Date:
August 31, 2024
Brazil has imposed an immediate country-wide ban on Elon Musk’s social media platform X over content moderation concerns.
The government of Brazil has been fighting a long battle with Elon Musk’s recently acquired social media platform X. The fight revolved around content moderation policies and lack of monitoring and censorship for underage users that can potentially harm the mental wellness of children in Brazil.
As a result, a top court has finally imposed a country-wide ban on the platform with immediate effect. The court has also shared a public notice stating that anyone caught using the application through VPN will be fined a flat 50,000 reais $8100 daily fine. It is unclear how the government bodies will monitor such activities and enforce the decree.
The battle between X and Brazil's government has lasted for months. The company responded to the allegations by closing operations in Brazil as a form of protest against the court’s orders to remove accounts that allegedly were spreading misinformation.
One of the senior representatives of X said that the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes “Threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders.” Moraes has earlier warned X to name a legal representative for the company in Brazil, or else they would ban the app in the region.
“Soon, we expect Judge Alexandre de Moraes will order X to be shut down in Brazil, simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents,” X’s global affairs team tweeted Friday morning. The platform has clarified that it will not follow the top court’s demands and will also post its demands in the coming days for the world to realize the discrimination it has been facing.
Since Musk took over Twitter and renamed it to X, the platform has not once breathed relief from controversies. From allegations of promoting adult media on the platform to deliberately removing censorship and monitoring, X has fallen under multiple scrutiny radars across the globe. With a nationwide ban in Brazil, X will lose on an important market that encompasses over 40 million users.
