Brazil is serious about this ban of Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
After banning the social network within its borders, one nugget in the New York Times‘ report about the story stands out: Anyone who tries to access X in Brazil using technical workarounds like VPNs will be fined substantially. To be more specific, those people could be fined as much as nearly $9,000 per day for using X in Brazil.
While a large country’s supreme court banning a social network may sound excessive (as if such a thing could happen here), the story of how it happened doesn’t exactly paint X and Musk in a positive light. Brazil’s government ordered the site to stop hosting disinformation, Musk called it “censorship,” and eventually things escalated from there. On Wednesday of this week, X (which shut down its Brazil operations earlier this year) was ordered by Brazil to appoint a legal representative in the country within 24 hours; X did not do this. As such, X is now banned in Brazil.
And if you try to get around that ban, you’ll have to pay up. Be careful.