By our Reporter
Brazil’s telecommunications regulator said on Friday it was banning access to Elon Musk’s X social network in the country to comply with a judge’s decision following a months-long fight with the billionaire investor.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to ‘adopt all necessary measures’ within 24 hours to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil. He also said that people who use VPNs to circumvent the block and access X could face fines of nearly $9,000 a day. VPNs, which can make internet traffic appear as though it was coming from a different country, are commonly used software for privacy and cybersecurity.
Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws. The popular social media platform missed a court-imposed deadline on Thursday evening to name a legal representative in Brazil, triggering the suspension.
X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.
Justice Moraes issued multiple orders on Friday. In the first, he also ordered Apple and Google to prevent downloads of X as well as popular VPN apps. “They’re shutting down the #1 source of truth in Brazil,” Musk said in a post on X on Friday.