With Musk’s X banned in Brazil, its users carve out new digital homes

Billionaire Elon Musk's conflict with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge came to a head last week, with legal twists, insults, ultimatum, contempt Then, finally, surrender. When the digital dust settled, X was an ex.

Musk’s social media platform is National ban Judge Alexandre de Moraes imposed a hefty daily fine of $9,000 on anyone using a virtual private network to circumvent the suspension. X users in Brazil began to look for new platforms, and most started using Threads and Bluesky.

“Well to everyone in Brazil,” Shauna Wright posted on Threads the day DeMorais ordered X suspended.

Not everyone has participated in X; Brazil’s social media community mainly uses TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. But X is hugely influential as a newsmaker, agenda-setting and thought leader. It’s a local battleground in the global culture wars and a peanut gallery for football games and reality TV shows (especially Big Brother). So when X is dimmed in this Highly online countries 213 million users started migrating.

Wright's post was a joke among former Twitter employees at the time. Tribute to his winning post When Meta launched Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp All down in 2021causing users to flock to Twitter for information. But Wright also hopes her return is a sincere greeting to all friendly Brazilians.

“It's starting to catch on even among people who don't get testimonials, but they don't have to!” Wright, a content designer who calls himself “goldengateblond,” told The Associated Press in San Francisco. “I’m glad it makes people feel welcome.”

Meta launched Threads last year, sparking widespread backlash when Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 and upended many of Twitter's policies and features, from content moderation to user verification systems.

Instagram users can seamlessly open a Threads account, so it has grown rapidly; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that as of July, the company had 175 million monthly users worldwide. Meta declined to provide specific information about Brazilian users.

More Brazilians are turning to Bluesky, a little-known platform that not only looks and feels a lot like the Twitter of old, but also grew up from it. The pet project of former chief executive Jack Dorsey was supposed to eventually replace it. Whether that comes to fruition remains to be seen, but the Brazilians are already starting to do their part. Bluesky said on Wednesday it had added 2.6 million users since last week, 85% of which came from Brazil, bringing its total user count to more than 8 million.

“Good morning everyone,” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted on Bluesky and Threads on Sunday. “What do you think of it here?”

“Our mental health situation is already showing signs of improvement,” replied Tatiane Queiroz, 43, who described herself as a “Twitter refugee from Mato Grosso” on Bluesky. It is an agricultural state in Brazil.

Bluesky has been posting in Portuguese to help Brazilians locate and find people they have previously connected with. On Wednesday, they celebrated the launch of television network Globo's evening news program, which has more than 20 million viewers, on air with its new Bluesky account. Pioneers who have already established themselves are offering tips and sharing so-called “starter pack” accounts to follow.

São Paulo-based human rights lawyer Jefferson Nascimento has created 10 starter packs to help newbies get started.

“In part, to improve the environment and make it more conducive for other people to go there so that when Twitter (X) comes back — if it does come back at some point — there’s not a massive stampede. incident, said Nascimento, 42, who has 135,000 followers on X, more than three times the number of Bluesky followers.

Some liken Bluesky to the halcyon days of Twitter in the early 2010s. Egerton Neto, 30, opened his Bluesky account the day X closed. He has only eight followers – far fewer than the 252 on X – but appreciates Bluesky's more peaceful rhetoric and less willful addiction. He said by phone from Recife that he also likes to see developers interacting with the community as they build the platform.

For Brazilians (at least millennials), starting from scratch online feels a bit familiar. They were early adopters of Google's former social network Orkut and dominated the platform before it shut down in 2014. They migrated to Facebook en masse.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told The Associated Press on Monday that the wave of Brazilians underscores one of its missions: to allow users to move the platform and stay connected, similar to changing cell phone carriers without losing numbers or contacts.

On mature social networks such as TikTok or Facebook, users can only interact with people on the same platform. There is no interoperability. Big tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which help serve their advertising-centric business models. Bluesky is building the technology foundation – which it calls a “public conversation protocol” – that could make the web work more like email, blogs or phone numbers.

“The situation that users find themselves in today is a bit of a trap because users are locked out and developers are locked out of these social platforms. What that means is that you're basically stuck in a place that's supposed to serve you, but now it's got you. The whole social life,” Graeber said. “One of the fundamental things we believe is that a user's social relationships, such as their social graph, their connections to their friends, should be their own thing.”

X has an estimated 22 million users in Brazil Numbers 2024: Brazil Reportonly one-sixth the number of Instagram and about one-fifth that of Facebook or TikTok. But David Nemer, who specializes in the anthropology of technology at the University of Virginia, said the paltry numbers belie its importance as a gathering place for journalists, politicians, academics and celebrities whose interactions extend far beyond their scope.

“Although Twitter may not have a direct impact on ordinary Brazilians, it affects the media and ultimately affects ordinary Brazilians indirectly,” said Nemer, a Brazilian. “This is the impact that Twitter has or has had in Brazil.”

The day before the suspension, X was the fourth most downloaded social media app on Brazil's Google Play store; Blue Sky has since surpassed it, according to research firm Similarweb. Bluesky became the most downloaded app of all genres (social media or otherwise) on Apple's App Store. On August 30, the day de Moraes ordered the shutdown, Bluesky had 3.4 million daily active users in Brazil, while X had 6.1 million active users that day.

Similar network data also shows that many Brazilians use VPNs to stay on X. fine.

But most Brazilians have left, and there are those on X who lament their departure.

“Losing Brazil is like losing Samantha on Sex and the City. You're losing all the best quips and sexual energy that make the platform/show work,” said Sam Stryker, who spoke on Until 2022, he was responsible for Twitter's global brand entertainment channels—and even ran Twitter's Twitter account.

Immigrant Brazilian X users, such as columnist and internet personality Chico Barney, are adapting to their new digital homes.

“As a refuge in the post-Twitter world, Bluesky proves once and for all that it’s not the place that counts, it’s the people,” he wrote on Wednesday.