Brazil blocked the social network X on Friday after its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with a Brazilian judge’s orders to suspend certain accounts, the biggest test yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered internet providers to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a necessary legal representative in Brazil.
Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.
X said on Thursday that it viewed Justice Moraes’ orders as illegal and that it planned to break their legal seal and publish them. “Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders,” the company said in a statement.
In an unusual move, Justice Moraes also froze the finances of another Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.
Mr. Musk and Justice Moraes have been sparring for months. Mr. Musk says Justice Moraes is illegally censoring conservative voices. Justice Moraes says Mr. Musk is illegally obstructing his work to rid the Brazilian internet of hate speech and attacks on democracy.
After the Brazilian Supreme Court’s X account posted on Wednesday that Mr. Musk had 24 hours to name a new representative in Brazil, Mr. Musk responded with an image of toilet paper with Justice Moraes’s name on it.
The fight is now at the center of Mr. Musk’s bid to turn X into a safe haven for people to say nearly anything they want, even if it hurts the business in the process.
In dozens of posts since April, Mr. Musk has built up Justice Moraes as one of the world’s biggest enemies of free speech, and it appears Mr. Musk is now betting the judge will cave to the public backlash he believes the block will cause.
But the longer the blackout on X lasts, the more it will test Mr. Musk’s commitment to his ideology at the expense of revenue, market share and influence.
“He might be losing money in the short term, but he’s gaining enormous political capital,” said Luca Belli, a professor at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, who has tracked Mr. Musk’s strategy with X.
Since 2022, Brazil ranks fourth globally with more than 25 million downloads of the X app, according to Appfigures, an app data firm. X’s international business has become more important under Mr. Musk, as American advertisers have fled the site because of an increase in hate speech and misinformation since Mr. Musk bought it.
Mr. Musk has overhauled the social network since buying it for $44 billion in 2022, when it was still called Twitter. In addition to renaming the service, he jettisoned many of its rules about what users could say. He also reinstated suspended accounts, including that of former president Donald J. Trump, and said no account should be permanently blocked.
Yet Mr. Musk said X would still follow the law where it operates. Under his leadership, X has complied with demands from the Indian government to withhold accounts and removed links to a BBC documentary that painted a critical portrait of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister.
At other times, Mr. Musk has battled orders to remove content. In Australia, he successfully fought an order to remove videos depicting a violent attack against a local bishop. The videos were hidden from users in the country, but available on the platform elsewhere.
But he has met a formidable challenge in Justice Moraes.
In recent years, few people globally have had a larger singular impact on what is said online than the Brazilian judge. He has emerged as one of Brazil’s most powerful — and polarizing — figures after the country’s Supreme Court enshrined him with expansive powers to crack down on threats to democracy online, amid fears about a far-right movement led by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.
Ahead of Brazil’s 2022 election, the court empowered Justice Moraes to unilaterally order the takedown of accounts he deemed threats. He has since wielded that power liberally, often in sealed orders that do not disclose why a given account was suspended.
He has ordered X to remove at least 140 accounts, most of them right-wing, including some of Brazil’s most prominent conservative pundits and members of Congress.
Mr. Musk’s sudden entry into the debate in April, with a series of posts calling Justice Moraes a dictator, gave new life to Mr. Bolsonaro’s right-wing movement. Mr. Bolsonaro lauded Mr. Musk at rallies and his supporters held signs thanking the tech mogul for coming to their rescue.
Yet when Justice Moraes included Mr. Musk in an investigation into disinformation and began threatening X with fines, the company sent a conciliatory letter that it would comply with the judge’s orders.
Then, in recent weeks, X stopped complying. After Justice Moraes warned that the company’s legal representative in Brazil would face arrest, Mr. Musk closed X’s office.
“The people of Brazil have a choice to make — democracy, or Alexandre de Moraes,” X wrote when announcing the move.
Mr. Musk has used X as a political cudgel. To his nearly 200 million followers, he has repeatedly boosted Mr. Trump and other right-wing leaders, like President Javier Milei of Argentina, while mocking politicians he opposes, such as Vice President Kamala Harris and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil.
Mr. Lula supported the block of X. “Just because someone has money doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want,” he said Friday. “They must accept the country’s rules.”
The U.S. Embassy in Brazil said it was monitoring the dispute. “The United States values freedom of speech as a cornerstone of a healthy democracy,” the embassy said in a statement.
Several authoritarian governments have banned X, including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Some other nations have temporarily blocked the site at times. In June 2021, Nigeria suspended the service for about seven months after the company removed posts threatening violence from the country’s then president.
In his order Friday, Justice Moraes told Brazil’s telecommunications agency and major internet providers to block people in Brazil from using X. He also told Apple and Google to prevent downloads of X’s app in Brazil. The telecom agency was told to comply within 24 hours, while the companies have five days. X may remain accessible in Brazil until the agency and companies comply.
To get around such measures, users have turned to privacy tools known as virtual private networks, or VPNs, which make internet traffic appear as though it was coming from a different country. Makers of popular VPN apps said downloads have recently soared in Brazil.
Yet Justice Moraes also took an unusual approach to prevent such access. He said that anyone caught using a VPN to gain access to X in Brazil would face a fine of nearly $9,000 a day.
It is not the first time Brazilian authorities have blocked an online service for ignoring court orders. Yet such blocks have usually lasted just days before a company has reversed course and complied. That was the case in 2022, when Justice Moraes blocked the messaging app Telegram for a weekend.
Mr. Belli, the law professor, said he expected the same with Mr. Musk and X. “My bet is that he might be blocked for a couple of days, and then will comply and portray himself as a victim,” Mr. Belli said. “So he’s still winning.”
