X agrees to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, shells out fines and takes down user accounts that the court had ordered to remove

X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, has capitulated in its fight with the Brazilian judiciary, after complying with court orders that had blocked Brazilian users from accessing X. The platform acceded to one of the main demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the nation. It also timidly paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to remove on the basis that they threatened the nation’s democracy, the New York Times reported. Signs of eventual capitulation of X had already become quite evident when after X came back online fleetingly on September 18, in a dramatic shift in tone from just weeks earlier the social media company said it was absolutely committed to working with the Brazilian government to make the site available again. Nevertheless, the battle is not quite over. The supreme court said that X had not filed the proper documentation informing that it had appointed Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its Brazilian representative. It gave the social media company five days to present documents validating her appointment.

Musk has been at odds with supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes since April after he ordered X to take down over 100 social media accounts that had been questioning whether the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro had really lost the 2022 election. By mid-August, Musk had shuttered X’s offices in Brazil, leaving it deprived of a legal representative in the nation, a legal requirement for companies to operate there. Moraes’ stern response was the order to Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block access to X. Musk had employed his platform to attack Moraes, describing him as an “evil tyrant” among other things.

Last week X resurfaced in Brazil after a software update that it said had been an “inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users”. But Moraes stated it had been “wilful, illegal and persistent”, and imposed a R$5m fine (£680,000) on X, adding to R$18.3m (£2.5m) that had already been levied. Musk has objected vehemently to legal orders to remove some posts and accounts in Brazil and Australia, claiming he was a champion of free speech, even though he has been far less vocal about removing content in nations such as Turkey and India. Brazil’s population of 200 million people makes it an alluring market for social media companies.