Supreme Court judge says X must pay new fine for temporarily evading IP blocks before service can resume in Brazil
Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has added a new fine for social media platform X to pay before it can be reinstated in the country, after the Elon Musk-owned firm made concessions to allow the service to resume fuctioning.
In a ruling de Moraes said X, formerly Twitter, must pay a new fine of 10 million reais ($1.84m, £1.4m) for what he called a move to evade blocks on X in Brazil.
After the service was banned in Brazil in late August, X briefly became available again as it was routed through the servers of media delivery platform Cloudflare.
X said it changed its servers for clients in Latin America and that this inadvertently brought the platform back online in Brazil.
New fine
De Moraes said the new fine and previous fines of 18.3m reais must be paid before X can be reinstated.
The judge said the court can use resources previously frozen from X and satellite broadband firm Starlink to pay the fines, but to do so Starlink must drop its pending appeal against the funds freeze.
Starlink is owned by SpaceX, which like X is controlled by Musk.
X is likely to pay all the fines but may consider challenging the new 10m reais fine, Reuters reported, citing an unnamed source.
The social media company last month formally requested the court to allow it to resume service in Brazil after providing proof it had complied with previous orders, including appointing lawyer Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its legal representative and blocking nine accounts that are under investigation in a hate speech and misinformation probe.
In de Moraes’ ruling he accepted the appointment of de Oliveira as X’s legal representative, but fined her 300,000 reais for not complying with other decisions he made in August.
Legal row
Musk said on 28 August he was removing all staff in Brazil, saying de Moraes had threatened X’s legal representative with arrest.
The lack of a legal representative was the immediate trigger for the court to suspend X’s availability in Brazil.
Brazil is a key market for X, with more than 20 million users in a highly online country.
X said in a statement last week it is “committed to protecting free speech within the boundaries of the law and we recognise and respect the sovereignty of the countries in which we operate”.
It said it would “continue to defend freedom of expression and due process of law through legal processes”.
Musk previously called de Moraes a “dictator” and said his orders were “illegal”.
