Sunday, September 1

Brazil has officially banned X as part of a crackdown on disinformation spread online, which will heavily impact local users across the country.

Brazil has been working to stop disinformation online recently, one part of which included the ordered suspension of multiple X accounts in April. However, Executive Chairman Elon Musk reactivated them soon after, citing 'free speech' and claiming that the judge was shutting the accounts down for 'political purposes.' X stated online that they were facing charges of $20,000 for every day that they kept the accounts up, and they later changed gears and announced that they would comply with the request. However, it never happened.

As a response, the Brazilian government opened up an investigation onto Musk's actions, with Federal Judge Alexandre de Moraes leading the case. From the political side of the incident, Musk accused Moraes of being left-wing, as the accounts that were forced to close were related to right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro and his attempted coup on the government back on January 8, as well as anti-democratic. Judge Moraes once again stated that while an investigation into Bolsonaro's actions is ongoing, the accounts must be continually blocked, but X still refused to comply. Then, X immediately shut down all operations in Brazil and withdrew all employees from the country. As another violation, Moraes was forced to take more severe action against the company-- Brazilian law requires for a company to have a legal office in the country. He informed X that if they did not choose a new legal representative within 24 hours, Brazilian authorities would arrest the company's current Brazilian legal representative and block access to the social media network.

Soon after, Moraes established that his deadline had not been met, and he announced a complete suspension of X's services in Brazil until they comply with the court's orders and pay the required fines. X has confirmed that they will not follow the orders or pay the fines, meaning that the ban will continue. Companies like Apple and Google have been given five days to remove X from their Brazilian app stores and block the use of the app on all devices, and any citizen or business found to be using X through a virtual private network, or VPN, will be charged R$50,000 Brazilian reais (around $8,900 USD). X, formerly known as Twitter, has over 40 million monthly users in Brazil, which is over one-fifth of the country's population, and this will surely be a big change to their daily lives. Many former users reported feeling disconnected from the world after the ban of the social media network, leading millions of people to join Bluesky, a similar network based in the United States-- they have been reporting record user levels for the last few days.

Moraes also froze the Brazilian bank accounts of satellite company Starlink, which will definitely affect the public. Owned by Musk's SpaceX, Starlink provides satellite-powered internet services to over 250,000 people across Brazil, many of which are in remote locations in the Amazon rainforest which have no cell towers. Starlink argued that they have no part in the case against X and appealed the decision, but the court denied it, keeping their local accounts frozen.

This isn't the first time X has been faced with disinformation challenges, though. In fact, the European Union (EU) recently slammed the social media app for not regulating the large amount of fake news circulating online about the Israel-Hamas War, and Elon Musk got into a serious battle against United Kingdom Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. While X usually takes down content that they are requested to remove by governments, Elon Musk has made himself a strong advocate of free speech and, in this case, has chosen to ignore Brazil's request-- resulting in a complete ban of the app across the country.

Also, this isn't the first time Brazil has done something like this to social media networks. WhatsApp was banned three times within eight months in 2015 and 2016 for failing to follow police requests for certain user data, and Telegram was threatened with a ban in 2022 for refusing to block several accounts. Then, it was officially banned for two days in 2023 for not complying with orders to provide data on multiple neo-Nazi groups, who used the app to plan attacks on schools. The app was eventually allowed again, as it was deemed impossible to retrieve that data after an appeal.

Fact of the Day (Reader's Digest): Visit to the Seaside was the world's first movie made in color.

Quote of the Day (Gracious Quotes): Instead of “sink or swim,” we give people swim lessons — and even let them wear floaties if they need them. (Jeff Lawson)

Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Byzantine (adj)- Something described as byzantine (or Byzantine) is very complicated, secret, and hard to understand. In its most literal (and always capitalized) sense, Byzantine describes that which is "of, relating to, or characteristic of the ancient city of Byzantium."

In a Sentence: The company's byzantine accounting practices have gotten it into trouble with the government.