SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilians are divided over Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ order to crack down on social media giant X in the country, an opinion poll shows.
A slim majority of respondents say the judge is right in his feud with billionaire
Pollster AtlasIntel said 50.9% of respondents surveyed on September 3 and 4 disagreed with Moraes’ decision to suspend the platform in the country, while 48.1% agreed and 0.9% didn’t know how to answer.
However, when asked who was right in the public dispute between Moraes and Musk, 49.7% sided with the judge, while 43.9% supported the billionaire. 5.4% chose not to take sides.
Moraes and Musk have been feuding for months over legal orders for X to remove certain content, and matters escalated after X failed to appoint a local legal representative as required by Brazilian law and ignored a deadline for the compliance with court orders.
According to AtlasIntel, 48.9% of respondents said that .
That was significantly higher than the 37.6% who sided with Musk in saying the social media platform should not have respected Moares’ statements. 9.9% think X should have removed specific content but not banned users.
Moraes’ decision to impose a 50,000 reais ($8,860) fine on any user who uses alternatives such as VPNs to access X after its suspension was unpopular, according to the poll, with 64.5% opposing it measure.
Asked about the judge’s decision to block financial accounts of Starlink – whose parent company SpaceX is 40% owned by Musk – in Brazil, 55.1% said the ruling is ‘abuse’, while 44% think it is ‘ was justified’.
Brazil is the sixth largest market in the world with approximately 21.5 million users in April, according to Statista.
X was eliminated from most Brazilians in the early hours of Saturday.
The poll interviewed 1,617 Brazilians and used a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. AtlasIntel sometimes surveys people about popular topics and this research is not commissioned or paid for by any public party.
($1 = 5.6429 reais)
