Brazil right to ban X

Alan Cai

August 30, 2024

Unlike his big tech rival Mark Zuckerberg, who wrote a letter earlier this week explaining his decision to acquiesce to the Biden Administration’s pressure to regulate politically charged content on his platform Facebook, entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk has no qualms about picking fights and drawing controversy. Musk has picked fights with companies, politicians, other billionaires, and now, a 200 million-person country. Alexandre de Moraes, one of Brazil’s eleven Supreme Court Justices, ordered the blocking of Musk’s social media platform X in the South American nation.

De Moraes cited Musk’s refusal to appoint a legal representative in Brazil as the basis for the platform’s suspension. In his decision, he wrote, “Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country.” Brazilian law requires tech companies to retain a domestic legal representative in order to stay updated and comply with regulations. X’s legal representative resigned earlier this month and Musk has refused to appoint a successor. The altercation is part of an ongoing feud between Musk and the Brazilian jurist, who has clashed with X regarding content moderation and free speech on the platform. In an apparently connected incident, Brazil’s government froze Starlink's financial assets in the country. Starlink is a satellite internet service company which is also owned by Musk.

The court order to ban X in Brazil was carried out by Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) which told internet service providers to suspend Brazilians’ access to the platform. A fine was also enacted for individuals caught skirting the ban through virtual private networks (VPN).

Musk responded to recent developments in the situation by posting “Alexandre de Moraes is an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge” on X. He has previously posted “The tyrant,  @Alexandre [de Moraes], is dictator of Brazil. Lula is his lapdog.” For context, Alexandre is one of several Supreme Court justices in Brazil, and the executive branch, which Brazilian President Lula da Silva leads, is not beholden to the judiciary.

Although the punishments leveraged against Musk’s companies and the repercussions Brazilians (around one-fifth of whom use X) experience may seem overly excessive on the part of the Brazilian government, they are wholly justified in an effort to enforce the law. It is important that American corporations and entities respect other countries’ judicial systems and do not demean their sovereignty regardless of how powerful or influential they are. Stomping on the legal system of other countries is not only a terrible image for participating plutocrats, but it also sets an abhorrent precedent for future business leaders and politicians to disregard the country’s rule of law.