X is facing a deadline to put a face to its presence in Brazil before the nation’s top court bans the platform from the second most-populous country in the Americas.
The Supreme Federal Court posted an order at 8:31 p.m. local time Wednesday night and on X ordering the service to name a legal representative in Brazil within 24 hours, “under penalty of suspension of activities in Brazil.”
The order signed by Alexandre de Moraes, one of the court’s 11 judges, comes after X announced that it would shut down operations in Brazil instead of complying with an order by de Moraes to suspend accounts allegedly posting disinformation to undermine Brazil’s democracy.
Since April, the judge has led an inquiry into the role the former Twitter may have played in helping “digital militias” plot the January 2023 insurrection in Brasilia in support of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
The rioters who stormed the capital’s presidential, legislative, and judiciary buildings sought to overturn Bolsonaro’s defeat in the October 2022 election by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Many hoped the military would join their efforts and stage a coup–as Brazil’s armed forces did in 1964 before embarking on 21 years of military dictatorship rife with extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, and execution.
The January 2023 insurrection has been widely compared to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol–except that in Brazil, courts and other government bodies have not bent over backwards to shield Bolsonaro from accountability. In June 2023, the Supreme Federal Court banned the former president from running for office until 2030.
(In April, President Lula, as he’s commonly known, became one of few heads of state to set up shop on the Twitter alternative Bluesky, where he posts under the same “lulaoficial” handle he uses on X.)
This is not the first time Brazilian authorities have threatened a ban on a social platform for noncompliance. In March 2022, de Moraes ordered Telegram to shut down in the country for failing to meet legal obligations to combat disinformation; Telegram founder Pavel Durov, now facing a series of criminal charges in France, blamed that on staffers overlooking emails from Brazilian officials, and the shutdown ended after two days.
In January 2023, a court imposed another brief shutdown of Telegram for failing to disclose information on alleged neo-Nazi activity on the platform.
Musk, however, has taken this treatment more personally, criticizing de Moraes in increasingly hostile terms that Bolsonaro supporters have cheered. Meanwhile, Musk has walked away from X’s anti-disinformation efforts, invited such misinformation magnets as disgraced conspiracy liar Alex Jones back on X, and has shared fake images himself.
Musk took the news as he does most criticism: by quote-sharing supportive posts from his chorus of superfans with opinions like “This ‘judge’ has repeatedly broken the laws he has sworn to uphold,” and sharing an altered image of de Moraes wielding lightsabers “as if Voldemort and a Sith Lord had a baby and he became a judge in Brazil.”
And Musk posted another generated image of de Moraes behind bars, tagged with the handle from which the judge hasn’t posted anything since Jan. 11, under the text “One day, @Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real. Mark my words.”
