X Banned In Brazil: How Users Are Adapting To New Social Media Platforms
X Banned In Brazil: Billionaire Elon Musk’s confrontation with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice escalated with legal battles, insults, ultimatums, defiance, and eventually, a surrender. In the end, X ceased to exist.
X has just been officially banned in Brazil
The battle begins
Are you on Team X? pic.twitter.com/tT1komhkhP
— Not Elon Musk (@iamnot_elon) August 30, 2024
Not everyone in Brazil used X, in part because they were still strongly preferring alternatives such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. However, X had enormous influence over the news and agenda setting as well as thought leaders. It represented the mainstream application for global culture wars and soccer and reality show discussions, with a large proportion being Big Brother. The ban in Brazil spurred users away to other platforms.
Brazil Bans X, Fines VPN Users
Musk's social media platform was blocked across Brazil, and Justice Alexandre de Moraes imposed a $9,000 daily penalty for anyone using a VPN to circumvent the ban. During this period, many Brazilian X users hunted around for somewhere else to go - and switched in droves to Threads and Bluesky. Shauna Wright took to Threads to say, "Hello literally everyone in Brazil," the day that de Moraes suspended X.
It was a joke to her former colleagues at Twitter and also an homage to that time in 2021 when Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp went down and users started looking for news on Twitter. She meant it as a warm greeting to friendly Brazilians, though.
San Francisco: "It became popular even among those who didn't get the reference, and that was fine! I was thrilled it made people feel wanted." - Wright, a content designer writing under the alias "goldengateblond"
Meta Launched Threads Against X
Meta launched the Threads in an attempt to react to the opposition that was raised to Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022 and to the changes he implemented on the site's policies and features, content moderation, and user verification.
Registration for Threads was seamless to Instagram users and greatly helped it boom considerably; as of July, Meta announced that it had reached 175 million monthly users worldwide. Meta did not indicate figures for Brazil.
Brazilians Started Using Bluesky
More Brazilians began using Bluesky, a much smaller platform that looked very much like the old Twitter and was developed by Twitter's former CEO, Jack Dorsey, as an alternative. It's too early to say if it can replace Twitter, but Brazilians are making themselves heard. Since last week, Bluesky added 2.6 million users, including 85% in Brazil, bringing it up to more than 8 million users.
