Elon Musk’s social network X (formerly Twitter) appears to be avoiding a showdown with Brazil’s Supreme Court.
The New York Times reports on new court documents in which the company’s lawyers argue that X complied with the court order: deleting the designated accounts, paying the fine and naming a new official representative in the country.
The Supreme Court reportedly responded in its own filing that X had not been provided with the proper documentation and had been given five days to do so.
The dispute began when Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes opened an investigation into election disinformation. Moraes ordered the company to block certain accounts, and X at one point said it would comply, but instead shut down its operations in Brazil.
Moraes then threatened to ban the service and fine anyone who tried to use a VPN to bypass the ban. X came back online in Brazil earlier this week, but Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch that the timing of the company’s recent switch to Cloudflare’s infrastructure was simply “coincidental.”
During the ban, Brazilian users looked for social media alternatives, resulting in a sharp increase in the number of users on Bluesky and Tumblr.
X did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, and neither Musk nor X’s Global Government Affairs account appeared to comment on the news. (Both accounts have criticized Moraes’ decision in the past.) On Wednesday, X said it would “continue our efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very quickly for the Brazilian people.”
