X announced in a post Saturday, that it's closing Brazil office after a notorious Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened the company's legal representative with arrest if the platform refuses to ban certain accounts. “As a result, to protect the safety of our staff, we have made the decision to close our operation in Brazil, effective immediately," the company wrote Saturday on X. "The X service remains available to the people of Brazil.”
In an earlier post, X listed some of the targeted accounts and said they include “a pastor, a current Parliamentarian, and the wife of a former Parliamentarian.”
Moraes who has been sending secret orders pressuring X to block certain accounts on the platform, “threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders” the social media company's global government affairs account wrote on X. "He did so in a secret order, which we share here to expose his actions."
CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote on X: "Incredibly sad day for the people of Brazil." And owner Elon Musk wrote: "The decision to close the 𝕏 office in Brazil was difficult, but, if we had agreed to @alexandre’s (illegal) secret censorship and private information handover demands, there was no way we could explain our actions without being ashamed."
Moraes has been aggressively going after supporters of former popular president Jair Bolsonaro who has also criticized the fascist supreme court justice and called for his impeachment.