Elon Musk put on a brave face of not giving in to the demands of Brazil, but in the end, appears to be caving to their demands.
Last month, we learned of a Brazilian judge ordering the blocking of X/Twitter. Among the things being requested was the removal of certain accounts as well as sending legal council to the court in question. Ultimately, Musk refused, so the judge ordered the blocking of the platform entirely. Where things got controversial was the judge, at least temporarily, ruling that using a VPN service to access X/Twitter also be illegal and threatening fines for anyone who did so.
Now, that gets into the perfectly reasonable question of how one goes about enforcing such an order, but regardless, the Brazilian supreme court upheld that ruling with only minor dissent from at least one judge. For that judge, the reservation was that maybe law enforcement should focus on whether or not illegal activity occurs while using said VPN instead of presuming guilt of some sort just by using it. That judge, however, was overruled and the ruling, including the insane finding for VPN’s, still stood.
Despite the ban, however, X/Twitter suddenly came back to Brazil after the infrastructure was put behind Cloudflare’s Content Distribution Network (CDN). Cloudflare not only uses a dynamic IP address, but also hosts numerous other legitimate services (obviously). So, enforcing the ban would prove to be rather difficult and it would require Cloudflare to cooperate in this situation.
Apparently, that is exactly what Cloudflare did. In response to the story, Cloudflare said that it would be isolating the IP addresses and assisting in the ban.
More recently, however, it appears that Musk has decided to cave to Brazil’s demands. From TechDirt:
Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won.
After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian news org Folha reports that ExTwitter has (1) rehired a law firm in Brazil (though hasn’t yet designated a “legal representative” for the purpose of being a potential hostage) and (2) begun taking down accounts that it was ordered to remove (translated via Google Translate):
X (formerly Twitter) began complying with court orders from the Federal Supreme Court (STF) on Wednesday night (18) and took down accounts that Minister Alexandre de Moraes ordered to be suspended.
This week, the company rehired the Pinheiro Neto law firm to represent it before the Court. The firm had been dismissed last week. The STF says it will only recognize the new lawyers after X appoints a legal representative in the country.
This all comes right after the mess where ExTwitter switched its CDN provider, leading to the site briefly becoming available again in Brazil. According to Bloomberg, de Moraes appeared none too pleased about this and ordered another fine on the company:
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has been sparring with Musk for months, ordered a daily fine of 5 million reais ($922,250) against the social media site and accused it of attempting to “disobey” judicial orders.
An order published Thursday instructs the nation’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, to ban X access through network providers such as Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno, which were “created to circumvent the judicial decision to block the platform in national territory.”
So, it appears all that talk about supporting “free speech” (whatever that means inside Musk’s head) was just that, just talk. This whole sorry affair has shades of the previous Musk screw up we covered. As you might recall, Elon Musk sued advertisers for the crime of failing to advertise on his platform. This after basically telling those advertisers years earlier to fuck off. The advertisers in question followed his advice and fucked off. Somewhere along the line, the realization seemingly set in that Musk needs revenues from advertisers, so to cover up his obvious screw up, he sued the advertisers in what is arguably the most ridiculous lawsuit Musk had filed to date.
You can almost see the same situation here. It’s easy to imagine Musk saying that he doesn’t care about one stupid little country banning his platform. Somewhere along the line, however, Musk realized he needed those users to help prop up his failing platform. So, he finally came back to the Brazilian legal system, grovelling and begging for forgiveness. It’s that’s what ultimately happened, it would garner precisely zero surprise from me.
Either way, you can add this to the long list of screw ups Musk has done during his tenure as owner of X/Twitter. Given his long history of doing stupid things all the time, this likely won’t be the last screw up we ever hear from him.
This is a genuine victory for Brazil and democracy. I’m glad that Musk and Twitter are going to be blocking/banning the accounts of people who are responsible for helping to foment and incite a coup attempt.
Recently, various scholars and writers signed a letter against Twitter and its actions. The letter is titled “Against Big Tech’s Attack on Digital Sovereignties”. A wide array of professors and doctors have signed it, including Cory Doctorow. It is well worth a read.