The IT Nerd

You might recall that Elon Musk has been in a bit of a fight with Brazilian authorities over the fact that he won’t ban certain content within the country. That led to Twitter being banned in the country. Now Elon has been pretty defiant about this. And even going as far as antagonizing the Brazilian officials who were behind the Twitter ban. But that might be changing:

After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk’s social network, X, has capitulated. In a court filing on Friday night, the company’s lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site.

The decision was a surprise move by Mr. Musk, who owns and controls X, after he said he had refused to obey what he called illegal orders to censor voices on his social network. Mr. Musk had dismissed local employees and refused to pay fines. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil last month.

Now, X’s lawyers said the company had done exactly what Mr. Musk vowed not to: take down accounts that a Brazilian justice ordered removed because the judge said they threatened Brazil’s democracy. X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country, the lawyers said.

Brazil’s Supreme Court confirmed X’s moves in a filing on Saturday, but said the company had not filed the proper paperwork. It gave X five days to send further documentation.

Now why would Elon fold up like a cheap suit? The fines that he was dealing with may be hurting him. Or it might be that the fact that Brazilians were signing up for Bluesky and Tumblr in record numbers was something that he could not ignore. But I am going to put this out there. This isn’t over. I think that Elon may comply for a short amount of time. But he’ll go back to playing FAAFO with Brazil. I say that because Elon isn’t an honest broker and I have no reason to believe that he’s being honest now. Thus if I were the Brazilians, I would keep that in mind before considering any lifting of the ban on Twitter.

This entry was posted on September 21, 2024 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.