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The story of X in Brazil has taken another surprising turn: Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, appears to have backed down. To recap: Musk refused to take several steps ordered by Brazil’s Supreme Court, including removing certain accounts that the court said threatened Brazil’s democracy and naming a new formal representative in the country. The court responded by blocking X, leaving roughly twenty-two million Brazilian users unable to access the platform. As part of the blackout order, the court said that internet users who tried to circumvent the measure by using a virtual private network (VPN) could be fined nearly nine thousand dollars a day (which, as the New York Times notes, is more than most people in Brazil make per year). Musk furiously criticized the ban, but now appears to be complying with it, as the Times has reported. His sudden reversal may end a long-running battle with Alexandre de Moraes, the controversial justice behind the ban.
Moraes has become a polarizing figure in Brazil over the past three years due to his firm stance on combating online disinformation campaigns, particularly from the far right. X isn’t the only platform that has faced the slam of his hammer: in 2022, he threatened to block the messaging app Telegram, alleging that it had repeatedly refused to comply with requests to help fight disinformation in the lead-up to national elections. (Telegram eventually complied and remained online—though more on that in just a minute.) Later that year, Brazil’s electoral tribunal took things a step further, granting Moraes unilateral power to order tech companies to remove accounts and online posts in an effort to combat election-related disinformation. This move infuriated right-wing politicians, including former president Jair Bolsonaro, who accused Moraes of abusing his power. Moraes’s supporters, on the other hand, argue that he has been taking necessary steps in an extreme situation to protect Brazil’s democracy. Moraes himself has insisted that “freedom of expression is not freedom of aggression, it is not freedom to offend, nor to threaten.”
The dispute between Musk and Moraes gathered momentum in April, when the justice ordered the suspension of several accounts as part of an investigation into Bolsonaro’s refusal to recognize his election defeat in 2022. X’s global government affairs team said that the order was given, in its view, without proper explanation, adding, “We are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order, or on what grounds.” In a power play, Musk called out Moraes by name and declared that he would not comply with his orders regardless of the repercussions. “As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there,” Musk said in a post. “But principles matter more than profit.”
And yet the accounts Musk previously vowed not to suspend are now exactly that: suspended. Recently, “X also complied with the justice’s other demands, including paying fines and naming a new formal representative in the country,” according to the Times. Moraes said in a decision on Saturday that X has still “not duly met” all of his requirements for ending the ban. He gave the platform until today to present validating documents. (Reuters reported yesterday that X “will file documents requested by Brazil’s Supreme Court and ask by this Monday that service be restored in the country.”)
The reason behind X’s sudden decision to comply with the court’s orders is unclear. Neither Musk nor any representative of X has made a public statement on the matter—an eyebrow-raising silence, given Musk’s previous bold rhetoric around free speech. Regardless of the reason, rival social media platforms have been basking in the gap left by X in one of the world’s most online countries. Bluesky—an alternative to X founded by its former CEO, Jack Dorsey—registered two million new users in the four days following the suspension, according to the Financial Times. Even Tumblr, the microblogging social network whose popularity peaked a decade ago, saw a roughly 350 percent growth in users.
Whatever the reason, Musk isn’t the only tech titan bowing to regulatory pressure at the moment. Three weeks ago, Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France for refusing to cooperate with legal authorities regarding criminal activity on the app, including the sharing of content related to child sexual abuse and drug trafficking. Law enforcement agencies in various countries have voiced concerns for years over the app’s hands-off approach to content moderation, which has consequently made it a go-to platform for aspects of the criminal underworld and for those wishing to foment far-right terror attacks. Durov was released on bail (which was set at more than five million dollars) and is required to report to the police twice a week, according to The Guardian.
Now Durov says that his company is cracking down on illegal content. In a Telegram post on Monday, he informed his thirteen million subscribers that the platform is leveraging AI to remove “problematic content” that users could previously have found through its search feature. The IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate the app’s policies may also be shared with relevant authorities in response to what he describes as valid legal requests. “These measures should discourage criminals,” Durov wrote. “Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods.”
