Members of Brazil’s supreme court have unanimously voted to uphold the ban on X, after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws led to the social network being blocked in one of its biggest markets.
On Monday, five of the court’s justices were asked to consider Friday’s decision to temporarily banish X from Brazil, where the platform has more than 21 million users. By lunchtime all five had voted in favour of the ban.
Casting his vote in favour of X’s continued suspension, Flávio Dino said the company’s decision to “deliberately” ignore a court order to name a legal representative in Brazil suggested it “considered itself above the rule of law”.
Such behaviour risked turning X into an “outlaw”, Dino added, indicating that he could revisit his decision in the future if the company corrected its “illegal conduct”.
“Economic power and the size of one’s bank account do not produce some strange immunity from jurisdiction,” Dino argued, warning of the risks of “private autocrats” being allowed to lay down the laws of social networks.
Judge Cristiano Zanin also backed the ban, citing how X had “systematically” flouted supreme court orders, first to block accounts that were allegedly spreading disinformation and then to name a local representative.
“The repeated noncompliance with supreme court decisions is extremely serious for any citizen or legal entity, be they public or private. No one can seek to perform their activities in Brazil without complying with the laws and the federal constitution,” Zanin argued.
A third justice, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, said she supported the suspension as a result of X’s “aggressive and bellicose infringement of Brazilian legislation”.
At stake was whether a foreign company could be allowed to behave “however it wished, without rules or legal limits” in Brazil, Rocha added.
Earlier, justice Alexandre de Moraes – who ordered last week’s ban – reiterated his belief that the “immediate, complete and total” suspension of X across the whole of Brazil was necessary.
Dino, Zanin and Rocha all agreed with perhaps the most contentious part of Moraes’s earlier ruling: the prohibition of the use of “technological subterfuge” such as virtual private networks (VPNs) to bypass the blocking of X. Using such technology to access X in Brazil is now punishable with a fine of 50,000 reais (£6,760) a day.
Musk has increased his attacks on Brazil’s supreme court and leftwing government since last week’s ruling, which he has denounced as part of a woke authoritarian crusade to silence conservative voices and curb free speech.
On Sunday, Musk’s satellite internet subsidiary Starlink reportedly told Brazil’s country’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, it would not obey the court’s order to block X in the South American country.
Simultaneously, Musk has used his X account to vilify Moraes as a “fake judge”, “the dictator of Brazil” and “Brazil’s Voldemort”.
“He can block this platform in Brazil, but he can’t stop the whole world from knowing his illegal, shameful & hypocritical deeds,” Musk tweeted on Saturday as the ban came into force and millions of Brazilians found themselves shut out of X, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk, who has aligned himself with the far-right movement of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, as well as his US ally Donald Trump, has also turned his fire on the government of leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“The current Brazilian administration likes to wear the cloak of a free democracy, while crushing the people under its boot,” tweeted Musk, who visited Bolsonaro in Brazil during the final year of his 2019-2023 presidency and received a military decoration for distinguished services to the country.
That medal was given to the tech billionaire by Bolsonaro’s then defence minister, Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, who is being investigated by federal police over the suspected conspiracy to stop Lula taking power after he won Brazil’s 2022 election.
That alleged plot culminated in the 8 January 2023 far-right riots in Brasília, which Moraes has accused X and other social networks of helping cause by spreading hate speech and anti-democratic sentiment.
Bolsonaro and several close allies will be formally charged by federal police over the alleged coup attempt in the coming weeks, the broadsheet O Globo reported on Sunday.
The former president denies wrongdoing and on Monday hit out at the ban on X, where he has 13 million followers. Bolsonaro attributed the ban to the “inexplicable desire of some members of the government and the judiciary to control public debate and silence dissenting voices”.
Senior members of Lula’s administration have rejected attempts by Musk and Bolsonaro to paint the standoff as an attack on free speech.
“It’s simply about following the rules … nobody is above the law,” vice-president Geraldo Alckmin told the Folha de São Paulo newspaper. Alckmin compared the case to the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France, “a country with a huge democratic tradition”.
Experts believe the showdown between Musk and Brazil’s supreme court will escalate before it cools. If Starlink follows through on its reported vow to ignore the X ban, it is likely to face similar sanctions itself for ignoring a supreme court order.
That could have a big impact in the Brazilian Amazon, where Starlink antennae have spread rapidly since being made available in September 2022, bringing high-speed internet connection to far-flung regions. By the end of 2023 Starlink antennae were being used in more than 90% of the Amazon’s municipalities, according to BBC Brasil.
