Don’t go on holiday to Brazil, Musk tells staff

SpaceX employees given travel warning after X banned in country

Elon Musk has told staff not to go on holiday to Brazil amid an escalating row with the country following a ban on his social media company X.
Workers at Mr Musk’s space company SpaceX were advised last week against travelling to Brazil for work or pleasure in an email sent by the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, according to the Wall Street Journal. 
The US newspaper said SpaceX was also seeking to move non-Brazilian staff out of the country. SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 
Tensions have escalated between Mr Musk and senior officials in Brazil amid a long-running dispute over alleged far-Right content on X, formerly known as Twitter.  
Last week, the country’s Supreme Court announced a ban on the service, making it the first major democracy to block the company. Brazil, the largest nation in Latin America, was X’s sixth-largest market. Before the court order, there were an estimated 20m active users there. 
The ban followed months of wrangling between Mr Musk and Brazil’s Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes. Mr de Moraes has been conducting an investigation into far-Right content on X, including alleged hate and anti-democratic fake news. 
Mr Musk announced the closure of X’s Brazilian office last month after the company claimed it had received a “secret order” to take down certain accounts. 
X was then given a court deadline to appoint a legal representative in the country, but responded to say it expected its app would not be available to users “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents”.
Last week, the website was suspended. 
Mr Musk, responding to the ban, said: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”
Nations have been ramping up their efforts to force social media companies to take action on harmful content. 
Mr Musk recently provoked a row with Downing Street after he claimed Britain was heading for civil war following riots and repeatedly engaged with posts by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the far-Right activist who goes by the name Tommy Robinson.
Jess Phillips, a Home Office minister, said X was “despotic” and a “place of misery”. Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter executive in the UK office, called for Mr Musk to face personal sanctions if he continued to stir up public disorder online.
Other social media apps, meanwhile, are also facing international scrutiny. Telegram’s founder, the Russian-born entrepreneur Pavel Durov, is facing charges in France for his alleged complicity in failing to tackle abuse on the app. Telegram was set up with the aim of championing free speech. Mr Durov denies the allegations.