Those most hooked on X, who in Brazil number hundreds of thousands or even a million, were already expecting the closure of the old Twitter sooner rather than later. Some began to design a plan B and make backup copies of their accounts when the volatile Elon Musk bought it in 2022. Others, last April, coinciding with the magnate’s first public spat with the Brazilian judge who is trying to stop him. But that did not prevent that, once the closure by court order was materialized on Saturday, when they found that the content was not updated on any device no matter how hard they tried, bewilderment spread among the 22 million users of the network in Brazil.
Jefferson Nascimento, a hyperactive human rights lawyer on X, where he had 136,000 followers, mentions the words emptiness, lagoon, orphanhood, when asked on the phone what life is like without the platform. These are intense days for him, focused on paving the way with educational advice to compatriots who are migrating en masse to another network called Bluesky. In four days, the platform created within the original Twitter has added two million users, according to the company. Techcrunch.
Nascimento says that X is certainly a death foretold since Musk bought Twitter, changed its name and modified the algorithm. The result: less reach, more advertising and a more hostile environment. At the end of last week, it became clear to Brazilians that the threat was now real. The question is whether there will be a resurrection. “A lot of questions arise. What happens now? Will X come back? Is it worth investing so much time and effort with so much uncertainty?” says Nascimento, who has already managed to add 40,000 followers to Bluesky.
“I just realized that I’m hooked on Twitter… I go on it all the time and it doesn’t load ANYTHING,” tweeted Nath Finanças on Saturday, already installed on Bluesky. She is a young, black and talkative financial advisor who is successful on social media with simple advice on saving and investing. It wasn’t all frustration, there was also some relief: “What PEACE without ads every two tweets on your TL,” she added.
Although YouTube, Instagram and Facebook are much more popular, the influence of Twitter and later X was too much for their size. Many of the debates that arose in the network bubble quickly spread to the real Brazil.
Once it was clear that this time the closure was serious, consultations with colleagues began. Should we move? Where? Within hours, two options stood out: Threads, which belongs to Meta, prefers brands to political debate and offers itself as a kind of complement to Instagram, and Bluesky, very similar in appearance and functionality to the original Twitter, with which it shares creators such as Jack Dorsey. In no time, blindly or following the advice of the most experienced Twitter users, the Brazilians opted for the second. For many users who stuck with X despite the drastic changes implemented by Musk, it was like coming home, even if it is a rental house where you better have a copy of everything because at any moment it closes.
In just four days, Bluesky has gained two million followers. The joke here is that “Brazilian refugees” have put the stability of its servers and engineers to the test. It has become the most downloaded app in the country, ahead of Threads, from Meta. In addition, this massive landing of Brazilians has given Bluesky a notable boost in other markets. Techcrunch reports that following the suspension of X, downloads from the Blue Butterfly network skyrocketed by more than 1,000,000% in Brazil and almost 600% in the rest of the world.
On Saturday, in the blink of an eye, millions of citizens of the most populous country in Latin America were left without a universe built over 15 years where they would converse, follow the political debate or the disagreements in the Big Brother Brazil house, get informed, let off steam or disconnect from daily emergencies with a laugh at the latest meme. Brazil, with 212 million inhabitants and more than nine hours a day on average surfing the Internet (only South Africans are more hooked), is a highly prized market for big tech companies. And for politicians. In the hours before closing, even the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, took action. He tweeted a reminder list of all his social media accounts, including one on Bluesky.
Although he tweets little, Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes has more than a million followers on his @alexandre account. Last week he used the official Supreme Court profile on X to send an official subpoena to Musk. Invested with broad powers by the court, he ordered the closure of X on Friday in the face of the repeated refusal of Elon Musk’s company to comply with the order to block a handful of profiles in the Bolsonarist orbit. The billionaire responded to the judge with a legal battle and the accusation that he is a dictator who censors political rivals. In addition, the tycoon is cheering on former president Jair Bolsonaro and a new account, @AlexandreFiles, discloses secret decisions taken by De Moraes in his investigations into disinformation and incitement to hatred.
Meanwhile, the debate continues over the judge’s order to fine anyone who uses a VPN to access Twitter from Brazil 50,000 reais (8,000 euros, 8,800 dollars) (which allows you to pretend you are in another country) and over the decision by Starlink, Musk’s company that offers satellite Internet, to finally block X for 215,000 Brazilians who pay for its service.
Fernanda K. Martins, from the Internet Lab research centre, says that with Musk’s arrival she drastically reduced her use of X, where she had around 2,000 followers. “It started to work differently. There was a lot of gossip, I didn’t see issues related to digital rights or human rights, so now the impact hasn’t been as great,” she says. In any case, she also designed a plan B some time ago. In her case, on Threads. “It didn’t capture me the first time. And now I’ve tried again, and it still doesn’t,” she explains on the phone. “As it brings up Instagram contacts, where family, old school friends and so on are usually, the dynamic is different.”
Moving to another network is nothing new for Brazilians. They learned from the closure of Orkut, which reigned in these lands and in India until a decade ago. When Musk turned Twitter into X, there was a massive landing of Brazilians to Koo (the twitter (Indian and the butt of all kinds of jokes here because it is pronounced like ass in Portuguese). Joke after joke, it reached 13 million Brazilian users but it was a short-lived idyll. The relationship never really took off. More successful was the migration of Bolsonarism to Telegram in 2022, as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube took measures against misinformation and fake news. Bolsonaro Sr. has 1.6 million followers there.
Martins, from Internet Lab, recalls that Twitter was once an excellent research territory. “When X was Twitter, it was extremely important as a political thermometer, a place to gather information about certain events, whether it was a wave of attacks, a trial… it served to investigate and understand political dynamics and from there, propose public policies.” The progressive degradation of content undermined that role.
For this researcher, the key issue regarding the judicial closure of X is “how a guy with a lot of money tries to place himself above the sovereignty of a country,” openly disobeying the law. That Musk presumes to ignore Brazilian legislation and insults its most powerful judge while doing business with China, which vetoes the network, or obeys the requests of authoritarian regimes to block inconvenient users is a real offense for many Brazilians.
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