Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third-largest market and reportedly more than 40 million users. And despite His online bravadoseems to have run into a dead end.
Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an ongoing conflict between Musk and the country’s Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), a special court led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, which has issued takedown orders for content it deems a threat to the integrity of its elections. Musk and X refused to comply, allowing accounts accused of spreading hate speech and disinformation to remain on the platform — a move that ultimately triggered the ban.
Starlink also came under scrutiny: The court froze the assets of Musk’s other company, saying it was part of the same “economic group” as X given its ownership, for possible use to pay fines owed by X. When the block went into effect on Monday, Starlink allowed its customers — more than 250,000 people, according to the company — to circumvent X’s ban by using their satellite internet connection. After initial resistance, Starlink backed down and said it would comply. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that, increasingly, it seems Musk has overreacted.
“I think he’s realizing that Brazilians aren’t going to take to the streets because X is suspended,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at Brazil’s National Institute of Science and Technology for Digital Democracy. “Brazilian institutions aren’t going to back down just because Musk is swearing online.”
In response to a request for comment, an X spokesperson directed WIRED to a mail From the platform’s Global Affairs team. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of expression,” reads part of the post.
Meanwhile, Musk has continued to antagonize the court. Last week, he posted a Apparently AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars (which was later deleted), with the accompanying text claiming: “One day, Alexandre, this photo of you in prison will be real,” and another comparing it to the The Harry Potter villain, Voldemort.
“Since April, he has been playing with Moraes’ image, with the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and has been climbing the ranks in a problematic way,” says Bruna Santos, a researcher and activist with the civil society coalition Coalizão Direitos na Rede in Brazil. “He was fully aware and knew what the consequences would be.”
WIRED reported how employees scrambled to avoid a legal crisis when Musk took over Twitter in 2022, just days before Brazil’s presidential runoff election. The company was served with a consent decree from the judiciary, warning it that if it didn’t follow through on its promises to maintain safeguards around the election, it risked being blocked. At the time, the country’s then-president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters allegedly spread disinformation about the security of the country’s election to cast doubt on the results. Musk had promised a rollback of the company’s existing content moderation policies and pledged a kind of “free speech absolutism” that has, in practice, allowed hate speech and misinformation and disinformation to flow freely on the platform.