Comment by maronato

“Free speech” has limits. Spreading lies about people with the purpose of undermining someone’s reputation is defamation, which is a crime in the US.

In Brazil, it happens that lying about the democratic process with the intent of getting people to not vote or to get people to support your fascist coup is also a crime.

The Supreme Court ordered X to ban people who commit these crimes and subpoenaed it to reveal their identities so they can be arrested. Subpoenas happen all the time in the US.

Complying isn’t the problem here though. Twitter complies with similar requests all the time. The problem is that Twitter is failing to comply in time and is being hit with ever-increasing fines for it.

Musk could hire more people to deal with it or pay the fines, but he decided that firing everyone and leaving the country would be cheaper.