Brazil’s Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Elon Musk’s X Platform

X CEO Elon Musk during the UK Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, in central England, on Nov. 1, 2023. Leon Neal/AFP via Getty Images

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court on Sept. 2 ruled to uphold a countrywide ban and fines on Elon Musk’s X social media platform amid a high-profile spat between the billionaire and the court.

Three judges of a five-member panel of Brazil’s high court formed a majority to uphold Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s previous ruling shutting down the platform for not complying with local regulations.

Justices Flavio Dino and Cristiano Zanin sided with de Moraes, forming a majority before Justices Luiz Fux and Carmen Lucia had cast their votes. Moraes and Musk have been locked in a monthslong feud after X was required to block accounts implicated in investigations of the alleged spreading of distorted news and what court officials said is hate speech.

“It is not possible for a company to operate in the territory of a country and intend to impose its vision on which rules should be valid or applied,” Dino said in joining with de Moraes. “A party that intentionally fails to comply with court decisions appears to consider itself above the rule of law. And so it can turn into an outlaw.”

X was taken down in Brazil, one of its largest markets, in the early hours of Aug. 31 following a decision by de Moraes, after the platform missed a court-imposed deadline to name a legal representative in Brazil as required by local law.

In a shutdown order issued last week, de Moraes wrote that X has to be shut down until the firm complies with the order and set a daily fine of $8,900 for individuals or firms who attempt to circumvent the ban by using a VPN, also known as a virtual private network, or through another way.

Over the weekend, Musk fired off multiple X posts that criticized de Moraes, with one saying that “he should be impeached for violating his oath of office” and that his “actions are against the will of the Brazilian people he is supposed to represent.”

Some critics, including a professor of political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said they believe that the ban and fines are overboard.

“I used VPNs a lot in authoritarian countries like China to continue accessing news sites and social media. It never occurred to me that this type of tool would be banned in Brazil. It’s dystopian,” professor Maurício Santoro wrote on X before the ban went into effect.

The Brazilian Bar Association said on Aug. 30  in a statement that it would request that the Supreme Court review the fines imposed without due process on all citizens using VPNs or other means to access X. The association argued that sanctions should never be imposed summarily before ensuring an adversarial process and the right to a full defense.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has issued public statements in support of de Moraes’s decision to block the social media company, as has Supreme Court Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso.

“I have already said publicly, and I repeat, that a company that refuses to present a legal representative in Brazil is not able to operate in Brazil,” Barroso told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, according to a translation of his comments in an article published on Sept. 1. “But I will still evaluate the specific case, if it is brought to the panel, and any appeals, always considering all the arguments.”

The ban officially went into effect on Aug. 31. An Epoch Times reporter based in the United States who attempted to access X through a VPN could not reach the site.

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users, according to the Oosga research company.

Some X users based in Brazil indicated on similar social media platforms such as BlueSky and Threads that they were migrating there in the meantime. The CEO of BlueSky, which was cofounded by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, wrote in a post over the weekend that traffic has risen.

“At peak traffic over these past few days, we’ve had 20x the usual load on our infrastructure!” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wrote on the platform on Sept. 1, adding that there might be “slow loading times” ahead.

She also delivered a separate message in Portuguese, ostensibly to the rash of Brazilian users that joined in recent days, about how the website works.

Reuters contributed to this report.