Brazil Supreme Court vote upholds X ban in the country

Social media platform X will remain suspended in Brazil, after the country’s Supreme Court voted unanimously in favour to uphold a ruling to ban the social media platform.

Justice Alexandre de Moraes called the five-member panel to vote on Monday, after X, formerly Twitter, was shut down in the early hours of Saturday after it failed to appoint a legal representative in the country before a court-imposed deadline.

Musk criticised the ban in recent post, stating: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”

The billionaire claimed that de Moraes was trying to “enforce censorship” through the ban.

Moraes’ feud with Musk first started over issues related to misinformation and hate speech on the platform.

In April, the Brazilian government asked X to suspend seven influential accounts associated with the regime of former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The feud has also led to the freezing of the Brazilian bank accounts of Starlink – the satellite internet providing subsidiary of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX, which currently counts more than 200,000 clients in Brazil.

In response to the decision to uphold the ban, Starlink told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it won’t block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.

The decision has been passed onto Brazil’s top court, the Brazilian agency said in a statement.

Commenting on the decision, Justice Flávio Dino said that “freedom of expression is closely linked to a duty of responsibility”.

“The first can’t exist without the second, and vice-versa,” he added.

Chief Justice Luis Roberto Barroso said in an interview with Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo over the weekend that “a company that refuses to name a legal representative in Brazil cannot operate in Brazilian territory”.

Moraes’s current ruling imposes fines of up to R$50,000 ($8,910; £6,780) for individuals and businesses that decide to access the platform using virtual private networks (VPNs).

Companies including Apple and Google will have to remove X from their app stores, blocking the social media platform across their iOS and Android devices.

In recent months, Musk launched several online attacks against Moraes, including posting an AI-generated image of the judge in a prison cell to his 196 million followers.

Brazil currently represents one of X’s largest markets with the number of social media users in in Brazil forecasted to continuously increase between 2024 and 2029 by a total 45.5 million users.

Since X went offline on Saturday, users have started migrating to alternative platforms, with social media platform BlueSky recording activity surging to one million users in the past three days.