Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes on Sunday opened an inquiry into Elon Musk for obstruction of justice involving his social media company X, according to a court document.
Musk is challenging a decision by Moraes ordering his social media platform X to block certain accounts.
Musk earlier on Sunday posted that X will lift the restrictions, because they were unconstitutional.
In his decision, Moraes said “X shall refrain from disobeying any court order already issued, including performing any profile reactivation that has been blocked by this Supreme Court”.
If X fails to comply with the order to block certain accounts, the company will be fined 100,000 reais (USD 19,740) per day, the judge said.
X Corp. has been forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil. We have informed those accounts that we have taken this action.
We do not know the reasons these blocking orders have been issued.
We do not know which posts are alleged to violate the…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) April 6, 2024
Last year, Moraes also ordered an investigation into executives at social messaging platform Telegram and Alphabet’s Google, who were in charge of a composed internet regulation bill.
The bill put the onus on internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material, instead of leaving it to the courts, and charge hefty fines for failures to do so.