Elon Musk must think that his immense wealth makes him above the law. Since he is able to buy influence with prominent politicians in the US, he may have felt that he could act with impunity in other countries. In particular, he seemed to feel that he need not follow the laws that exist in Brazil regarding how companies operate there and as a result got himself embroiled with a no-nonsense Brazilian judge.
The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.
Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.
Musk refused to do so and was immediately smacked down by the judge.
Musk has been at loggerheads with supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes since April after he ordered the company to take down more than 100 social media accounts that had been questioning whether the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro had really lost the election in 2022.
…Musk has objected to legal orders to remove some posts and accounts in Brazil and Australia, claiming he was a champion of free speech, although he has been less vocal about removing content in countries such as Turkey and India. Brazil’s population of 200 million people makes it an attractive market for social media companies.
Instead of complying with the judge’s order, Musk instead ordered the closure of all X’s offices in Brazil, but that triggered a new response by the judge
By mid-August, Musk had closed down X’s offices in Brazil, leaving it without a legal representative in the country, a legal requirement for firms to operate there. Moraes responded by ordering Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block access to X. Musk had used his platform to attack Moraes, describing him as an “evil tyrant” among other things.
Musk then thought that he had found a clever way around Moraes’s edict shutting down X in Brazil, that enabled the company to operate there without having to appoint a country representative as Moraes said the law demanded.
On Wednesday, Musk tried to circumvent the X ban in Brazil with an update to its communications network that allowed some users in the country to access the platform without a VPN, showing once again that he has no respect for Brazilian law.
But Moraes was having none of this and levied even more fines. Finally Musk completely caved.
X, Musk’s social media platform, has backed down in its fight with the Brazilian judiciary, after complying with court orders that had blocked users in the country from accessing X.
The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.
But Moraes is not done yet.
However, the battle is not quite over. The supreme court said X had not filed the proper documentation showing that it had appointed Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its Brazilian representative. It gave the company five days to present documents validating her appointment.
I am sure that even though it must stick in his craw to be ordered around by a mere Brazilian judge, Musk will give in on this too.
It’s important to remember that this case is an outlier -- in the majority of cases, Twitter is perfectly happy to comply with censorship and takedown requests from governments. In fact, it’s even more compliant under Musk that it was previously.
See, for example, Twitter is complying with more government demands under Elon Musk:
[My emphasis]
Of course, that was before the Brazilians elected a government he doesn’t like…
If the Brazilian judge turns out to be a k*ffer it must hurt Musk even more.
It’s really not hard to get a legal representative in any country, and most countries require it. I worked on homologation for a few years, which is all about ensuring your company meets the regulations of a country and is legally allowed to operate in the host nation. I was working in RF technology at the time, and ensuring our equipment would not interfere with frequency spectrum allotments in each country was somewhat like straightening cooked spaghetti.
But we had a Brazilian representative whom I never met. The person we hired represented a few dozen companies and we paid them about $500/year. He passed paperwork from the Brazilian government to me, I filled it out and attached the appropriate test data, and he went to the government offices to get the paperwork stamped. He probably spent 40 hours a year working on our products, which allowed him to do the same for many companies. Near the end of the gig all the paperwork went digital and he had even less to do, but we still paid him to be our local representative. That was the law. Not a bad gig if you can find it. The legal requirement to have a local representative is all about being able to find someone if there are any concerns. At one point our Canadian representative retired and I had to find a new one, there are people who specialize in this type of work. It’s all part of the international trade game, but if you come across it unexpectedly it might seem surprising.
I imagine the company called “X -- previously known as Twitter” would want a larger presence, but it would not be required by Brazilian law. I doubt Musk knew it was a requirement of Brazilian law when he pulled out, and his immediate team may not have known either. But someone lower in the organization would have known and raised the flag (which would be ignored). This is a Musk temper tantrum, he threw some of his toys out of his pram but eventually got bored with it.
Like the old saying goes, “If you scratch a bully, you will find a coward underneath.”
@#2 birgerjohansson
I understand you are coming from the side of the egalitarians, but could you not use the “k” word? It’s just as bad as the “n” word. You could have made your point by assuming the judge is “dark skinned”, or of “African descent”, without amplifying utterly hateful rhetoric that really needs to be thrown out.
So, a) Musk is a hypocrite, who will cave to demands from right wing governments but not to demands that work against the right wing; b) Musk is used to being above the law as he seems to be in the US, and c) Brazil blocks access to websites that don’t have a representative in Brazil.
Wait, what?
So, anyone who has a website would need to hire a Brazilian to serve as a local representative there if they want that website to be viewable in Brazil? That seems … problematic. If every country followed suit, the web would balkanize fast. No, worse than that. The big “platform” sites, like Facebork and Google and friends, would spend a few million dollars a year to hire a representative in each country in the world, and stay universally available, but Joe Rando wouldn’t have a hope in hell of standing up their own site and being visible outside of their own country, in effect reducing the web to just the sites run by large corporations that can afford to have branch offices throughout the world. I’m sure those large companies would love this, but it would put a final nail in the coffin of the web we loved back in the late 90s and early 00s, wouldn’t it?
FTB, in particular, would cease to be visible outside of (I’m guessing) the United States. Goodbye StevoR, who I’m given to understand is from the southern hemisphere; goodbye to a lot of the other regular commenters and several of the blog authors themselves; and goodbye me, for that matter, as of whatever day I woke up to find “This website is blocked in Canada because it has not appointed a local representative here” in place of the usual front page.
This is a worrying trend, if indeed it is a trend.
I think the requirement is to have a representative if you are operating a business in the country. Merely having a viewable website is not the same thing. The precise legal requirements are probably fairly subtle -- for example, merely shipping internationally from country A to country B is not generally regarded as meaning that you’re operating a business in country B (a fact that many international business use to their advantage when it comes to taxation).
moarscienceplz @ 5
I chose that word as I suspect it is a word Musk and his family still use in private* –a generation after apartheid was abolished- but OK I will refrain from using it even in the censored “*” version.
*just as SSADT and his family kept using the n word.
#5, Dunc, wrote,
That is my understanding as well. If anyone misunderstood this based on my comment, I apologize.