Elon Musk announces immediate closure of X service in Brazil: why?

Billionaire Elon Musk announced last Saturday, August 17, the immediate closure of operations of its social network X in Brazil, amid a dispute between the company and the Supreme Court, Despite this, the service will remain accessible to Brazilians.

Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has been dragging his feet for months a legal battle with Brazil’s powerful Supreme Court (STF) judge Alexandre de Moraes, whom he has called a “dictator” and accuses of censoring X.

Moraes, for his part, accuses the social network of failing to comply with his orders to block accounts accused of disinformation.

But Musk said Moraes’ “demands” would “require him to (secretly) violate Brazilian, Argentine, U.S. and international laws.”

“The decision to close X’s offices in Brazil was difficult,” said billionaire Elon Musk.

“If we had accepted the secret (illegal) censorship of Alexandre de Moraes and his demands to transfer private information, We would not have been able to explain our actions without shame.”

X’s global government affairs department said in a post that Moraes had “threatened” her legal representative in Brazil with “arresting her” in the event of non-compliance with what the social network called “censorship” decisions aimed at blocking content.

In the note, reposted by Musk, the group said the closure of the offices, which will take place “with immediate effect”, was necessary “to protect the safety” of its local team.

The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for its part, criticized X’s position.

“Pathetic attitude from a company that controls this platform with the size it has in Brazil,” wrote the Secretary of Digital Policies, João Brant, in X.

Brant said X is “trying to place on the STF the political burden of a decision that has a commercial basis” and forcing “a probable escalation that could lead to the blocking of the platform.”

Moraes “must go”

In recent years, Moraes ordered the blocking of accounts of influential figures of Brazilian ultraconservative movements, mainly since the attempts by supporters of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, an admirer of Elon Musk, to discredit the electronic voting system during the presidential elections won by the leftist Lula.

In April, X admitted that users of several blocked accounts had managed to bypass the restrictions.

“Despite our numerous unheard appeals to the Supreme Court, a Brazilian public is left uninformed about these rulings and the fact that our Brazilian staff has no responsibility or control over the content blocked on our platform,” Judge Moraes “decided to threaten our staff in Brazil instead of respecting the law and its procedures,” the social network said on Saturday.

X published a digital copy of an alleged letter from Moraes which gave the company 24 hours to comply with its decisions under penalty of a fine and arrest the person responsible for X in Brazil, Rachel de Oliveira Villa Nova Conceição, for non-compliance.

The STF did not respond promptly to AFP’s requests to confirm the authenticity of the document.

According to Brant, “the court order published by X himself shows that the company had been ignoring court orders.”

Musk raised the tone of the dispute with another post illustrated with photos of Moraes and Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort and the caption “the resemblance is uncanny.”

Also appeared to give his support to a demonstration led by a conservative Brazilian legislator and scheduled for September 7 in Sao Paulo to request the dismissal of the judge.

Alexandre de Moraes “is a disgrace to justice” and “must go,” he added.

Elon Musk is the subject of a Brazilian justice investigation against “digital militias”, which points to the alleged illegal use of public resources by Bolsonaro and his inner circle to orchestrate disinformation campaigns on the internet during his presidency (2019-2022).