SAO PAULO – Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes said on Friday that Elon Musk’s Added conditions for restarting the service.
Mr. de Moraes said in his ruling that Mr. He said there is. X has been blocked in Brazil for nearly a month. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after months of sparring with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.
Earlier this month, Mr. De Moraes ordered that Starlink’s assets be used to cover X’s fines, which have already exceeded $3 million. The Brazilian judge has argued that the companies are part of the same economic group, but some legal experts have questioned the validity of that claim.
His new sentence also includes a fine of 10 million Brazilian reals ($1.84 million). Experts who examined X’s IP addresses, a numerical designation that identifies a site’s location on the Internet, said the company was temporarily routing users through servers of the content distribution network Cloudflare.
Company X said it inadvertently brought its social media network back online in Brazil as it changed its servers to serve customers in Latin America.
A source familiar with the judge’s ruling told The Associated Press that both Mr. de Moraes’ symptoms are new. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. de Moraes also accepted Mr. . The company’s lack of legal representation in the country led to his decision to suspend his social media channels on August 30th.
The company has been at loggerheads with Mr. de Moraes since the beginning of this year over free speech, far-right-linked accounts and misinformation on the platform, claiming it is the victim of censorship.
Mr. Musk and his supporters have criticized Mr. de Moraes as an authoritarian and censored his rulings, which they have repeatedly supported, and which have been used by Mr. This also includes suspension. On August 28, Company X announced that all remaining Brazilian employees in the country would be fired “with immediate effect” after Mr. de Moraes threatened to arrest his legal representatives in the country.
The company has reversed course in recent days. On Thursday, X told Mr. de Moraes that it had complied with all decisions and called for a restart in Brazil, according to a person familiar with the decision, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly. submitted a document to do so.
X was blocked in the highly online country of 213 million people. The country is one of X’s biggest markets, with more than 20 million users. Brazil has stricter speech rules than the United States.
“We are committed to protecting free speech within the limits of the law, and we recognize and respect the sovereignty of the countries in which we operate,” X said in a statement Thursday.
“We believe that Brazilian citizens’ access to I will defend it.”
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Associated Press writer David Biller reported from Rio de Janeiro.
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