Brazil Supreme Court panel unanimously upholds judge's decision to block X nationwide

FILE - Tesla and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington on March 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

RIO DE JANEIRO -

A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform X nationwide, according to the court's website.

The broader support among justices undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a renegade and authoritarian censor of political speech.

The panel that voted in a virtual session was comprised of five of the full bench's 11 justices, including de Moraes, who last Friday ordered the platform blocked for having failed to name a local legal representative as required by law. It will stay suspended until it complies with his orders and pays outstanding fines that as of last week exceeded US$3 million, according to his decision.

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The platform has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users, and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest.

De Moraes also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais (US$8,900) for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced, including Brazil's bar association, which said it would request the Supreme Court to review that provision.

But the majority of the panel upheld the VPN fine -- with one justice opposing unless users are shown to be using X to commit crimes.

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users. Its block marked a dramatic escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

"He violated the constitution of Brazil repeatedly and egregiously, after swearing an oath to protect it," Musk wrote of de Moraes in the hours before the vote. He also announced Sunday the creation of an X account to publish the justice's decisions that he said would provide evidence of his claims.

De Moraes' decision to quickly remit his order for panel approval served to obtain "collective, more institutional support that attempts to depersonalize the decision," Conrado Hubner, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Sao Paulo, told The Associated Press.

It is standard for the rapporteur to remit a decision to a five-justice panel in such cases, Hubner said. In exceptional cases considered controversial, the justice has the discretion to send it to the full bench for evaluation.

Had de Moraes done the latter, two justices who have questioned his decisions in the past -- and were appointed by former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro -- would have had the opportunity to object or hinder the vote's advance.