On Sunday, one of the world’s most popular social networking platforms, X, went offline in Brazil after its boss, Elon Musk, failed to comply with local laws. On Friday, Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered the suspension of X, formerly known as Twitter, in the country after Musk failed to bring a new legal representative in an ongoing case.
Millions of Brazilian X users were unable to access the platform on Saturday morning after internet providers and mobile companies in Brazil began implementing the plan after the court order. “Seems like you lost connectivity. We’ll keep retrying,” read the message when some of the users tried to access their accounts, The Guardian reported.
As a result, several Brazilians sought refuge in rival networks like Bluesky, which reported that it had gained 500,000 users in the past two days. Bluesky’s new members included Felipe Neto, one of Brazil’s top social media influencers with more than 17 million X followers.
“Don’t forget, when you go to another country, you’re obliged to follow its legislation, even if you disagree,” Neto wrote on Saturday morning. It is pertinent to note that X had 22 million users in Brazil. Its ban came as the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country’s top court and the rightwing tech billionaire.
What happened?
One of Brazil’s most influential judges, Alexandre de Moraes, who also oversaw the case, had spearheaded an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices following the January 2023 uprising in Brasilia. Supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro carried out the attack.
Musk, who usually aligns himself with rightwing figures, including Bolsonaro and his US ally Donald Trump, pushed back on Moraes’s demands and accused the Brazilian judge of squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views.
While Musk kept attacking Moores on X, the final straw that led to the eventual ban was when Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline to name a new legal representative after the social media platform closed its local office in mid-August. In the Friday judgment, Moraes accused X of treating the social network “like a no man’s land—a veritable land without law” by allowing the “massive propagation” of misinformation, hate speech, and anti-democratic attacks.
Shortly after midnight, several Brazilian users began noticing they could no longer access X. Following the judgment, Musk ramped up attacks on Moraes, referring to him as “Voldemort.” “He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice,” Musk wrote on X, although Brazilian users could no longer read his words without using a virtual private network (VPN).
