A panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court upheld last week's decision to completely block the social network X (formerly Twitter), owned by Elon Musk, UNN reports with reference to the BBC.
Details
The blocking of the network was approved by all members of the board, but three of them said that the decision could be reconsidered if network X complied with the authorities' demands.
Platform X was blocked throughout Brazil early Saturday morning. At that moment, the deadline for the company to appoint a new lawyer to represent it in its dispute with the government expired.
The blocking was the culmination of a confrontation between Supreme Court Justice Alessandri di Morais and X owner Elon Musk. Their dispute began in April, when the court ordered the platform's administration to freeze dozens of accounts that allegedly spread disinformation.
Otherwise, the company's representative in Brazil was threatened with arrest, according to Network X.
The company closed its representative office in the country and said it would not submit to what it called censorship. Musk called the judge a tyrant and a dictator and threatened to reactivate all suspended accounts.
On August 30, Morais ruled to block the network and then sent the matter to a five-member panel of the Supreme Court.
One of the Supreme Court's judges, Flavio Dino, said that "freedom of expression is closely linked to the obligation to bear responsibility for it." "The former cannot exist without the latter, and vice versa," he emphasized.
Reacting to the first decision to ban X, Musk said: "Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy, and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.
The court decision obliges app stores, including Apple and Google, to remove X within five days and block access to the platform for both iOS and Android devices.
Addendum
As Reuters reminds us, citing the Statista website, Brazil is the sixth largest market in the world for the X network. As of April, the platform had about 21.5 million users in the country.