Now resistant to collaborating with authorities in Brazil, X has signed an agreement with Brazil's Attorney General's Office (AGU) in May 2024 to combat disinformation, and it even removed content by the government's request.
The information was disclosed this week by the Attorney General's Office in response to a parliamentary information request in the House of Representatives, submitted by 14 conservative politicians affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro.
Although Elon Musk's company has been at odds with the Brazilian government for several months now, recent information reveals that the platform until recently provided some willingness to cooperate with authorities. In April 2023, before this agreement, the platform helped the government suppress violent content about school shootings, taking down over 400 posts following a request by the Ministry of Justice.
On Friday, August 30, 2024, X was blocked in Brazil following a decision by Moraes after the company refused to appoint a legal representative in the country, as required by law. To resume operations, X must appoint a new representative, pay R$18 million (approximately $3.7 million USD) in fines, and comply with Brazil's Supreme Federal Court orders.
CLIMATE DISASTER. X's compliance with Brazilian authorities has taken place in the context of catastrophic floods in May 2024 that caused immense damage to Rio Grande do Sul, a southern state in Brazil.
At a meeting focused on strategies to combat disinformation around the disaster, X was represented by Gabriela Ottoni Salomão de Azevedo, according to documents provided by the Attorney General's Office. On August 28, 2024, Ottoni co-authored an article criticizing Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' rulings, labeling them as “judicial activism.”
AGREEMENT SIGNED. The meeting also approached a cooperation agreement signed between the Attorney General's Office and six Big Techs: ByteDance (owner of TikTok), Meta, Google, Kwai, LinkedIn and X.
The agreement was signed on May 20, 2024, and was valid for 90 days, until August 18, 2024. The Attorney General's Office confirmed to Nucleo that all the platforms have signed the agreement.
The document stipulated that the platforms should provide mechanisms to facilitate access to official and reliable information about the disaster, as well as coordinating the provision of public services and collaboration between the Attorney General's Office and the platforms.
August 18 was also the same day that the agreement expired that the Supreme Federal Court ordered Elon Musk to appoint a new representative. The day before, Musk had announced that he would be shutting down X's operations in Brazil.
REMOVAL. According to the Attorney General's Office, the government sent 11 extrajudicial notices to X asking for disinformation-related posts to be flagged. Of these, 9 were complied with, which led to the contents being taken down.
Among the requests that X did not meet was the one to classify as disinformation posts that accused the federal government of sponsoring Madonna's concert in Rio de Janeiro on May 4, 2024 – a false claim that generated disinformation campaigns at the time, coinciding with the period of the floods in Rio Grande do Sul.
