Brazil: Court threatens X with daily fines
X faces a hefty fine in Brazil for circumventing the ban on his service in the country. The conflict with Brazil's judiciary comes to a head once again.
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Brazil's Supreme Court has ordered US billionaire Elon Musk's social network X not to circumvent the ordered blockade of the social media platform in the country. In the event of non-compliance, the court threatens the company with a fine of five million reais (830,000 euros) – per day.
The short messaging service X became accessible again for many users in Brazil on Wednesday, despite the court-ordered block. An X update redirected some Brazilian users via third-party cloud services outside the country so that they could access the platform without a virtual private network (VPN), reported the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo. According to IT experts, X redirected users to its own servers via those of Cloudflare, a content delivery network.
X explained on Wednesday that a change of network provider had led to an "accidental and temporary restoration of the service" in Brazil. However, Brazil's judiciary does not want to believe in a coincidence or mistake. "There is no doubt that X, under the direct command of Elon Musk, once again intends to disregard Brazilian justice," wrote federal judge Alexandre de Moraes of Brazil's Supreme Court in his latest ruling. He accused the social media platform of having a "strategy" to circumvent imposed bans, according to the news agency Reuters.
Conflict with numerous episodes
The restoration of the X service in Brazil and the subsequent threat of punishment are the latest (and final?) chapter in a long series of disputes between tech billionaire Musk and Brazil's Supreme Court. The dispute escalated when federal judge De Moraes ordered the blocking of X in the country at the end of August. He accused the company of not taking decisive enough action against the spread of hate speech and fake news. Previously, X owner Musk had refused for weeks to comply with Brazilian court orders to block certain X accounts and ignored fines that had been imposed. In mid-August , he closed the X office in Brazil and dismissed the remaining employees so that the courts could not hold them accountable.
Following the court-ordered blockade of X, the satellite internet provider Starlink, which is also owned by Musk, initially announced that it would not comply with the decision of the Brazilian judiciary and would ignore the X blocking order. A few days later, however, Starlink relented and gave up its resistance to the X blockade in Brazil for now. At the end of last week, Brazil's Supreme Court then confiscated 18.2 million reais (around three million euros) from the bank accounts of X and Starlink. The measure ordered by Judge De Moraes was aimed at recovering funds equivalent to the amount that X owes the country in fines. The two companies' bank accounts, which had been frozen meanwhile, have since been unfrozen.
Meanwhile, Brazil's national telecommunications authority Anatel announced in a statement that it was working on blocking X's access in Brazil via Cloudflare. X had allegedly used the content delivery network to circumvent the blockade in the country. The Cloudflare block will probably be implemented by Thursday evening, writes Reuters, citing a person familiar with the situation. According to the Brazilian authorities, other platforms such as Fastly and EdgeUno could also have been used by X to provide users in Brazil with unlawful access. X, on the other hand, said it was working with the Brazilian government to resume the service in the country "very soon".
(akn)
