Brazil Blocks Elon Musk's X, Users Flock to Bluesky in Protest of Supreme Court Ruling

Brazilian President Criticizes Elon Musk's Extreme Right-Wing Stance: Wealth Doesn't Allow Recklessness!

As of Saturday morning local time, Brazilian users found themselves unable to access the social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk. This follows a Supreme Court justice's order to shut down X in Brazil after Musk refused to appoint a legal representative for the platform in the country.

Internet providers and mobile companies in Brazil began enforcing the ban, leaving millions of users disconnected from X. Brazil has around 20 million users who discovered a message stating, "You seem to have lost your network connection. We will keep trying," whenever they tried to access the platform from their computers or mobile devices.

With X rendered inaccessible, many Brazilians have migrated to another social media platform, Bluesky. According to Bluesky, their user count surged by 500,000 in the past two days. "Welcome to Bluesky!" the platform's Portuguese message to new users read.

The pressing question now is whether Musk will relent. On Saturday, he took to X to lash out at Justice Alexandre de Moraes, labeling him a dictator. "I have always told people that this person @alexandre (Moraes) is a dictator of Brazil, not a judge. He cloaks himself as a judge while holding supreme executive, judicial, and legislative power, which is the hallmark of a dictator. His robe is merely a guise to deceive Western fools into believing he is a judge," Musk tweeted.

Thaynara Oliveira Gomes, a prominent Brazilian influencer with over a million followers on X, expressed regret over losing access to the platform. "It's unfortunate to lose this platform because it's incredibly popular in Brazil," she said in a message.

Currently, numerous countries are taking stringent measures to make companies accountable for their online content. Recently, France accused Telegram CEO Pavel Durov of allowing criminal activities on his platform. In Brazil, Moraes is spearheading a comprehensive investigation targeting hate speech and inflammatory statements, claiming these threaten the democratic order.

"This is another chapter in Brazil's efforts to hold tech companies accountable," noted Clara Iglesias Keller, a scholar at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin who studies information technology regulations. "But the attention this case has garnered is entirely different."

However, some believe Moraes's decree is excessively harsh. "This is the most extreme judicial decision in the 30-year history of the internet in Brazil," commented Carlos Affonso Souza, Director of the Technology and Society Institute of the State University of Rio de Janeiro.