In the latest round of the dispute between Elon Musk and Brazil’s top court, a senior judge has accused X of a “willful, illegal and persistent” effort to circumvent a court-ordered block – and imposed a fine of R$5m ($921,676) for each day the social network remains online.
The social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which has been banned by court order since 30 August, on Wednesday became accessible to many users in Brazil after an update that used cloud services offered by third parties, such as Cloudflare, Fastly and Edgeuno.
This allowed some Brazilian users to access X without the need for a VPN – which is also prohibited in the country.
Late on Wednesday, X described its reappearance in Brazil as an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.
But the influential supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes – who ordered the original ban as part of an attempt to crack down on anti-democratic, far-right voices – on Thursday described the move as a deliberate attempt “to circumvent the court’s blocking order”.
Elon is not in Brazil, and making the service available via CloudFlare was not an action taken in Brazil. Brazil should be able to seize assets in Brazil and change how they block access to prevent Twitter from doing business in Brazil, but arresting people in other countries for something like this is extreme.
I don’t think it’s extreme at all. Elmo openly mocked the Brazilian justice system and its representatives, including posting offensive AI-generated images of Judge Moraes, and has demonstrated several times through his words and actions that he believes himself to be above the law and can do whatever he wants. He is responsible for the actions of his company. “Responsible” means “one who answers for”.
It might be a different situation if this were a company whose CEO was unaware of the legal troubles in a country that isn’t home to their HQ. But he became personally involved with the case and is using technicalities to sidestep his legal obligations without even pretending that’s not what he’s doing. This is a perfect picture of the absolute worst way in which plutocrats can flaunt the law and you’re advocating for it.
We can all hate Elon and Twitter, but we’re really arguing in favor of internet censorship and extraditions for foreign citizens living in their home country that, knowingly or unknowngly, assisted or has employees that assisted people in circumventing that censorship.
Internet censorship? Twitter was blocked for refusing to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, a legal requirement for any business that operates in the country above a certain size (and Twitter is very far from the threshold). Elmo claimed it was about censorship to make himself look good.
Why does Twitter need a legal representative? Precisely so that someone can answer for the sort of shit Elmo pulls on the regular. Or any other shit. Somebody needs to be accountable to the laws of a country if you’re doing business in that country. Otherwise you could sell Fentanyl online from overseas and the worse that would happen would be geting the product seized at the border after you’ve already been paid. This isn’t a radical concept and it has nothing to do with censorship.