It’s a showdown between the world’s richest man and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice.
The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has threatened to suspend social media giant X nationwide if its billionaire owner Elon Musk doesn’t swiftly comply with one of his orders. Musk has responded with insults, including calling de Moraes a “tyrant” and “a dictator.”
It is the latest chapter in the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Many in Brazil are waiting and watching to see if either man will blink.
How would one country just shut a service down globally?
To the best of my knowledge, typically this is only possible under two circumstances:
when the service is solely hosted in that one country - then the shutdown order prevents the service from getting out to anywhere else.
when the service is only hosted in a few countries, and they all have agreements with each other (think Canada + US, or a service that’s hosted in multiple countries but they’re all in the EU). Then the other countries typically follow the agreement and the service is jointly shutdown in all, leading to a complete blackout (but if one country refuses - or the service has one host outside of this group - then it can continue).
A third option might be if the domain name were registered in the country (think like twitter dot com dot br) then the country has the power to seize the domain and block access that way - though it’s just a stopgap measure as the company can get a new domain and slowly rebuild the brand etc.