Social network X, formerly Twitter, began disappearing on Saturday in Latin America’s largest country after a Brazilian… Supreme Court The court had ordered the blackout just hours before. It was the culmination of a months-long battle between that judge, Alexandre de Moraes, and unknownThe owner of, Elon Muskabout what can be said online in Brazil.
In recent weeks, Musk said X would stop complying with Moraes’ court orders to suspend certain accounts. After Moraes threatened to arrest X’s employees, Musk pulled X’s team out of Brazil. Moraes responded by blocking X on Friday.
Hours later, millions of Brazilians woke up to a social network that wouldn’t load. Users of the app still saw a timeline, but posts had been frozen since Friday night. Those who tried to open the website were met with a blank screen.
Some customers of the few internet providers that had not complied with the ban as of Saturday morning posted excitedly on X that they could still use the service. (One of those providers was Starlink, the satellite internet service run by SpaceX, Musk’s space company.)
But for the most part, Brazilian Twitter had gone offline, and the rest of the world suddenly realized how much of the site had been powered by the nation of 200 million people. (Brazil is X’s fifth-largest international market, behind Japan, India, Indonesia and the U.K., according to data firm Statista.)
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As Brazilians lost access to their old X timelines and followers, many decided to take their musings to other digital venues. Bluesky, a social network that resembles X, reported a record surge in usage after the X ban was announced in Brazil. Hundreds of thousands of new users flocked to the service within hours, according to usage data posted on the platform.
Others went to Threads, Meta X’s competitor. Mark ZuckerbergCEO of Meta, created Threads to try to capitalize on the backlash toward Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter and his transformation of the service into something he renamed X.
Bluesky and Threads have yet to overtake X, but now the two burgeoning social networks could find new life in Brazil.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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