In the latest round of the dispute between Elon Musk and Brazil’s top court, a senior judge has accused X of a “willful, illegal and persistent” effort to circumvent a court-ordered block – and imposed a fine of R$5m ($921,676) for each day the social network remains online.
The social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which has been banned by court order since 30 August, on Wednesday became accessible to many users in Brazil after an update that used cloud services offered by third parties, such as Cloudflare, Fastly and Edgeuno.
This allowed some Brazilian users to access X without the need for a VPN – which is also prohibited in the country.
Late on Wednesday, X described its reappearance in Brazil as an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”.
But the influential supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes – who ordered the original ban as part of an attempt to crack down on anti-democratic, far-right voices – on Thursday described the move as a deliberate attempt “to circumvent the court’s blocking order”.
Moraes said that the tactic was “confessed directly by its largest shareholder, Elon Musk, in a post on X addressed to the entire country”.
This was a reference to a message by Musk who on Wednesday posted: “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
According to Moraes, this left “no doubt that the X platform – under the direct command of Elon Musk – intends, once again, to disrespect Brazil’s judiciary”.
Moraes also ruled that if X does not pay the fines – which occurred with the previous R$18.3m ($3,376,509) penalties applied to the platform – the obligation will fall on Musk’s satellite internet provider, Starlink.
The justice argued that, as the companies share the same owner and X no longer has a legal representative in Brazil – something required by Brazilian law and one of the reasons for the ban – the satellite internet provider becomes “jointly liable” for the fines owed by X.
After a day of unrestricted use, the national telecommunications agency, Anatel, announced on Thursday that, “with the active support of Cloudflare”, it was able to identify the mechanism enabling access to X.
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Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former far-right president, seized on the platform’s temporary return to post a lengthy message defending Musk and criticising Moraes, who is handling most of the cases related to an attempted coup to keep the former army captain in power.
After “congratulating everyone for the pressure they are applying in defence of democracy in Brazil”, Bolsonaro wrote that “X was banned for questioning judicial rulings that demanded not only the removal of specific posts but the permanent exclusion of accounts. This is prior censorship.”
The supreme court, which has supported Moraes’s decision to ban X, has found that the social network refused to remove accounts that were disseminating false information, hate speech and incitement to crime.
Among them were threats against federal police officers “involved in investigations into digital militias and the attempted coup”, the court said.