Brazil’s Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it will take action against Elon Musk’s social network.
“I authorize the immediate resumption of the social platform’s activities,” Judge Alexandre de Moraes said in his ruling, which fined X millions of dollars for failing to comply with a series of court orders.
He gave Brazil’s communications regulator 24 hours to make the platform formerly known as Twitter accessible again to its millions of Brazilian users.
Musk has not yet reacted to the decision.
Moraes has for months been locked in a standoff with the world’s richest man, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” over a flood of online disinformation related to Brazil’s 2022 election campaign.
On August 31, tensions reached a fever pitch when Moraes dramatically blocked X for deactivating the accounts of dozens of supporters of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and failing to name a new legal representative in Brazil. Gave.
The controversy, which pitted freedom of expression against corporate responsibility, was closely watched around the world.
An angry Musk attacked Moraes, calling him an “evil dictator” and dubbing him “Voldemort” after the villain from the “Harry Potter” series.
Moraes, for his part, accused the platform of undermining democracy by allowing disinformation to flourish – a position supported by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who declared that the state “intimidates individuals, companies or digital platforms Those who believe “they themselves are above the law.”
X eventually complied with all of Moraes’ demands for the suspension to be lifted.
Last week, the judge confirmed that the company had also paid a fine of approximately $5.2 million.
– Largest Latin American market –
With more than one mobile phone per resident, Brazilians are among the most connected people in the world.
Before being blocked, X had 22 million users in the country.
Many Brazilians, including Lula, moved to other platforms such as Threads or Bluesky, the social media network created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
But none of these have come close to attracting the kind of audience that X enjoyed.
Ax’s battle with Moraes began during the October 2022 election, in which Bolsonaro failed to win a second term.
This escalated following attacks by Bolsonaro supporters on federal buildings in Brasília following Lula’s inauguration in January 2023.
The destruction carried out by supporters of Bolsonaro, dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics”, was compared to the January 2021 attacks on the US Capitol by supporters of then US President Donald Trump.
Halfway through his suspension, X returned to Brazil sometime in mid-September following a technical fix, which he claimed was “inadvertent”.
But it went offline again after Moraes threatened higher fines if it did not comply.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
