Rio de Janeiro, Aug 31 (EFE).- The social network X began to be suspended in Brazil this Saturday after the country’s main operators complied with the decision of a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice due to the non-compliance of «court orders» imposed on the platform.
Since early Saturday morning, customers of Vivo, Claro and Oi, the country’s main operators, reported the social network was down, and EFE was also unable to access it.
The suspension was ordered on Friday by the magistrate Alexandre de Moraes, after the tycoon Elon Musk, owner of X, failed to comply with the order to appoint, within 24 hours, a legal representative of the platform in Brazil.
In his ruling, the judge ordered the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel, regulatory body) to immediately adopt “all necessary measures” to implement the decision against the social network. “throughout the national territory.”
The judge also imposed daily fines of 50,000 reais (almost 9,000 dollars or 8,064 euros) for those who tried to access the social network through the Virtual Private Network (VPN), a tool that creates a secure connection between a device and the Internet and is used to protect online privacy.
Initially, De Moraes had also ordered Apple and Google to adopt restrictions to prevent the use of the VPN by iOS and Android systems, as well as removing it from their virtual stores, but later suspended that order due to the possibility that «X Brazil» speak out and decide to comply «fully» court orders.
The suspension of the service, however, did not occur instantly because, according to Anatel, there are some 20,000 operators in the country that must prevent customers from accessing all of the social network’s servers.
The sentence is part of an investigation into the dissemination of false news in which the South African businessman is suspected of having committed crimes of obstruction of justice, criminal organization and incitement to crime.
De Moraes stated that he made this decision due to X’s “non-compliance with court orders” and “attempt to not submit to the Brazilian legal system” with the intention of “to establish an environment of total impunity and lawlessness.”
In this sense, he ordered the “immediate” suspension until “all court orders are complied with” and the million-dollar fines imposed on the company are paid. X.
The problems began months ago, after the judge ordered the removal of a series of profiles for allegedly misleading information and Musk refused to do so, accusing the judge of acting without apparent motive.
The social network’s suspension will remain in effect until all court orders are “fulfilled” and the multimillion-dollar fines imposed on X are paid.
Brazil is one of the countries in the world with the most active X users, with around 20 million.
This is not the first time that the Brazilian justice system has ordered the suspension of a social network. This has already happened with YouTube (2007), WhatsApp (2015 and 2016) and Telegram (2023) for lack of cooperation in various judicial investigations.
