Brazil’s social media site X has started to go back online after being unavailable for almost a month due to a dispute between Elon Musk, the company’s owner, and a judge on the highest court in the nation.
After Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes approved the removal of X’s suspension on Tuesday, internet service providers started to allow users to once again access the platform.
Musk’s failure to designate a local representative and pay fines totaling millions of dollars served as the immediate catalyst for the ban.
However, there was a politically charged and protracted legal dispute raging between the vocal tech billionaire and Brazil’s highest court as the latter attempted to stop far-right propaganda and anti-democratic content from spreading on the social media platform.
Experts and Brazilian authorities partially attributed the far-right riots that shook Brasília in January 2023 to the circulation of such inflammatory online information. Musk, who has sided with far-right individuals like Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, reacted violently to August’s ban.
As a symbol of his uprising, he tweeted a meme of a dog dangling its privates in front of another animal and referred to one justice of the supreme court, Alexandre de Moraes, as a tyrant and “Voldemort.”
However, it seems that Musk has changed his mind in recent days, since he paid fines totaling 28.6 million reais (£3.9 million) and designated a Brazilian attorney as X’s local agent in accordance with Brazilian law.
Comentators and pro-democracy activists in Brazil hailed X’s submission to the law as a triumph for the nation’s institutions and sovereignty. Prominent political analyst Gerson Camarotti told GloboNews that “[the ban] wasn’t censorship.”
This concerned disobedience to court orders… Brazil’s democracy benefits from this. Camarotti observed that despite the absence of Musk’s increasingly disorderly network, life in Brazil had continued as usual over the previous few weeks.
A few million social media users in Brazil just switched to the competitor network Bluesky.
“The most interesting thing is that Brazil didn’t grind to a halt uu of [the ban on] X … Nobody in Brazil died because of the absence of X,” Camarotti added, lamenting how Musk’s social media platform had become “the network of hatred”.
