SAO PAULO — Brazil started blocking Elon Musk’s social media platform X early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through its mobile app after the company
The justice said the platform will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais for people or companies using VPNs to access it. “When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote.Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy.
X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.
On Thursday evening, Starlink, said on X that de Moraes this week froze its finances, preventing it from doing any transactions in the country where it has more than 250,000 customers.