Brazil imposes fine on Musk’s X after service returns

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Brazil’s Supreme Court will impose a fine of about $1mn per day on Elon Musk’s X and his satellite internet provider Starlink after service to the social media platform was temporarily restored in spite of a court-ordered ban.

The app became partially accessible on Wednesday after the company switched third-party cloud providers to Cloudflare, in what some Brazilian officials believe was a technical manoeuvre to deliberately skirt the ban in Latin America’s largest nation.

This enabled some users to reach X without the use of a virtual private network, or VPN, which Brazil’s supreme court prohibited for the purposes of viewing the social media platform.

X earlier said it had changed network providers after its infrastructure for providing services across Latin America was no longer accessible to its staff. That update had caused “an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”, they said.

“While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil,” the company added. 

However, the country’s communications regulator Anatel accused X of seeking to deliberately disobey a supreme court ruling at the end of August that ordered its nationwide blackout.

With the platform still accessible on Thursday morning, supreme justice Alexandre de Moraes issued a summons notice to X and demanded the immediate suspension of its use of the new servers.

X must “immediately suspend the use of its new accesses through the CDN Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno servers and other similar ones, created to circumvent the court decision to block the platform in national territory, under penalty of a daily fine of R$5mn,” which is equal to almost $1mn, the summons read.

The daily fine counts from today, the court said. Starlink is held jointly responsible for payment of the penalties.

X’s comeback highlights the technical difficulties that can face public authorities that seek to block certain websites.

X was suspended in Brazil, where it has more than 20mn users, by a controversial order from the supreme court on August 31 after it refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, a requirement under domestic law.

It marked a dramatic escalation between Musk and Moraes after the billionaire entrepreneur publicly criticised judicial requests to remove some accounts apparently linked to far-right individuals and groups suspected of spreading misinformation. Musk also shut the company’s office in the country in protest at the orders. 

Moraes has presided over a sweeping crackdown on digital disinformation in the South American country. Supporters say it has protected democracy, but Brazil’s rightwing opposition has accused the judge of censorship.

Abrint, the Brazilian Association of Internet and Telecommunications Providers, said the change of service providers by X to Cloudflare “makes blocking the application much more complicated”.

“Unlike the previous system, which used specific and blockable IPs, the new system uses dynamic IPs that change constantly. Many of these IPs are shared with other legitimate services, such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services,” Abrint said.

“Blocking Cloudflare would mean blocking not only X, but also a number of other services that rely on this infrastructure, which could negatively affect the internet as a whole.”

Cloudflare and Brazil’s communications regulator declined to comment.