from the was-there-no-strategy? dept

Elon Rehires Lawyers In Brazil, Removes Accounts He Insisted He Wouldn’t Remove

Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won.

After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian news org Folha reports that ExTwitter has (1) rehired a law firm in Brazil (though hasn’t yet designated a “legal representative” for the purpose of being a potential hostage) and (2) begun taking down accounts that it was ordered to remove (translated via Google Translate):

X (formerly Twitter) began complying with court orders from the Federal Supreme Court (STF) on Wednesday night (18) and took down accounts that Minister Alexandre de Moraes ordered to be suspended.

This week, the company rehired the Pinheiro Neto law firm to represent it before the Court. The firm had been dismissed last week. The STF says it will only recognize the new lawyers after X appoints a legal representative in the country.

This all comes right after the mess where ExTwitter switched its CDN provider, leading to the site briefly becoming available again in Brazil. According to Bloomberg, de Moraes appeared none too pleased about this and ordered another fine on the company:

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has been sparring with Musk for months, ordered a daily fine of 5 million reais ($922,250) against the social media site and accused it of attempting to “disobey” judicial orders.

An order published Thursday instructs the nation’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, to ban X access through network providers such as Cloudflare, Fastly and EdgeUno, which were “created to circumvent the judicial decision to block the platform in national territory.”

From everything I’ve heard, it really does appear that the Cloudflare thing was unintentional and just happened because ExTwitter was in the process of moving from Fastly to Cloudflare for CDN services. This was for a variety of reasons and not to avoid the ban in Brazil. ExTwitter put out a statement saying it was unintentional as well:

You can say that the company is lying, but that wouldn’t make much sense. Elon has had zero problems antagonizing and attacking de Moraes and the Brazilian government, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to lie about this. Especially if it is true that they had already begun the process of rehiring the law firm and banning some accounts.

Cloudflare quickly announced that it would segregate ExTwitter and make sure Brazilian traffic didn’t reach it. Anyone would have had to know this was the likely result if it really was intentional.

So, all of this sounds like Elon potentially realizing that he did his “oh, look at me, I’m a free speech absolutist” schtick, it caused ExTwitter to lose a large chunk of its userbase, and now he’s back to playing ball again. Because, like so much that he’s done since taking over Twitter, he had no actual plan to deal with these kinds of demands from countries.