Musk is in Brazil and has backed himself into a corner
The Brazilian High Court Case in the Age of the Superior Electoral Court: How Starlink and Musk fought to end the TSE blockade
Unlike countries like Russia, Iran, and China, the Brazilian government does not have a technical infrastructure to restrict access to websites or internet platforms.
VPN usage has surged in Brazil this week under the ban as a way around ISP attempts to block X, but the court order ban includes a provision stating people could be charged a fine of 50,000 reais—around $8,900—per day for using circumvention tools like VPNs.
Mobile apps like X’s Android and iOS apps don’t rely on DNS, though, so DNS filtering alone is not enough to block all connections to a web platform. Some Brazilian ISPs seem to also be using IP address “sinkholing”—redirecting online traffic to a different server than the users intended to visit—as a way to send traffic meant for X into the abyss.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference reported that a similar progression played out when Brazil’s Federal Police obtained a court order in April 2023 for ISPs to block the communication platform Telegram because it would not fully share information about users involved in neo-Nazi group chats. The Telegram service was blocking immediately by some large ISPs. “However, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. This suggests lack of coordination between providers, and that each provider implemented the block autonomously.
Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an ongoing conflict between Musk and the country’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE)–a special court run by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that issued take down orders on content that it considers to be a threat to the integrity of its elections. Musk and X refused to comply, allowing accounts that were accused of spreading hate speech and disinformation to remain on the platform, a move that eventually triggered the ban.
Starlink was also caught in the crosshairs. The assets of the other company were seized by the court because they were part of the same economic group that Musk’s other company was in. Starlink back away from initial resistance and said it would comply. Experts who spoke to WIRED said that Musk has overplayed his hand.
The WIRED story reported how employees scrambled in the days before the presidential elections in Brazil to avoid a legal crisis when Musk took over. The company was served a consent decree from the judiciary, warning it that if it didn’t keep its promises to keep safeguards around the elections in place, it risked being blocked. At the time, the country’s then-President, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters allegedly spread disinformation about the security of the country’s elections to cast doubt on the results. The company had promised a reverse of its content moderation policies, which had allowed hate speech and mis- and misinformation to flow freely on the platform.
Meanwhile, Musk has continued to antagonize the court. Last week, he posted a seemingly AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars (which was later deleted), with the accompanying text alleging, “One day, Alexandre, this picture of you in prison will be real,” and another comparing him to the Harry Potter villain Voldemort.
Bruna, who is a researcher and activist with the civil society coalition Coalizo Direitos na Rede in Brazil, claims that he has been scheming with the image of Moraes since April. “He was fully aware and he knew what the consequences would be.”
Twitter Suspense Announced: Elon Musk Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm to Overcome the Mistakes in Twitter
Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third largest market and reportedly over 40 million users. He seems to have backed himself into a corner despite his online statements.
X appears to be working with a well-known Republican consulting group, seemingly to handle the messaging around the social media platform’s suspension in Brazil.
On Thursday, the company head of global affairs Nick Pickles announced that he was quitting, and investors stated that their investments in the company were performing substantially worse than they had predicted.
The auto response to the press email returned the poop symbol. More recently, the auto-response says “Busy now, please check back later.”
Journalists rarely get a reply from the press team when they contact them, and an email response from Targeted Victory on behalf of X is notable. When he took over the helm of the company, Musk planned on laying off a large number of employees. That move not only included the vast majority of the platform’s trust and safety team, the people who keep hate speech and disinformation off the platform, but also the company’s communications team.
The group has had tech companies work with them. The Washington Post told of a campaign that Meta had hired to make public opinion against TikTok less favorable. The Chinese company ByteDance owns the app, which is being framed by the campaign as a threat to Americans privacy and the mental health of teens and children.
Source: X Is Working With a GOP Consulting Firm
Suspension of the Targeted Victory Platform in Brazil: Reply to a Reply from the Brazilian Consultative Group WIRED
In his emailed reply, Abboud referred WIRED to a company statement from X about the suspension of the platform in Brazil, and said to reach out with further questions.
Targeted Victory has had contracts with several Republican campaigns and political action committees (PACs) this election season to the tune of over $75 million, according to OpenSecrets. The Republican National Committee spent $11,128,739 on the firm in a little over two years.
When WIRED emailed X for comment about the rapidly evolving situation in Brazil, a reply came from Michael Abboud, the managing director of the conservative consulting and public relations firm, Targeted Victory. Abboud worked for the State Department in the last year of the Trump administration, and also as press secretary for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.