Jack Nicas and Kate Conger, reporting Friday for The New York Times:

X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts.

The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.

Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.

Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week after Justice Moraes threatened arrests for ignoring his orders to remove X accounts that he said broke Brazilian laws.

X said that it viewed Justice Moraes’s sealed orders as illegal and that it planned to publish them. “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes,” Mr. Musk said on Friday.

In a highly unusual move, Justice Moraes also said that any person in Brazil who tried to still use X via common privacy software called a virtual private network, or VPN, could be fined nearly $9,000 a day.

Justice Moraes’ order outlawing VPNs isn’t just unusual, but probably illegal. But the specifics of Brazil’s law aren’t very interesting nor applicable to this case because readers of this blog aren’t experts nor interested in Brazilian law and politics. What’s more concerning is Elon Musk’s “compliance” with Judge Moraes’ order while moaning about it on his website. Musk has continuously complied with demands from authoritarian governments so long as they fit his definition of “well-meaning.” The best example of this is India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a far-right authoritarian speech police, ordered Musk to have hostages in India whom he could arrest at any time if unfavorable content was made available to Indian users via X. From Gaby Del Valle at The Verge:

Musk has been open to following government orders from nearly the beginning. In January 2023 — a little over two months after Musk’s takeover — the platform then known as Twitter blocked a BBC documentary critical of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting confirmed that Twitter was among the platforms that suppressed The Modi Question at the behest of the Modi government, which called the film “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage.”

Musk later claimed he had no knowledge of this. But in March, after the Indian government imposed an internet blackout on the northern state of Punjab, Twitter caved again. It suppressed Indian users’ access to more than 100 accounts belonging to prominent activists, journalists, and politicians, The Intercept reported at the time.

Musk said at the time that he did this to prevent blocking access to such a popular social media platform in the most populous country in the world, but that’s far from the truth. He did it because he likes authoritarian, far-right dictators. Musk doesn’t, however, like leftist authoritarians, regardless of what their requests are and how many people X serves in their countries, so he doesn’t comply with their understandable concerns over hate speech on X. X “exposed” these concerns by launching a depressing, pathetic account called “Alexandre Files,” which cosplays as some kind of in-the-shadows online vigilante, only from the richest person on the planet.

On “Alexandre Files,” X published an order from Brazil’s Supreme Court demanding the removal of seven accounts that post misinformation. Instead of simply removing these seven accounts, X blocked access to tens of millions of users, then proceeded to dox all seven of them, including their legal names and X handles. Fantastic. This is completely real — the post is still up on X. X is happy to comply with draconian demands from India and Turkey, but when it comes to Brazil, no can do. @LigerzeroTTV said it best: “Masterful gambit, Elon. 8 million accounts lost vs 7. Absolute genius, there’s no one smarter than you.”

Judge Moraes’ order could be illegal under Brazilian law, but c’est la vie; that’s life. Welcome to hell — this is what it’s like to run a social media platform.

Also entertaining: Musk’s Starlink, being an internet service provider in Brazil, was ordered to block access to X, as were all other ISPs. SpaceX, led by Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s chief operating officer, begrudgingly complied with the order so as not to risk millions of people’s internet access for some silly billionaire’s pet project social media app. Smart move, Shotwell.