It sometimes feels that when X owner Elon Musk is fighting the law, he won’t ever back down. But he just has. After weeks of battling the Brazilian judiciary, the social network has moved to comply with court orders.
In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court – after defying them for three weeks – in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.
According to The New York Times, the platform has now appointed a legal representative in Brazil, paid outstanding fines, and taken down user accounts that the court had ordered removed because they were allegedly threatening Brazil’s democracy.
Of course, the dispute was a bit weird in the first place, as Brazil is one of X’s largest markets, with 200 million people. But Musk kept complaining about what he called illegal censorship by Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Musk is now, unsurprisingly, silent about the fact that X has ended its crusade against Brazilian law, thanks to which the platform was not available in the country for several weeks.
The battle is not quite over, though. The Supreme Court said X had not filed the proper documentation showing that it had appointed a Brazilian representative and gave the company five days to present documents validating her appointment.
However the dispute finally ends, it has shown that governments can prevail in the power struggle against tech giants. In this specific case, Musk must have realized that his alternate reality on X doesn’t translate into laws in the real world where you either respect or break them.
Plus, there’s competition. In mid-September, Bluesky, another social media platform, said it added millions of users from Brazil immediately after the country suspended X.
Perhaps that’s why X surreptitiously placed itself behind Cloudflare’s third-party cloud network last week, thereby allowing users in Brazil to access the platform by essentially hiding X’s server IP addresses. Brazil’s Supreme Court responded with additional fines for the firm.
Musk has also previously clashed with the European Union, where X faces fines of up to 6% of its revenue if it does not comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act. Regulators said the platform violated the law by deceiving users into engaging with potentially harmful content.
The tech billionaire also engaged in a war of words with UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who said Musk was inciting anti-immigration riots that shook the country in the summer.
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