Separately, Instagram is rolling out changes that it says will make the app a safer space for children and teens. The new policies include automatically making the accounts of users sixteen and under private, limiting who can contact or tag teen accounts in posts, and automating sleep mode to mute notifications overnight. These new protocols come after years of warnings that social media platforms may be harming teens. (A recent survey by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt found that a third of Gen Z wishes that Instagram had never been invented.) Now, with the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act looming in Congress, Instagram is taking action—though critics say it’s too little, too late. Jim Steyer, an advocate for children’s digital well-being, told The Guardian: “This is basically another attempt to make a splashy announcement when the company’s feeling the heat politically, period.”
Platforms’ taking a step back after feeling the heat from regulators presents a new, slightly more hesitant approach, one that differs from Mark Zuckerberg’s notorious motto to “move fast and break things.” (The Times reported this week that Zuckerberg himself is “done with politics”—though it seems unlikely that politics is done with him.) These clashes come after a decade or so of platforms operating in a sort of no-man’s-land, where outside rules were often ignored, for better or worse. Brazil banning X is one of the biggest examples we’ve seen thus far of authorities putting their foot down and punishing tech giants with real-world consequences. With this seal broken, other nations may follow.
Other notable stories:
- Last night, Kamala Harris did her first solo interview on a major network since taking over from Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, focused on the economy. Harris also spoke this week with Wisconsin Public Radio and, per Semafor’s Max Tani, taped a forthcoming appearance on All the Smoke, a basketball podcast hosted by Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, both formerly of the Golden State Warriors. (We wrote about Harris’s evolving interview strategy, and the debate around it, on Monday.) Meanwhile, Univision announced that it will host separate town hall events with Harris and Donald Trump next month, with the two candidates set to field questions from undecided Hispanic voters. And Biden went on The View yesterday—the first time that a sitting president has appeared on the show live.
- ESPN’s Mark Fainaru-Wada, who almost went to prison for refusing to give up a source while reporting on a steroids scandal for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 2000s, reports on a similar case involving Mississippi Today, which is being sued by Phil Bryant, the former governor, over a story about a spending scandal involving the former football player Brett Favre; the suit is based on remarks made by Mississippi Today’s CEO, not the story itself, but Bryant is demanding that a journalist, Anna Wolfe, turn over reporting notes and confidential sources, and the judge has ordered to see them. (Mississippi Today is appealing; Bryant and Favre deny wrongdoing and have not been charged.) “Despite the differences,” Fainaru-Wada writes, “I have a unique understanding of Wolfe’s experience.”
- For Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy and Forrest Wilder dug into Houston Public Media’s mysterious decision to scrap a podcast series digging into a state takeover of the local school district, despite having promoted it heavily in advance of publication; HPM did not publicly explain the move, but Hardy and Wilder found that executives balked after learning that the host of the series was in a long-term relationship with a local teacher. At some outlets, this would be “unremarkable,” Hardy and Wilder write, but at HPM, it was “apparently seen as a five-alarm fire. In separate interviews with Texas Monthly, three experts in journalism ethics questioned HPM’s decision to bury the podcast.”
- In the UK, fallout continues from a BBC documentary reporting numerous allegations of rape and sexual abuse against the billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, who died last year; for The Observer, Henry Porter, the former UK editor of Vanity Fair, recounts his “battle to expose” Fayed in the nineties. In other British media news, The Spectator, a conservative magazine that is under new ownership, named Michael Gove, a former government minister, as its editor. And, per Deadline, the London Evening Standard is planning to use AI to publish reviews in the voice of its art critic—who died in 2015.
- And last night, news broke that Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, has been indicted on federal corruption charges. The details remain murky but the story quickly blew up online, where various journalists shared past national media coverage extolling Adams as the future of the Democratic Party, his endorsement by the New York Post, and an old headline from the satirical site The Onion in the voice of former mayor Bill de Blasio: “Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?”
New from CJR: Thinking the unthinkable about the First Amendment
Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen is a computational investigative fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She works on a range of computational projects on the digital media landscape, including influence operations conducted through news media and the information ecosystem. She graduated from Columbia University in 2022 with an MS degree in data journalism.