Brazil suspends social media platform X | BBC News

next to South America an ex formerly known as Twitter has been banned in Brazil the ruling came after the platform missed a deadline to name a new legal representative there a Supreme Court judge ordered the immediate and complete suspension of the social media platform until this complies with all court orders and pays existing fines X removed its legal representative from Brazil claimed the judge had threatened her with arrest Elon Musk says free speech is the bre Rock of democracy and an unelected suda judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes technology comist for the

Washington Post Taylor Loren explains how this ruling came about this has been a monthlong battle um it basically stems from Elon refusing to uh take down content related to uh Brazil's attempted Insurrection um back in 2022 um and then he was ordered to you know have a lawyer you have to in under Brazilian law have a legal representative in the country he was given 24 hours to appoint a legal representative in the country or the platform would be banned he refused to do that so he's he's kind of on this had this sort of a

showdown um he could have prevented this ban uh and he chose not to and of course a lot of us know X we use x as well how significant is this decision for the social media platform this is an incredibly significant moment for X I mean Brazil is one of the top user one of the top most used countries uh we've got 21.5 million monthly users in Brazil Alone um Brazil also plays a really crucial part of sort of Pop Culture standom um you saw a lot of big celebrity accounts are located in Brazil uh

journalists um you know big names that people follow for news and information so cutting this off uh really with very short notice uh is going to have a significant effect yes and the question is what does it mean for users in Brazil I was just reading that anyone who tries to access X illegally there could be find $99,000 a day so how will it impact people in Brazil yeah they've said that people using uh VPN to essentially try and circumvent this van will be fined um this is kind of scary precedent to set um but

you know they really want to ensure that it's cut off um users of that I spoke to today of that run Big Stan accounts celebrity focused accounts were saying that they're trying to push people onto other platforms a lot of them are trying to exchange contact information and say goodbye um a bunch of these accounts are monetized so you have people relying on the monetization that they're generating from these big Twitter accounts to pay their rent to put food on the table and so for that to go away overnight because Elon Musk you know just

decided sort of arbitrarily not to comply with this stuff uh is quite is quite major that was Taylor Loren of the Washington Post there