Elon Musk faces a legal investigation in Brazil after becoming embroiled in a public row with a supreme court judge over an order requiring the social network X to take down some far-right accounts.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes had issued a court order forcing the site formerly known as Twitter to block several users as part of his investigation into the former president Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to stay in power after his 2022 election defeat.
The order also barred the social network from publishing details of which accounts were blocked, and came with fines of about £16,000 a day for failure to comply. Now, Musk says, the company will reverse those blocks. The multibillionaire also called on Moraes to resign or be impeached.
In response, the judge announced late on Sunday that he had opened an inquiry into what he called Musk’s obstruction of justice.
News of the court order broke in an apparently coordinated disclosure as part of Musk’s “Twitter Files”, a collaboration with a number of journalists that has resulted in them being given access to the social network’s internal records.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/08/elon-musk-brazil-x-jair-bolsonaro