Brazilians are set to regain access to X after a supreme court judge lifted a ban introduced nearly six weeks ago as a result of Elon Musk’s failure to comply with the South American country’s laws.
X was blocked in Brazil, where it had more than 22 million users, at the end of August in what was the culmination of a months-long arm wrestle between the network’s billionaire owner and the Brazilian supreme court.
The immediate trigger for the ban was Musk’s failure to name a local representative and pay millions of dollars worth of fines. But the backdrop was a long-running and politically charged battle between the outspoken tech billionaire and Brazil’s top court, which was trying to combat the dissemination of far-right misinformation and anti-democratic content on the social network.
Experts and Brazilian authorities partly blamed the spread of such incendiary online content for the far-right riots that rocked Brasília in January 2023.
Musk – who has aligned himself with far-right figures including Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro – reacted angrily to August’s ban. He called one supreme court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, a dictator and “Voldemort” and posted a meme of a dog dangling its private parts in the face of another animal as a sign of his revolt.
But in recent days Musk appears to have backed down, paying 28.6m reais (£3.9m) in fines and naming a Brazilian lawyer as X’s local representative, as required by the country’s laws.
Given those steps, Moraes wrote that he ordered the “end of the suspension and authorise[d] the immediate return of X’s activities in Brazil” in a legal decision issued on Tuesday.
Moraes ordered Brazil’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, to implement his ruling – although on Tuesday evening X remained inaccessible without the use of a virtual private network. The network is expected to become available in the coming hours.
Brazilian commentators and pro-democracy activists celebrated what they portrayed as X’s surrender to the rule-of-law as a victory for the country’s institutions and sovereignty.
“[The ban] wasn’t censorship,” Gerson Camarotti, a prominent political commentator, told the news channel GloboNews. “This was about non-compliance with judicial decisions … It’s Brazilian democracy that gains with this.”
Camarotti noted how, over the past few weeks, life in Brazil had continued as normal, despite the lack of Musk’s increasingly unruly network. Several million Brazilian social media users simply relocated to the rival network Bluesky.
“The most interesting thing is that Brazil didn’t grind to a halt because 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”.
In a statement, the social media activism organisation Sleeping Giants also voiced support for what it called “a significant victory for Brazilian democracy, our political institutions, and the sovereignty of our state”.
“The suspension of X was an important measure to ensure that all companies, including big tech, comply with and respect Brazilian laws, particularly when the human rights of our citizens are at stake and our democratic institutions are being undermined,” Sleeping Giants said.
“Contrary to some misconceptions, X was not suspended in Brazil to suppress freedom of speech. The Supreme Federal Court’s judicial decisions came after a series of orders that were ignored by the social media company.”