2023 Brazil Telegram Suspension Order

On April 26, 2023, Federal Judge Wellington Lopes da Silva of the Federal Court in Espírito Santo ordered a nationwide suspension of the messaging platform Telegram throughout Brazil, citing the platform's refusal to produce subscriber data demanded by the Federal Police (Polícia Federal) in connection with a neo-Nazi extremism investigation linked to the wave of Brazilian school attacks that began with the 2022 Aracruz School Shootings.¹

The Order

Judge da Silva's order required Google and Apple to remove Telegram from their app stores in Brazil and directed mobile carriers to block access to the platform nationwide. Telegram was simultaneously assessed a fine of R$1 million (approximately US$198,000) per day until it produced the required data. The order followed Telegram's partial non-compliance with a prior judicial demand: the platform had provided user data for the administrator of the "Brazilian Anti-Semitic Movement" (Movimento Antissemitico Brasileiro) channel but had declined to provide data on the channel's members or any data from a second channel, "Anti-Semitic Front" (Frente Antissemitica).¹

Evidence Basis

Both channels had been recovered from the phone of a school shooting suspect. Brazilian investigators found murder tutorials, bomb-manufacturing instructions, violent videos, and Nazi content within the channels. The investigation formed part of Brazil's federal-level response to the school violence surge of late 2022 and early 2023, during which approximately 60% of the total count of Brazilian school attacks recorded over two decades occurred within a two-year period.²

Resolution

The suspension was lifted on April 28, 2023, approximately 48 hours after it was imposed, after Telegram provided partial compliance with the court's data production requirement. The fine assessment was not publicly quantified after the lifting of the order.¹

Terrorgram Channel Infrastructure

The Espirito Santo order is the most specific documented instance in which Brazilian judicial process was applied to the platform infrastructure underlying the Terrorgram Collective's Brazilian operations. The two named channels (Brazilian Anti-Semitic Movement and Anti-Semitic Front) are not publicly confirmed to be Terrorgram Collective channels in the strict sense, but they operated within the same Telegram ecosystem that Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira's channels inhabited, and their documented content (murder tutorials, bomb instructions, Nazi propaganda) is consistent with the Terrorgram propagation model documented in the Dallas Humber prosecution and in Michele Prado's 2023 ABIN report.³