Brazil unblocks X after Elon Musk backs down

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil lifted its ban on the social network X on Oct 8 after its owner, Elon Musk, capitulated in his fight with the country’s Supreme Court, ending a five-week suspension of the platform across the nation of 200 million.

Brazil’s Supreme Court said X had complied with the court’s orders to take down certain accounts, which the court called necessary to protect Brazil’s democracy and which Musk called illegal censorship. The company also complied with other orders, including paying fines and naming a new representative in the country.

X’s compliance marked a stark reversal for Musk, who had loudly criticised and defied the court for months, going so far as to publish its sealed orders and to close X’s offices in Brazil. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil in August, sending millions of Brazilians to the platform’s competitors.

But now, X is returning in Brazil and obeying orders that Musk had vowed to resist. X said in a post Tuesday that “giving tens of millions of Brazilians access to our indispensable platform was paramount throughout this entire process.” It added that it would “continue to defend freedom of speech, within the boundaries of the law, everywhere we operate.”

Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Tuesday gave regulators 24 hours to let X come back online in Brazil, though it could take more time for the site to return.

The apparent resolution to the monthslong battle represented a defeat for Musk, who has styled himself as an outspoken defender of free speech. His company lost a month of business in one of its biggest markets, allowing rivals to gain a foothold there, only to end up exactly where it began.

Yet, despite the legal and business loss, Musk and his backers may view the ordeal as a public-relations victory. Standing up to Brazil’s Supreme Court – which has acted aggressively to censor certain voices on social media – attracted the billionaire entrepreneur widespread praise from people worried about governments restricting what can be said online. That was despite his compliance with government orders elsewhere to remove accounts and posts.

On the other hand, the outcome is a victory for Brazil’s Supreme Court and, specifically, Moraes, the judge who led the fight against X.

Moraes has become a polarizing figure in Brazil for his sweeping push to police the Internet, and his move to block X was his most hotly debated decision yet. But many in Brazil, particularly on the left, praised the judge’s stance as an example of a developing country standing up to the world’s richest man and his powerful tech empire.

The turn of events in Brazil also suggests that nation-states still hold the upper hand in the ongoing power struggle with big tech companies.

The fight has centered on Moraes’ demands to remove accounts on X that he said spread hate speech or were a threat to Brazil’s democracy. In most cases, he has not disclosed what the accounts had done to warrant suspension. But in some of his orders released by X, he showed the accounts had questioned Brazil’s elections and sympathized with protesters demanding a military coup.

Musk has said that suspending the accounts is a dangerous example of governments controlling speech. He has railed against Moraes for months, calling him a dictator and saying he should be imprisoned.

“This was an arm-wrestling match between the Supreme Court and Elon Musk,” said Laura Porto, a Brazilian lawyer and a specialist in digital law. “And I see it as a victory for national sovereignty, for Brazil as a whole, having managed to impose these limits.”

Musk had tried to use various workarounds to fight the blocking of X. Starlink, a satellite-Internet service he controls, told regulators that it would defy orders to block X in Brazil. Then X used a technical manoeuvre to briefly evade the block and have its site function again for many Brazilians.

But Starlink quickly complied when regulators threatened to revoke its license in the country. X’s technical workaround was blocked within a day. And Moraes even forced X to pay fines it was avoiding in Brazil by taking money from Starlink.

As a result, X suffered defeat after defeat, and the company eventually relented.

To many conservatives in Brazil, however, the dispute showed how Brazil’s Supreme Court has grown too powerful. “We’re not going to stop until we return democracy to Brazil!” Eduardo Girão, a right-wing Brazilian senator, wrote on X alongside a video of him at a protest calling for Moraes’ impeachment.

And some are holding out hope that Musk’s reversal is just a temporary peace deal and that the businessman has other plans to subvert the court soon. Another right-wing Brazilian congressman recently suggested in an interview that Musk was only “temporarily” complying with the court’s orders, so that the ban on X would be lifted, but that Musk still planned to lobby for Moraes’ impeachment.

Brazil is one of X’s most important international markets, with analysts estimating that it had more than 20 million users there. But, since the ban, Brazilians have flocked to other platforms, and it’s unclear if they will rush back to X.

Bluesky, a social network similar to X, attracted a wave of new users in recent weeks. From Aug 31 – when X went dark in Brazil – to Sept 29, Bluesky’s average daily users on its app in Brazil doubled to 6.8 million, according to Similarweb, a data intelligence firm.

Daily users on Threads, the X competitor from Meta, grew by a third to 3.6 million in Brazil over that period. The number of Brazilians on X, by comparison, plummeted by 80% since its ban, to 1.2 million, with Similarweb explaining that most of the traffic was driven by users unsuccessfully trying to access the platform.

But some Brazilians were able to sidestep the ban by using virtual private networks, or VPNs, common privacy software that disguises the location of Internet traffic.

Most of those people sided with Musk. About 90% of the politically related posts from users who kept logging on criticised the ban and Moraes, according to a study by the Getúlio Vargas Institute, a Brazilian research institution.

Moraes had threatened to fine users US$9,000 per day if they used VPN software to access the platform, and Brazil’s federal police said last month that it had received court orders to identify those who defied the ban.

Despite X’s vast user base in Brazil, the ban on Musk’s social media platform is not likely to have had a significant impact on its bottom line. Bloomberg reported last month that Brazil accounted for just 2% of its overall earnings.

Globally, X is still far larger than its rivals, with 84 million daily users on its app, according to Similarweb. Threads has about 41 million daily users, while Bluesky has 7.5 million, nearly all now in Brazil. – The New York Times