Elon Musk announced the closure of X operations in Brazil on Saturday, saying that Brazil's Alexandre de Moraes was threatening the arrest of X's legal representation and was requiring the social media company to break international law
Musk posted, "Due to demands by 'Justice' Alexandre in Brazil that would require us to break (in secret) Brazilian, Argentinian, American and international law, X has no choice but to close our local operations in Brazil. He is an utter disgrace to justice."
The Global Government Affairs page of X stated that on Friday, "Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders. He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions."
"Despite our numerous appeals to the Supreme Court not being heard, the Brazilian public not being informed about these orders and our Brazilian staff having no responsibility or control over whether content is blocked on our platform, Moraes has chosen to threaten our staff in Brazil rather than respect the law or due process. As a result, to protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately," the statement added.
The decision comes after the left-wing judge has had multiple legal spats with Musk over the presence of the social media platform in the country, attempting to censor speech on the platform. Musk said the decision to close X's local operations in Brazil was difficult, however, he noted that if X had agreed to the "(illegal) secret censorship" deal that X was offered, that "there was no way we [X] could explain our actions without being ashamed."
Michael Shellenberger reported back in April that documents in the Twitter files "show that Moraes has violated the Brazilian Constitution" in his censorship battle against X.
"Moraes illegally demanded that Twitter reveal private information about Twitter users who used hashtags he considered inappropriate. He demanded access to Twitter's internal data, violating the platform's policy. He censored, on his own initiative and without any respect for due process, posts on Twitter by parliamentarians from the Brazilian Congress. And Moraes tried to turn Twitter's content moderation policies into a weapon against supporters of then-president Jair Bolsonaro," Schellenberger added at the time.
