug. 30 suspension order follows de Moraes’s Aug. 28 order that gave X just 24 hours to appoint a new legal representative for X Brazil in response to a petition filed against the company. In the Aug. 28 order, the judge warned that failure to comply would result in the platform’s suspension.

A spokesperson for X pointed to the Aug. 29 statement in response to a request for comment on the suspension order.

Musk has yet to issue a public statement on the suspension. He did praise reporter Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the case, however, in which Greenwald characterized de Moraes’s demands as part of a broader trend in which regimes exert online platforms to stifle dissent.

“It is genuinely remarkable the lengths to which not just Brazil but countries throughout the democratic world are now willing to go to prevent the internet from being a free exchange of ideas where human beings can organize freely and privately because they recognize that is the one threat to establishment power and the status quo ruling class prerogatives,” Greenwald said in his analysis.

X said in its Aug. 29 statement that it plans to publish all of de Moraes’s demands and all related court filings in the coming days in the interest of transparency.

“Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders,” X wrote. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.”

Brazilian Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes at the Supreme Court in Brasilia, Brazil, on April 4, 2018. Victoria Silva/AFP via Getty Images

Authorities in Brazil have previously ordered telecommunications providers to block access to certain websites or face daily fines.

While Musk has accused Brazil of censorship, Brazilian authorities say that X is breaking the country’s internet laws.

Earlier this year, de Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts amid investigations into so-called digital militias accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Last year, a federal judge in Brazil ordered a temporary suspension of messaging app Telegram, citing the social media platform’s alleged failure to provide all the information that Federal Police requested on neo-Nazi chat groups.

In 2016, a Brazilian court issued a nationwide ban on the messaging app WhatsApp, which had more than 100 million users, for 72 hours.

Owner Meta had failed to provide encrypted information requested in a police investigation, the fourth block ordered against WhatsApp in Brazil since February 2015.

At the time, the court ruled that providers that do not cut off access to WhatsApp be fined the equivalent of $15,300 a day until they comply.

According to market research group Emarketer, some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month.

Owen Evans and The Associated Press contributed to this report. This article has been updated to reflect the response received from X.