There’s a corner in Brazil where Musk is attempting to navigate
Starlink and the X ban: how ISPs and the Brazilian Internet have complied after a court-ordered social network ban
With Brazil’s population of 215 million people, its mature democracy, its sprawling land mass, and more than 20,000 internet service providers, blocking a web platform in the South American nation isn’t straightforward. And while the biggest ISPs have implemented the ban, many are still scrambling to comply with the order, leaving a patchwork of access to the site.
A court order ban this week in Brazil which included a provision stating that people could be fined up to $8, 900 per day for circumventing the ban, led to a significant increase in the use of virtual private networks.
The X’s mobile apps don’t rely on the internet so they aren’t able to block all connections to a web platform. The Brazilian ISPs seem to be doing something calledsinkholing, which means redirecting online traffic to a different server than the users intended to visit.
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. Some large ISPs began blocking Telegram immediately. “However, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. The lack of coordination between providers suggests that each ISPs implemented the block autonomously.
The social network X has largely disappeared in Brazil since Saturday, after the Supreme Court ordered all internet and mobile service providers to block it. The court order was issued by a judge after a months-long dispute between him and Musk over the company’s policies.
Starlink was also in the crosshairs. The court froze the assets of Musk’s other company, saying that it was part of the same “economic group” as X given its ownership, for possible use to pay off fines owed by X. When the block came into effect Monday, Starlink allowed its customers—over 250,000 people, according to the company— to circumvent the X ban by using its satellite internet connection. After initial resistance, Starlink backed down and agreed to comply. The experts who spoke to WIRED say that it’s becoming more apparent that Musk has overplayed his hand.
WIRED reported on how employees scrambled to avoid a legal crisis when Musk took over, just days before Brazil’s presidential runoffs. 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. The president and his supporters supposedly spread fake information about the elections security to try to cast doubt on the results. Musk promised that he would roll back the company’s existing moderation policies and let hate speech and misinformation freely flow 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.
“Ever since April, he has been toying with the image of Moraes, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and escalated in a problematic way,” alleges Bruna Santos, a researcher and activist with the civil society coalition Coalizão Direitos na Rede in Brazil. He knew what would happen and he was well aware of it.
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