The standoff between a Brazilian Supreme Court judge and Elon Musk is getting tougher: the accounts of his company Starlink have been blocked in Brazil, where his social network X is threatened with imminent suspension.
This new episode began on Wednesday evening, when Judge Alexandre de Moraes threatened to suspend X if its owner Elon Musk did not appoint a legal representative for the company in the country within 24 hours.
In an injunction published on the social network, Judge Moraes of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) ordered Mr. Musk to indicate “within 24 hours the name and capacity of the new legal representative of X” in Brazil under penalty of “immediate suspension of the activities of the social network.”
In response, the billionaire posted a message saying that “this ‘judge’ has repeatedly violated the laws he swore to uphold.”
He also posted a photo montage with a sarcastic message calling the magistrate “the son of Voldemort and a Sith Knight,” an allusion to the villains of the Harry Potter and Star Wars sagas.
The judge opened an investigation into Elon Musk in April, accusing him of reactivating accounts that had been ordered suspended by the Brazilian courts. Mr. Musk, for his part, accuses him of stifling freedom of expression.
The satellite company Starlink, which also belongs to him, also indicated on X on Thursday that Judge Moraes had “ordered the freezing of his financial assets” in Brazil, confirming press reports.
According to the company, which operates in Brazil to provide Internet access, particularly in the Amazon, “this order is based on the unfounded assumption that Starlink should be responsible [du paiement] of fines imposed – unconstitutionally – on X”.
The company said it wanted to deal with the matter “through legal channels.”
The hashtag “Twitter morreu » (“Twitter is dead”) was one of the most used in Brazil after the publication of the Supreme Court injunction.
“Censorship”
On August 17, Elon Musk announced the closure of X’s offices in Brazil, while leaving the service available for Brazilian users.
He then accused Judge Moraes of threatening to arrest his legal representative in Brazil, which the social network considers to be a form of “censorship” aimed at blocking certain content.
“If we had accepted secret censorship [illégale] “If we had not heard of the allegations of Alexander de Moraes and the requests for transfer of private information, we could not have explained our actions without being ashamed,” Musk said.
In the name of the fight against disinformation, the judge has ordered in recent years the blocking of the accounts of influential figures in Brazilian ultra-conservative movements.
This is particularly true since the attempts by supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), an admirer of Elon Musk, to discredit the electronic voting system in the election won by his left-wing rival Lula in 2022.
In April, X admitted that users of several blocked accounts had managed to bypass the restrictions.
The affected accounts belong to conservative figures such as Senator Marcos do Val, a former ally of Mr Bolsonaro, according to federal police.
Elon Musk is also the subject of a judicial investigation in Brazil in the case of “digital militias”, suspected of having used public money to orchestrate disinformation campaigns in favor of Mr. Bolsonaro and his close associates.
A possible suspension of X would not be a first in Brazil: the encrypted messaging service Telegram has been temporarily blocked twice, in 2022 and 2023, for refusing to comply with court injunctions.
According to the specialized site DataReportal, X has more than 22 million users in Brazil.
Among them, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As if to prepare his ” followers ” to a suspension of X, he published the coordinates of his official accounts on competing social networks at the end of Thursday.