Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered Elon Musk’s X to be banned in the country, demanded that Apple and Google remove their virtual private networks (VPNs) from their stores, and threatened to fine Brazilians $8,900 a day if they are caught using the popular social media platform.
De Moraes ordered the suspension of X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, the Associated Press reported. Musk had urged his lawyer to leave the country after de Moraes threatened to have him jailed.
Wednesday night, De Moraes warned Musk that X would be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative, and established a 24-hour deadline. The company removed their legal representative from the country earlier this month.
“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote in his decision.
The justice gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders. He established the same deadline for app stores to remove virtual private networks, or VPNs, and set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using them to access X.
X has been clashing with de Moraes over his orders to censor users all year, and Musk has repeatedly lashed out against the Brazilian justice on his platform.
“Alexandre de Moraes is an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge,” Musk posted on X Thursday.
De Moraes cited Musk’s statements as evidence that X’s conduct “clearly intends to continue to encourage posts with extremism, hate speech and anti-democratic discourse, and to try to withdraw them from jurisdictional control.”
Musk acquired Twitter (now X) in 2022, after complaining that the platform was “undermining Democracy” due to its failure to uphold the principles of free speech.
X Global Government Affairs posted Thursday that it expected to be deplatformed in Brazil “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
The company noted that “these enemies include a duly elected Senator and a 16-year-old girl, among others.”
“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” X Global Gov. Affairs posted. “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”
Last April, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim report, accusing the Biden administration of being suspiciously “silent” in the face of these draconian attacks on free speech abroad.
The Select Subcommittee said it has received troubling testimony about government censorship in Canada, France, and most recently Brazil.
Brazil’s authoritarian censorship regime is fairly new and stems from the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision in 2019 to grant itself new powers to “ act as an investigator, prosecutor and judge all at once in some cases,” the report stated.
The House Judiciary Committee released over 500 pages of confidential Brazilian court documents related to the regime’s censorship demands on X. The documents showed how de Moraes demanded permanent bans on over 150 elected officials and journalists.
Rather than relying on a prosecutor or a law enforcement officer to open an investigation, the president of Brazil’s Supreme Court, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, “issued an order granting the Supreme Court itself the authority to open an investigation.”
Former Brazilian Supreme Court justices openly criticized the move as unprecedented and in violation of Brazil’s constitution.
In his unprecedented order, Toffoli selected fellow Brazil Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes to run the first investigation conducted by the court.
Moraes first joined the Supreme Federal Court in 2017. Moraes has been described as a “political animal” with hopes of being president of Brazil someday.
Former State Department official and cyber security expert Mike Benz called on the GOP to come out of recess and address this urgent issue.
“How is there not a joint press conference by our 220 Republican members of the House of Representatives and 49 Republican Senators making this vow immediately on TV so the State Dept, USAID, NED, and our soft power NGO swarm in Brazil know they mean business?!?” Benz posted on X.
He added: “Congress Critters: we KNOW you are ALL on X right now even tho you’re in recess. Post your tweet or press release or selfie video that YOU WILL PLAY HARDBALL on STATE/USAID’s BUDGET to protect an AMERICAN free speech champion against our own AMERICAN government.”
Benz asserted that Brazil did not take this step without the go-ahead from the Biden-Harris State Department, noting that even though the U.S. Embassy in Brazil’s X account was shut down, it has not condemned the authoritarian move or threatened Brazil with sanctions.
The State Department, he said, has been “behind” the censorship of right-wing voices in Brazil. “They have been behind it, they have been funding it, they have been coordinating it,” he explained in a video posted on X. “This is not a case of the Brazilian government gone rogue. The U.S. government sponsored it through the State Department, through USAID, through the National Endowment for Democracy, and about 100 different NGOs, university centers, legal scholars, and activists within Brazil.”
As of yet, neither Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has commented on the suspension of the popular American social media platform in Brazil.
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