Brazil re-secures "relaxation destination" status by issuing country-wide Twitter ban

Elon Musk’s ongoing war on reality has now escalated to the “fighting with whole, entire countries” stage: Having recently gotten into a battle with Brazil’s supreme court, Musk is now facing an order for his Twitter service (which pod people, tech journalists, and the like refer to as X) to be banned in the entire country. Per The Guardian, authorities have issued orders to the country’s various internet service providers to block access to the social media site, as well as instituting hefty fines for anyone using a VPN to access the service.

If we’re being honest here, we’re torn: On the one hand, the idea of a national government cutting its people off from communication tools always gets our hackles up a bit. On the other, well: God damn that sounds relaxing, huh?

Musk’s conflict with Brazil dates back to April, when the court ordered Twitter to block the accounts of members of what it called “digital militias” who vocally supported former president Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to retain power in the wake of his loss in the country’s 2022 election (which led to the storming of federal buildings in the country in January of 2023). Musk refused, calling the efforts censorship, and since then, relations have only soured further. The breaking point came two weeks ago, when the court—and specifically, Justice Alexandre de Moraes—ordered Musk to appoint a new legal representative in Brazil, a requirement for doing business in the country. Musk refused, and, thus: Ban.

Musk, whose primary duties, as far as we can tell, seem to be largely made up of passing along the most uncle-coded shit you’d see on Facebook onto the social media company he owns, took brief breaks from complaining about American politics today to complain about this, too, writing that, “The oppressive regime in Brazil is so afraid of the people learning the truth that they will bankrupt anyone who tries.” He also made several 1984 references, and we would actually love to see a betting pool on whether Elon Musk has ever actually read 1984, but that is, obviously, neither here nor there.

All of this is complicated by the fact that Starlink, the satellite internet company that generally pops up high on rankings of Musk’s least-hated business ventures, is also being affected by the rulings, with its accounts in Brazil frozen. Starlink is one of the biggest internet providers in the Amazon region, having made aggressive pushes into countries like Brazil over the last two years; the company has pledged to keep providing its services to Brazilian users despite being unable to get money from them at the moment, but time will tell on how long that will last.