Elon Musk and X have been given the boot in Brazil, complicating the efforts of the eccentric billionaire’s attempt to reshape the social network into an anything-goes digital town hall and — more importantly — what can be said on the internet.
The showdown, which has heightened in recent days, comes amid an escalation of deepfakes and politically motivated content on X in the weeks leading up to the presidential election on Nov. 5.
And Brazil offers a case study in how far X can, and is willing to go, to main a firehose of controversial content with few guardrails.
Last week, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the country’s telecom agency to block access to X because the company lacked a required legal representative in Brazil, where it has some 20 million members.
Moraes concluded many X accounts — primarily supporters of former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — spread disinformation. On Monday, the country’s five-member Supreme Court unanimously confirmed his order and supported a fine of about $8,900 for those attempting to access X via a virtual private network.
App stores and internet providers have until Wednesday to consent with the ban, but Musk’s Starlink has no intentions to comply. The satellite internet provider, which has more than 250,000 customers in Brazil, reportedly told Anatel, Brazil’s telecom agency, it won’t block X on its network.
Stoking the conflagration, an unrepentant Musk said, “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.” To drive home his point, Musk posted on X an AI-generated image of a bald man in black robes behind bars — presumably Moraes.
In an interview with CNN Brasil that was released Monday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva countered, “The world is not obligated to put up with Musk’s far-right ideology just because he is rich.” [Musk is the world’s richest person at $239 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.]
“He is a citizen of America, he is not a citizen of the world,” Lula said. “He cannot keep offending the presidents, the deputies, the senate, the Supreme Court…he has to respect the decision of the Supreme Court.”
This isn’t X’s first scrape with a democratic body accusing it of disseminating disinformation. Earlier this year, the European Union charged the company with failing to comply with social media laws under its Digital Services Act.
Indeed, X isn’t the first social media company to be thwarted by Brazilian authorities: Telegram was temporarily banned in 2023 over its failure to cooperate with requests to block certain profiles. Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp faced temporary bans in 2015 and 2016 after refusing to comply with police requests for user data.
