RIO DE JANEIRO – A panel of Brazil's Supreme Court on Monday unanimously upheld the choice of one among its judges to dam billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform X nationwide, the court's website said.
The broader support among the many justices undermines efforts by Musk and his supporters to portray Judge Alexandre de Moraes as a renegade and authoritarian censor of political speech.
The panel, which voted in a virtual session, consisted of 5 of the 11 full judges, including de Moraes, who ordered the platform blocked last Friday for failing to appoint an area legal representative as required by law.
X will remain suspended until it complies together with his orders and pays outstanding fines, which, based on his decision, exceed three million dollars as of last week.
De Moraes also imposed a every day advantageous of fifty,000 reais ($8,900) on individuals or corporations using virtual private networks (VPNs) to access X. Some legal experts questioned the reasoning behind this decision and its enforcement. The Brazilian Bar Association announced it could ask the Supreme Court to review this provision.
But nearly all of the panel upheld the advantageous for VPNs – one judge opposed it unless it could be proven that users are using X to commit crimes.
Brazil is one among the most important markets for X, with tens of hundreds of thousands of users. His ban marked a dramatic Escalation in a months-long feud between Musk and de Moraes about free speech, right-wing extremist accounts and misinformation.
“He has repeatedly and egregiously violated the Constitution of Brazil, despite having sworn to protect it,” Musk wrote within the hours before the vote on de Moraes. He also announced on Sunday that he would create an X-account to publish the judge's decisions, which he said would offer evidence for his claims.
De Moraes' decision to quickly forward his resolution to a committee for approval was intended to achieve “collective, more institutional support that seeks to depersonalize the decision,” Conrado Hübner, a professor of constitutional law on the University of Sao Paulo, told the Associated Press.
Had de Moraes done the latter, two judges who had questioned his decisions up to now – and who were appointed by former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro – would have had the chance to object or prevent the vote from happening.
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