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

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — As billionaire Elon Musk’s clash with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice came to a head last week, there were legal twists, insults, ultimatums, defiance and then, finally, capitulation. When the digital dust settled, X had become an ex.

Musk’s social media platform was banned nationwide and Justice Alexandre de Moraes set a whopping $9,000 daily fine for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to skirt the suspension. Brazil’s X users, left casting about for a new platform, mostly started washing up on Threads and Bluesky.

“Hello literally everyone in Brazil,” Shauna Wright posted on Threads the day de Moraes ordered X’s suspension.

Everyone hadn’t been on X; Brazil’s social masses are primarily on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. But X had outsize influence in terms of newsmakers, agenda setting and thought leaders. It was the local battleground of the global culture war and the peanut gallery for soccer games and reality shows, especially Big Brother. So as X went dark in this highly online country of 213 million, its users started migrating.

Wright’s post was an in-joke for fellow former employees of the company then known as Twitter, and an homage to its award-winning post when Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp all went down in 2021, sending users flocking to Twitter for info. But Wright also intended her throwback as a genuine greeting to all the friendly Brazilians.

“It took off even among those who didn’t get the reference, but they didn’t have to!” Wright, a content designer who posts as “goldengateblond”, told the Associated Press from San Francisco. “I was glad it made people feel welcome.”

Meta launched Threads last year amid widespread backlash to Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter and his upending many of its policies and features — from content moderation to its user verification system.

Opening a Threads account was seamless for Instagram users, so it scaled rapidly; it had 175 million monthly users globally as of July, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. Meta declined to provide specifics on Brazilian users.

More Brazilians went to Bluesky, a lesser-known platform that not only looks and feels very much like the former Twitter, but also grew out of it. The pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey was supposed to replace it eventually. Whether it can remains to be seen, but Brazilians have started doing their part. Bluesky gained 2.6 million users since last week, 85% from Brazil, the company said Wednesday, boosting its total to over 8 million.

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

“Our mental health is already showing signs of improvement,” Tatiane Queiroz, 43, replied on Bluesky, where she describes herself as a “Twitter refugee in Mato Grosso,” a state in Brazilian farm country.

Bluesky has been posting in Portuguese to get Brazilians situated and find those with whom they previously shared connections. They celebrated Wednesday as TV network Globo’s evening news program, which gets over 20 million viewers, presented its new Bluesky account on air. Pioneers with prior footholds are giving tips and sharing so-called “starter packs” of accounts to follow.

Jefferson Nascimento, a human rights lawyer in Sao Paulo, has created 10 starter packs to help newbies navigate.

“In some way, to strengthen the environment, make the environment more favorable for other people to go there, so that when Twitter (X) comes back — if it does come back at some point — there isn’t a mass stampede again,” said Nascimento, 42, whose follower count on X was 135,000, more than triple his Bluesky amount.

Some compared Bluesky to the halcyon days of early-2010s Twitter. Egerton Neto, 30, opened his Bluesky account on the day of X’s shutdown. He has just 8 followers — far below his 252 on X — but appreciates Bluesky’s more peaceful discourse and less intentional addictiveness. He said by phone from Recife that he also likes seeing its developers interact with the community as they build the platform.

Starting over from scratch online is a bit of déjà vu for Brazilians — at least millenials. They were early adopters of Google’s former social network Orkut and dominated the platform before its 2014 shutdown. They migrated en masse to Facebook.

Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber told the AP on Monday that this wave of Brazilians underscores one of its missions: allowing users to move platforms and keep connections, similar to switching cell phone carriers without losing your number or contacts.

On established social networks like TikTok or Facebook, users can only interact with people on the same platform. There’s no interoperability. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models. Bluesky is building the technical foundation — what it calls “a protocol for public conversation” — that could make networks work more like email, blogs or phone numbers.

“The situation users are in today is a bit of a trap because users are locked in and developers are locked out of these social platforms. And then that means that you’re essentially stuck in a place where it should be offering you a service, but now it’s owning your entire social life,” Graber said. “One of the fundamental things we believe is that a user’s social relationships, like their social graph, their connections to their friends, should be something that they own.”

X had 22 million users in Brazil, according to estimates in the Digital 2024: Brazil report, just one-sixth the number on Instagram, and about one-fifth of Facebook or TikTok. But skimpy figures bely its importance as a gathering place for journalists, politicians, academics and celebrities whose interactions resounded far beyond, according to David Nemer, who specializes in the anthropology of technology at the University of Virginia.

“Even though Twitter may not have this direct impact on the everyday, common Brazilians, it would impact the press, which eventually would impact indirectly common Brazilians,” said Nemer, who is Brazilian. “That’s the sort of impact that Twitter has — or used to have — in Brazil.”

According to data from research firm Similarweb, X was Brazil’s fourth-most downloaded social media app from the Google Play store the day before its suspension; Bluesky has since surpassed it. On Apple’s app store, Bluesky became the top downloaded app of any type, social media or otherwise. Bluesky saw daily active Brazilian users reach 3.4 million on Aug. 30, the day de Moraes ordered the shutdown, versus X’s 6.1 million that day.

Similarweb data also showed many Brazilians using VPNs to stay on X. Nemer said that from his home in Charlottesville he has seen some far-right politicians brazenly posting and defying Brazil’s Supreme Court to levy its exorbitant fine.

But most Brazilians have gone, and there were those on X lamenting their departure.

“Losing Brazil is like ‘Sex and the City’ losing Samantha. You’re losing all the best one-liners and the sexual energy that makes the platform/show tick,” posted Sam Stryker, who until 2022 oversaw Twitter’s global branded entertainment channels — even operating Twitter’s Twitter account.

And Brazilian X users who emigrated were settling into their new digital abodes, like columnist and internet personality Chico Barney.

“Bluesky as a post-Twitter refuge proving once and for all that it doesn’t matter the place, but the people,” he wrote Wednesday.

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Ortutay reported from San Francisco