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 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, an 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”, threatened to unban everyone involved who had been previously banned before he took over X and called 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 of August (tomorrow, at the time I’m writing this) 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 consequences?
To sum it up… X is very likely 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, Elon Musk is dying on the hill of “protecting the free speech” of far-right criminals (which is not very surprising since most of his friends are far-right shitheads too) and the social media website he was forced to buy in order to not be charged with market manipulation that he has been steadily fucking to shit ever since is going to lose around 21 million users overnight. Masterful gambit, sir!
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