According to Bloomberg, Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has officially ended the ban on billionaire Elon Musk’s microblogging app, after the company complied with orders to pay $5 million in fines, reinstate a legal representative in the country, and remove the original user accounts Musk initially refused to suppress.
In early September, Justice Moraes requested that Musk ban the accounts of seven commentators who were believed to be spreading false reports and hate speech with regard to the current government and the outcome of Brazil's presidential election in 2022.
Upon request, Musk -- who was a public supporter of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro -- fired back at the Justice, decrying the request as an attack on the platform’s freedom-of-speech principles, posting on X that the judge was a “dictator” and was “destroying” free speech “for political purposes.”
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However, a month of being cut off from 20 million users eventually trumped Musk’s political stance.
The company's monetizable daily active user count dropped from 250 million to 230 million overnight, while in Europe X had also lost around 5 million users -- bringing the company’s total user base down at least 10% since the start of the year.
In response to the ban, decentralized social media competitor apps such as Bluesky and Threads added millions of new users as well.
X’s ad revenue likely could not take much more of a hit either, as it has fallen around 83% compared to what it had been when Musk took over the app in late 2022.
So, while Musk has been able to wield his power to affect real change -- as in the recent lawsuit that dismantled the ad industry's Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) -- his fight against Brazil ultimately failed.