Media platform X said on Saturday that it was stopping operations in Brazil ‘immediately’ due to censorship orders from a Brazilian judge, Alexandre de Moraes. The platform also accused Moraes of making secret threats to arrest one of its legal representatives and ordered the platform to remove specific contents.
Still, the X service is available to users in Brazil, as stated in the official message from the platform belonging to Elon Musk. Back in February, at the height of investigations into the “digital militias” allegedly involved in spreading fake news and hate speech during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, Judge Moraes ordered X to suspend several accounts.
A process of inquiry was opened against Musk after he said that he wanted to unblock accounts that Moraes had asked to block. Musk referred to Moraes’s interference with X as unconstitutional.
Subsequent to these events, X representatives told the Supreme Court of Brazil that the company was ready to obey local legal decisions. In April, X lawyers admitted there were ‘operational failures’ that enabled banned users to continue using the platform, thus raising more concerns from Judge Moraes about the platform’s compliance.
