With Musk's X banned in Brazil, its users carve out new digital homes
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
RIO DE JANEIRO — 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
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