Elon Musk's X faces heavy each day fines in Brazil for allegedly circumventing a ban on the service there, in response to a press release by the country's Supreme Court on Thursday.
The fines imposed by Brazil's Supreme Court amount to five million Brazilian reals, or about $920,000 a day. The court said it will proceed to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite web service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk's space company.
X's suspension in Brazil was originally ordered by the country's chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes, in late August and upheld by a panel of judges in early September. The court found that X, under Musk, had violated Brazilian law, which requires social media corporations to employ a legal representative within the country and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X had didn’t block accounts allegedly involved in doxxing federal officials.
X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare and appeared to make use of dynamic IP addresses that consistently change, allowing many users in Brazil to access the location. In a previous configuration, the corporate had used static and specific IP addresses in Brazil, which were easier to dam by Internet service providers under orders from regulators.
Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter), has been slamming de Moraes for months and continued to achieve this after the manager order was issued, calling de Moraes a villain and comparing him to Darth Vader and Harry Potter character Voldemort. He has also repeatedly called for de Moraes' impeachment.
Brazil previously withdrew money for fines it had imposed on X from X and Starlink's accounts at financial institutions within the country. The latest fines will likely be due starting September 19, with the court calculating the overall amount based on “the number of days of non-compliance” with its previous orders to shut down X nationwide.
While Musk presents himself as an advocate of absolute freedom of expression, X has given in to requests to delete profiles and posts in countries comparable to India, Turkey and Hungary.
Musk and X might also be complying with Brazil's shutdown orders. Correio Braziliense, a Brazilian publication, reported on Wednesday that X has begun blocking accounts pursuant to the blocking orders issued by the country's Supreme Court.
Among the accounts apparently blocked were those of several web influencers who’re reportedly under investigation for spreading false information and calling for attacks on democratic institutions in Brazil.
X said it has no plans to revive access to Brazilian users.
“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure for delivering services to Latin America became inaccessible to our team,” an organization spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue to provide optimal service to our users, we switched network providers. This switch resulted in an unintended and temporary restoration of service to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to become inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue to work with the Brazilian government to return service to the people of Brazil soon.”
Brazil's national telecommunications agency Anatel was ordered by de Moraes to stop access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare. Fastly and EdgeUno servers and others that the court said were “created to circumvent” a ban on X in Brazil.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC that the corporate “neither enables nor prevents blocking,” adding that “many Cloudflare customers choose to use dedicated IPs, which is not unique in the industry.”
Before the ban, X had an estimated 22 million users in Brazil, in response to Data reporting.
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