Elon Musk’s battle for free speech in Brazil is getting expensive

De Moraes imposed the fines on X after the company refused to appoint a legal representative to respond to government requests to remove accounts or certain posts from the platform. The affected accounts were associated with “digital militias“, who de Moraes says methodically spread disinformation in support of the ousted far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.

“After paying the full amount due, the judiciary found no need to keep the bank accounts frozen and ordered the immediate unfreezing of the bank accounts/financial assets,” Brazil’s Supreme Court said in a statement.

The company’s accounts, which had been frozen, were reinstated. Still, the seizure indicates that Musk will face significant financial costs to support the battles for his stated goal of protecting free speech online.

Musk himself has a far from perfect track record of protecting speech rights — including complying with requests to restrict content from increasingly authoritarian governments in Turkey and India — but even Musk’s most reluctant supporters I say he has a point in Brazil because the Brazilian judiciary has taken a more extreme position to address disinformation than other democratic leaders.

Some of the extreme right groups de Moraes tried to restrict online, claimed that Bolsonaro’s loss in the 2022 election was caused by electoral interference and supported a mob that stormed Brazil’s Congress to start a military coup who would have taken control of the country’s government.

Like the US, Brazil has enshrined the protection of speech in its constitution, but the Brazilian government has more freedom to ban certain types of speech than the US government.

Musk countered that the people targeted by de Moraes’ legal actions had not been convicted of a crime, and therefore the Brazilian judge’s attempts to restrict their online activity amounted to censorship. In retaliation for the actions taken against X, Musk challenged the Brazilian judiciary online, comparing him to Lord Voldemort from the “Harry Potter” franchise and suggesting that de Moraes’ legal orders were violations of Brazilian law that should lead to the judge’s imprisonment .

What does this have to do with Starlink?

The battle between Musk and de Moraes has been escalating for months, leading to the seizure of funds from X and SpaceX. While the link between the social media site’s legal issues and the satellite communications company’s liability for premium fines is weak, de Moraes has dragged both Musk-owned companies into the fray.

Musk’s refusal to comply with court orders to remove certain content from his social media platform led de Moraes to threaten to issue an arrest warrant against X representative Rachel Nova Conceicao, prompting Musk to close X’s office in Brazil.

De Moraes then ordered X banned from Brazil – a request by SpaceX Starlink initially refused to comply before reversing course and blocking access to the platform from its constellation of internet-providing satellites after its license to operate in the country was threatened. Other ISPs in the country readily complied with de Moraes’ order to block the platform, avoiding similar actions by the judge.

Legal analysts have questioned de Moraes’ move to force Starlink to pay fines imposed on X, given that the companies’ only connection is that they are owned by the same person.

“Starlink is a different company. Belonging to the same economic group does not mean that it is also responsible for a debt in which it did not participate. It did not even have a chance to defend itself,” the Associated Press reported a Brazilian jurist. said Lênio Streck on social networks. “What could Starlink have done to avoid what another company did?”

Representatives for X and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.