Brazil Fines X, Starlink Over Brief X Restoration

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Facts

  • Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes on Thursday imposed a $920K daily fine on two of Elon Musk's companies, social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and satellite internet company Starlink, due to a brief restoration of X in the country.[1]
  • X had been banned in Brazil by de Moraes over what he described as the spread of misinformation and hate speech, as well as the company's previous refusal to pay over $3M in fines and appoint a legal representative in the country.[2][3]
  • While de Moraes accused the company of a deliberate 'trick,' X cited 'a change of network providers' as the reason for the 'inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users.' The company switched its server from Starlink to Cloudflare.[4]
  • Although X quickly removed access to the app, the court has now ordered the fine to encompass 'the number of days of non-compliance' since its original ban in August.[1]
  • De Moraes has also imposed $8.9K daily fines on those who try to bypass the ban with VPNs, which includes 24 politicians with a combined 26M followers. Brazilian internet trade group Abrint said it wasn't able to calculate how many had accessed the app during the brief reinstallment.[3][5]
  • Before the ban, there were an estimated 22M X users in Brazil. Many have shifted to using the social media platform Bluesky.[4][1][6]

Sources: [1]CNBC (a), [2]BBC News, [3]Wsj, [4]Arise News, [5]Rest of World and [6]CNBC (b).

Narratives

  • Narrative A, as provided by Folha de S.Paulo and Folha de S.Paulo. Musk has been known for removing content in some countries while allowing hate speech to flourish in others. It's understandable for a sovereign government to request the removal of certain content. When you add Starlink into the mix, which is directly tied to military operations, the government is also justified in not wanting Musk to have leverage over Brazilian national security affairs.
  • Narrative B, as provided by New York Post and The Rio Times. Musk aspires to the challenge of free speech absolutism, and he's particularly effective in facilitating positive change in countries that are supposedly democratic. On the flip side, Judge de Moraes, a man whose history is checkered, is actually causing democratic backsliding. Thankfully, de Moraes has no power over Starlink satellites, which will hopefully soon provide uncensored internet to all Brazilians.

Predictions