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”.
Except that is not what has happened here. X has refused to follow Brazilian law. And was given ample opportunity to remedy the situation. They refused.
There are plenty of other fora on the Internet. Banning Twitter will not stop discussion.
It must be nice to have such an innocent view of the world. When powerful people stop average people from having conversations, it is not a good thing. It doesn’t matter how much the internet tells you socialism and dictatorships are good, stopping discussion is bad.