Musk Canceled in Brazil
By 
Brazil blocked the social network X on Friday after its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with a Brazilian judge’s orders to suspend certain accounts, the biggest test yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.
Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a necessary legal representative in Brazil.
Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.
X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.
If there’s one thing Elon Musk is committed to, it’s democracy……
In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.
Justice Moraes also froze the finances of a second Musk business in Brazil, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-internet service, to try to collect $3 million in fines he has levied against X. Starlink — which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil, with more than 250,000 customers — said that it planned to fight the order and would make its service free in Brazil if necessary.
Mr. Musk and Justice Moraes have been sparring for months. Mr. Musk says Justice Moraes is illegally censoring conservative voices. Justice Moraes says Mr. Musk is illegally obstructing his work to clean up the Brazilian internet.
So I am very much not and have never been a free speech absolutist. See, like the U.S., Brazil has a slight fascist problem, having barely survived one of Musk’s buddies, a nice man named Jair Bolsanaro. And Brazil has since been much more serious than the United States at making sure he doesn’t return to power. The truth is, Brazil has very good reason to take this seriously, as military dictatorship is in the lived memory of many people. U.S. liberals instead fetishize free speech. Now, I stay on Twitter (fuck you Musk, I won’t call it your favorite lettter) rather than Bluesky, because Bluesky is even worse than fascism–it’s a boring closed epistemological circle filled with boring and unfunny people. But should American judges destroy Twitter to save the nation? I’d have no objection. At least I could try to make Bluesky less boring then.