Agencies
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 backif it does come back at some pointthere 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.