Elon Musk, left, and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Reuters (left) | Getty Images (right)
Elon Musk's X-Car is facing hefty daily fines in Brazil for allegedly evading a service ban there, according to a statement from the country's Supreme Court on Thursday.
The fines imposed by Brazil’s Supreme Court amount to $5 million in Brazilian reals, or about $920,000 a day, and the court said it would continue to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk’s space venture.
X’s suspension in Brazil was initially issued by the country’s Supreme Court chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes, in late August, and a panel of judges upheld the orders in early September. The court found that X had violated Brazilian law under Musk, which requires social media companies to employ legal representation in the country and remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X had failed to suspend accounts that allegedly engaged in defamation of federal officials.
X has recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare The company appears to be using dynamic IP addresses that are constantly changing, allowing many users in Brazil to access the site. In a previous setup, the company used specific, static IP addresses in Brazil, which were easily blocked by ISPs on the orders of regulators.
Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, has been attacking de Moraes for months and continued to do so after the order was issued. He has called de Moraes evil, compared him to Darth Vader and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, and has repeatedly called for de Moraes to be removed.
Brazil had previously withdrawn the fines it had imposed on X from X and Starlink’s accounts at financial institutions in the country. The new fines will start on September 19, with the court calculating a total based on “the number of days of non-compliance” with its previous orders to suspend X nationwide.
While Musk presents himself as a champion of absolute freedom of expression, X has agreed to requests to remove profiles and posts in countries including India, Turkey and Hungary.
Musk and X may be in the process of complying with Brazilian takedown orders as well. Brazilian newspaper Correio Braziliense reported Wednesday that X has begun blocking accounts in accordance with suspension orders issued by the country’s Supreme Court.
Among the accounts apparently blocked are those of some online influencers who are said to be under investigation for spreading misinformation and promoting attacks against democratic institutions in Brazil.
X said it has no plans to restore access to Brazilian users.
“When X was shut down in Brazil, our team was no longer able to access our infrastructure to deliver service to Latin America,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “In order to continue to provide optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an unintended and temporary restoration of service for Brazilian users. While we anticipate that the platform will be unavailable again in Brazil soon, we continue to work with the Brazilian government to restore it to the people of Brazil very soon.”
De Moraes ordered Brazil's national communications agency, Anatel, to block access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare as well as quickly EdgeUno servers, and other servers that the court said were “created to circumvent” the suspension of X’s service in Brazil.
A Cloudflare spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that the company does not “enable or prevent blocking,” adding that “many Cloudflare customers choose to use dedicated IP addresses, which is not unique in the industry.”
Prior to the suspension, X had an estimated 22 million users in Brazil, according to Data Reportal.
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