Elon Musk backs down in his fight with Brazilian judges to restore X

Elon Musk fought the law. The law appears to have won.

X, Musk’s social media platform, has backed down in its fight with the Brazilian judiciary, after complying with court orders that had blocked users in the country from accessing X.

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

However, the battle is not quite over. The supreme court said X had not filed the proper documentation showing that it had appointed Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its Brazilian representative. It gave the company five days to present documents validating her appointment.

Musk has been at loggerheads with supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes since April after he ordered the company to take down more than 100 social media accounts that had been questioning whether the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro had really lost the election in 2022.

By mid-August, Musk had closed down X’s offices in Brazil, leaving it without a legal representative in the country, a legal requirement for firms to operate there. Moraes responded by ordering Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block access to X. Musk had used his platform to attack Moraes, describing him as an “evil tyrant” among other things.

Last week X reappeared in Brazil after a software update that it said had been an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”. But Moraes said it had been “wilful, illegal and persistent”, and levied a R$5m fine (£680,000) on X, adding to R$18.3m (£2.5m) that had already been imposed.

Musk has objected to legal orders to remove some posts and accounts in Brazil and Australia, claiming he was a champion of free speech, although he has been less vocal about removing content in countries such as Turkey and India. Brazil’s population of 200 million people makes it an attractive market for social media companies.

Starlink, the satellite internet service provider owned by Musk, had also been in dispute with Brazilian authorities. Moraes had frozen the company’s assets because it refused to enforce the block on X, but on 4 September said that it would comply.

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