The funniest thing about this situation is that Elon Musk is so pissed off at not getting to do something illegal and get away with it by being a billionaire for once in his life that he has been -and I’m 100% serious here- making photo edits of our Supreme Court minister dressed as fucking Voldemort. Literal little kid taping a picture of someone they don’t like to a dartboard kind of behavior.
Brazilian Supreme Court: Hey, uh. Just letting you know that what you’re doing is a crass violation of Brazilian law and if you don’t remedy it on the next 24h we’ll shut your website down in Brazil.
Elon Musk:
Sorry, I just looked it up and it turns out I got it slightly wrong: Elon Musk didn't photoshop a picture of Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court minister into Voldemort. Pretty silly of me to think someone like him would put in the effort to actually edit a picture himself.
What ACTUALLY happened was that Elon Musk first compared Alexandre de Moraes to Voldemort, then posted an Al generated image of him behind bars and told him to "mark his words because it'll happen for real someday", then posted another Al generated picture of him as a roll of toilet paper and then, finally, posted a picture of him photoshopped into a Sith Lord that he claimed had been generated by that shitty Grok Al thing they came up with, just to eventually admit that it was actually some random edit someone else had made he took from Google Images because "Al made him look too badass". In this order.
Well, it’s a little bit of a convoluted story, but remember the US capitol invasion by Trump Supporters in January 2021? Brazil was being governed by our own far-right asshole back then as well, Jair Bolsonaro. When he was running for president, his political party orchestrated a large misinformation campaign, speeding fear mongering rumors about the left through social media and instant messaging apps to try and sway people into voting for them. A bunch of these rumors were, unsurprisingly, about how “the left is teaching your kids to be gay in school.” Even after he Bolsonaro was elected, there still were lots of people and communities in these platforms dedicated to spreading rumors in his favor.
Bolsonaro, however, did such a shitty job handling the COVID pandemic and was responsible for (and very indifferent about) so many people losing their lives that it irreversibly soured his popularity. As a result, he wasn’t reelected in 2022 and lost to Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist party candidate. So, in January 2023, two days after the anniversary of the US capitol invasion, Bolsonaro’s remaining supporters were called to arms through these misinformation spreading platforms to storm Brazil’s Supreme Court building, the congress building and the presidential palace to try and stage a coup and reinstate Bolsonaro as president. They weren’t successful, thankfully, but they caused a lot of damage to the buildings and hurt people in the process.
Ever since this happened, the Brazilian supreme court has been trying to properly identify and bring every person responsible for this attack to justice, including the people who were behind the scenes spreading rumors and organizing the whole thing. So it was ruled that the social media and messaging apps that were used to spread misinformation and organize this attempted coup should hand the information they had about these people over so they could be properly investigated and prosecuted, and ban them from using their services. Not doing so was, by very definition, obstruction of Brazilian justice and therefore a criminal act. Twitter, at the time not ran by a conservative dipshit, was cooperative at first.
Enter Elon Musk, known conservative dipshit, who takes over Twitter, changes it to X and refuses to cooperate with the investigation, saying that it is a “violation of the free speech of the accused”. Upon being told by our Supreme Court minister, Alexandre de Moraes, that he was breaking Brazilian law, he got all pissy, ordered all of the X offices in Brazil to be closed down, accused Alexandre de Moraes of “just wanting his political opponents to be silenced”, threatening to unban everyone involved who had been previously banned before he took over X and calling him “not even a real minister because he wasn’t elected” Yeah, no shit, dumbass. Ministers get appointed by the president over here.
Anyway, due to being a dumbass, Musk didn’t realize that closing down X’s offices in Brazil wouldn’t really change the fact that he was still breaking Brazilian law and, in fact, was just more obstruction of justice. So, Alexandre de Moraes gave him until the 31st to send or appoint a new legal representative for X in Brazil to handle the court proceedings or X would be shut down in all of Brazil until he did. That’s when Musk started the Voldemort shit and made it clear he would NOT do that and saying that Alexandre de Moraes should be the one sent to jail for… I don’t even know. Wanting people who committed crimes to face the consequences of it?
To sum it up… X is almost definitely going to close down indefinitely in Brazil because Elon Musk can’t stop himself from acting like a petulant toddler whenever he’s told to do something he doesn’t want, is dying on the hill of “protecting the of free speech” of far-right criminals and the social media website he was forced to buy in order to not be charged of market manipulation that he has been steadily fucking to shit ever since is going to lose around 21 million users overnight. Masterful gambit, sir!
