Twitter was ordered to appoint a legal agent by Brazilian authorities, a requirement for all foreign companies doing business there. It didn't and a judge there yesterday ordered local ISPs to block access to the platform. Brazil's National Telecommunications Agency has 24 hours to enforce the decision.
Late on Friday afternoon, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – who has been engaged in a dispute with X's owner, Elon Musk, since April – ordered the "immediate, complete and total suspension of X's operations" in the country, "until all court orders … are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country". … Moraes' April order to X to block some accounts stemmed from an investigation into "digital militias" who backed former president Jair Bolsonaro's attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat. After Musk refused to comply, the judge included him in his investigation.
On Wednesday, Moraes gave the company 24 hours to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil – a requirement for foreign companies operating in the country – "under penalty of immediate suspension of the social network's activities".
1. This is traditional authoritarian state censorship: a government denying public access to foreign media because it refuses to jump through expensive bureacratic hoops and subject itself to local authority. Everyday Brazilians now face fines and potential imprisoinment for simply accessing Twitter through VPNs.
2. Musk is an unashamed and quite weird censor himself, penalizing users for using innocuous terms that upset him, pulling all sorts of shenanigans to muzzle critics and eagerly complying with censorship requests from those politicians he favors—all while allowing right-wing influencers to post the n-word and other historically offensive terms. He presents himself as a free speech champion because everyone he cares about gets the joke—and maybe because hasty, indifferent reporters constantly use his tweets as a celebrity source for stories about free speech.
3. Be it resolved therefore that everyone here sucks, including Bolsonaro's terror twerps.
