In Brazil, X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, face daily fines of about $920,000 for allegedly violating an injunction. The country’s Supreme Court accuses X of bypassing the blocking of the service, which was used by about 22 million people in the country. The situation is aggravating the conflict between Musk and the Brazilian authorities, which began after the social network was banned at the end of August.
Image source: X
According to the Brazilian Supreme Court, the daily fines for X amount to 5 million Brazilian reais ($920 thousand). The court emphasized that it will continue to impose “joint and several liability” on SpaceX, which provides Starlink satellite Internet services in the country. Fines will be assessed from September 19, and the total amount will be calculated based on the number of days of non-compliance with the regulations.
X’s suspension in Brazil was initiated by the country’s chief judge, Alexandre de Moraes, in late August and upheld by a panel of judges in early September. The court found that under Musk’s leadership, X violated Brazilian law requiring social media companies to have legal representation in the country and remove content containing hate speech or material deemed harmful to democratic institutions. Despite Musk’s position as an absolute supporter of free speech, X has previously complied with requests from authorities to remove profiles and posts in countries such as India, Turkey and Hungary.
This time, Musk’s platform did not comply with the request of the Brazilian authorities to block accounts allegedly engaged in publishing personal or confidential information about federal officials. Moreover, to restore the platform, the company moved its servers to Cloudflare hosting and began using dynamic IP addresses that constantly change, making them difficult to block. Previously, X used static IP addresses in Brazil, which were easily blocked by ISPs at the request of regulators.
A spokesperson for Platform X told CNBC: “When X went offline in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide services in Latin America was no longer available to our team. To continue to provide optimal service to our users, we have changed service providers. This change resulted in an unintended and temporary restoration of service for Brazilian users. We expect the platform to become unavailable in Brazil again soon, but we continue to work with the Brazilian government to return service to Brazilian residents as soon as possible.”
Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) has been ordered by De Moraes to block Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno servers allegedly “designed to circumvent” the X suspension. A Cloudflare spokesperson noted that the company does not enable or prevent blocking, but rather the use of dedicated IP addresses – standard practice in the industry.
Brazil has already collected fines from X and Starlink by debiting funds from the companies’ local bank accounts. Local publication Correio Braziliense reported that X had already begun blocking accounts in accordance with court orders, including the profiles of Brazilian bloggers Bruno Aiub and Allan dos Santos, suspected of spreading disinformation.