With X blocked, Brazilian residents find new homes for their thoughts | World News
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. It was the culmination of a monthslong battle between that Justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and X’s owner, Elon Musk, over what can be said online in Brazil.
In recent weeks, Musk said X would stop complying with Justice Moraes’s court orders to suspend certain accounts. After Justice Moraes threatened arrests of X employees, Musk pulled X’s team from Brazil. Justice Moraes responded by blocking X on Friday. Hours later, millions of Brazilians woke up on Saturday to a social network that would not load. Users on the app still saw a timeline, but the posts were frozen from Friday night. Those who tried to open the website were met with a blank screen, as if the site did not exist.
Some customers of the few internet providers that had not yet complied with the ban as of Saturday morning posted excitedly on X that they could still use the service, and the phrase “it didn’t go down” began trending on X. (One of those providers was Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX, Musk’s space company.)
But for the most part, Brazilian Twitter had logged off — and the rest of the world suddenly realised just how much of the site had been powered by the extremely online nation of 200 million people. (At nine hours and 32 minutes a day, Brazilians rank second globally in average daily internet use, just after South Africans, according to Proxyrack, an internet infrastructure provider.)
On Friday night, a string of goodbye posts began appearing from popular X accounts, including many fan accounts for certain celebrities. “As all administrators are Brazilian, it will not be possible for us to continue with activities at this time,” read a post from the user @21metgala, which posts updates about celebrities to its nearly 176,000 followers. “We’ll be on Bluesky and Instagram. ”
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. Hundreds of thousands of new users flocked to the service within hours, according to usage data posted on the platform by its employees.
On Thursday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil shared on X a list of his accounts on other platforms. The list started with Bluesky. Others went to Threads, the X competitor from Meta. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, created Threads to try to capitalise on the backlash toward Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 and his transformation of the service he renamed X.
Both Bluesky and Threads have yet to overtake X, partly because so many people who had built followings on Twitter would loath to start over. 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. People can use virtual private networks, or VPNs, common privacy software that makes internet traffic appear as if it is originating from another country. But in his order on Friday, Justice Moraes said that people using VPNs to circumvent the block could face a fine of 50,000 Brazilian reais, or nearly $9,000, a day, which is more than what an average Brazilian earns in a year.
“I am tweeting this with VPN,” Marcel van Hattem, a right-wing Brazilian congressman, wrote on X. He added, “I will keep tweeting regardless of State persecution or threats because I believe in freedom of expression. …” Hattem asked Brazilians to join planned marches on September 7, Brazilian Independence Day, to call for the impeachment of Justice Moraes. He suggested that he was prepared to pay the daily fine of 50,000 reais for using a VPN. Over on Threads, Chico Barney, a Brazilian internet personality, joked that the platform just wasn’t the same as X.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First Published: Sep 01 2024 | 11:22 PM IST
