The tycoon Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, challenged Brazil, and its authorities, and has lost. The old Twitter, which the billionaire baptized as global. Judge Alexandre de Moraes, of the Supreme Court, ordered this Tuesday the reactivation of the platform after X finally blocked nine profiles from the Bolsonaro orbit accused of inciting hatred, paying fines of 28 million reais (five million dollars). and appoint a lawyer with a physical office as legal representative in the country. Twitter users will have to wait a few hours until the operators restore the service.
“I decree the end of the suspension and authorize the immediate return of the activities of X Brasil Internet LTDA in national territory and order Anatel (National Telecommunications Agency) to adopt the necessary measures to implement the measure (…) within 24 hours,” Moraes, the most loved and hated judge in Brazil, writes in the ruling. About 15 days ago, Musk began to take steps that indicated that he was giving in to the fight with the judge. The return has suffered an extra delay of a few days because the company deposited the money from the fines into the wrong bank account, according to the court.
In any case, the end of the suspension comes once the Brazilian municipal elections have been held, for whose integrity Judge Moraes feared. That has not stopped fake news from spreading quickly through other networks.
The 22 million Brazilian Twitter users were left without of unlimited freedom of expression.
It remains to be seen how many of the users return after this break that unleashed a mass migration to competing networks such as Bluesky, similar to the original Twitter, or Threads, from the Meta family. Little by little, a small part of the community that inhabited Brazilian Twitter has been created there.
A few days after the closure, Jefferson Nascimento, a hyperactive human rights lawyer on X, where he had 136,000 followers, had already managed to gather 40,000 followers on Bluesky. But the effort of starting over from scratch created a dilemma that he must now face: “Many questions arise. And now what happens? Will X return? “Is it worth investing so much time and effort with so much uncertainty?” he said then.
The technology magnate, also owner of Tesla and Starlink, contested the judicial closure both in court and by tweet. In addition to making public part of the summary, declared secret, Musk repeatedly accused the judge of violating the law himself, of being a dictator who gives “censorship orders” to silence political rivals. “The people of Brazil have to make a decision: democracy or Alexandre Moraes,” he tweeted in the frenzy of the most intense moment of the conflict.
Musk’s duel with Brazil on behalf of The future of Latin America, said the president, “is about building a sustainable, effective and inclusive state (…) that does not feel intimidated by individuals, corporations or platforms that believe themselves above the law.”
The technology magnate is completely in tune with the unlimited pro-freedom speech of former president Jair Bolsonaro, investigated for plotting a coup d’état. Thousands of his followers stormed the heart of Brazilian democracy within a week of Lula’s inauguration.
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