Brazilians turn to other social media platforms after X is blocked
As the clock struck midnight in Brazil, the feed stopped refreshing.
The social network X, formerly Twitter, began to go dark Saturday across Latin America’s largest nation after a Brazilian Supreme Court justice ordered its blackout just hours earlier. The battle was the culmination a month-long fight between Elon Musk and Alexandre de Moraes over what could be said on Brazil’s internet. Musk removed X’s Brazil team after Justice Moraes threatening arrests for X employees. Justice Moraes blocked X Friday.
Hours after, Brazilians woke on Saturday morning to a social media that wouldn’t load. The app showed a timeline but all the Friday night posts had been frozen. The website was blank, as if it didn’t exist. One of these providers was Starlink satellite internet service, run by SpaceX. Mr. Musk’s company. But for the most part Brazilian Twitter was logged off, and the rest the world realized how much the site relied on the 200 million strong nation that is extremely online. Proxyrack, a provider of internet infrastructure, says that Brazilians spend nine hours and 32 minute on average each day online, second only to South Africans. On Friday night, a series of goodbye posts appeared from popular X account, including fan accounts for celebrities. As all administrators are Brazilians, we will not be able to continue our activities at this time,” said a user of the account @21metgala who posts celebrity updates to its 176,000 followers. “We’ll also be on Instagram and Bluesky. “
Indeed, as Brazilians lost access to their old X timelines and followers, many people decided to take their musings to other digital town squares.
Bluesky, a social network that resembles X, reported a record spike in usage after the X ban was announced in Brazil. According to data collected by the company, hundreds of thousands of users flocked into the platform within a few hours. The list started with Bluesky.
Others went to Threads, the X competitor from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, launched Threads in order to capitalize on backlash against Mr. Musk for his purchase of Twitter and the transformation of X he renamed. But now the two burgeoning social networks might find new life in Brazil.
Brazil is X’s fifth-largest international market, ranking behind Japan, India, Indonesia and the United Kingdom, according to the data firm Statista. More than 20 million people there use X to weigh in on politics, sports and entertainment.
There is a way around the X blackout in Brazil. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are common privacy software which makes it appear that internet traffic is coming from a different country. Marcel van Hattem, a right-wing Brazilian congressman, wrote on X: “I am tweeting this with VPN.” …”
Mr. He suggested that he was willing to pay the daily fine of 50,000 reais for using a VPN. He joked on Threads that the platform was not the same as X. “I love Threads,” he wrote in Portuguese shortly after the X blackout was implemented. Can anyone lend me 50,000 Reais?
