Brazilians are split over Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes‘s order for social media giant X to be taken down in the country, a poll shows.
A slight majority of those surveyed say the judge is right in his feud with billionaire X owner Elon Musk, but user-targeted fines on VPNs and the freezing of Starlink accounts in the country were seen as “abusive.”
Pollster AtlasIntel said that 50.9% of the respondents surveyed on September 3-4 disagreed with Moraes’s decision to suspend the platform in the country, while 48.1% agreed and 0.9% did not know how to answer.
Asked about who was right on the public dispute between Moraes and Musk, however, 49.7% sided with the judge while 43.9% backed the billionaire. 5.4% chose not to take sides.
Moraes and Musk have been feuding for months over legal orders for X to take down some content, and matters escalated after X failed to name a local legal representative as required by Brazilian law and ignored a deadline for compliance with court orders.
According to AtlasIntel, 48.9% of respondents said X should have complied with court orders to take down some content and ban some users implicated in probes of so-called digital militias accused of spreading distorted news and hate.
That was considerably higher than the 37.6% that sided with Musk in saying that the social media platform should not have respected Moares’s rulings. 9.9% said X should have taken down some specific content, but not banned any users.
Moraes’s decision to impose a 50,000 reais ($8,860) fine on any user that uses alternatives, such as VPNs, to access X after its suspension was unpopular, according to the poll, with 64.5% standing against the move.
Asked about the judge’s decision to block financial accounts from Starlink—whose parent SpaceX is 40% owned by Musk—in Brazil, 55.1% said that the ruling is “abusive,” while 44% think it was “justified.”
Brazil is X’s sixth-biggest market globally with about 21.5 million users as of April, according to Statista.
X was taken down for most Brazilians in the early hours, Saturday.
The poll interviewed 1,617 Brazilians and had a margin of error of 2 percentage points plus or minus. AtlasIntel polls people on trending topics sometimes, and this survey was not commissioned or paid for by any public party.
—Luana Maria Benedito and Eduardo Simoes, Reuters
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