Bluesky is suddenly a lot more popular.
The X rival had around 6.2 million global users a week ago but thanks to the suspension of Elon Musk’s platform in Brazil, it’s suddenly had another 2 million signups. That’s about a tenth of X’s Brazilian erstwhile user base.
“A very warm welcome,” the Bluesky team wrote in an update yesterday. Meta’s Threads has also reportedly had a large influx of Brazilian users, though it hasn’t published figures.
To recap: X got banned in Brazil because of a drawn-out showdown between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes regarding a court-ordered blocking of several accounts in the country. Musk’s X has previously blocked users’ accounts on the orders of the Turkish and Indian governments—both times in the context of looming elections—but drew the line when it came to taking down accounts associated with a Jan. 6-style far-right insurrection in Brasília early last year.
On Friday, Moraes ordered X’s suspension until it takes down the accounts, and until it appoints a legal representative in Brazil, as it is also legally required to do. The Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously upheld the order yesterday, and also backed Moraes’s threat of a daily fine of $8,900 for any Brazilian who uses a VPN to access X.
Moraes also ordered the blocking of the bank accounts of satellite-based Internet service Starlink, owned by Musk's SpaceX, on the grounds that X hadn’t paid fines that it received for refusing to hand over certain documents. The Supreme Court has reportedly yet to discuss whether to uphold that order, but Musk is certainly seething.
“Unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of X and SpaceX, we will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too. Hope [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] enjoys flying commercial,” Musk announced yesterday on X, citing the recent seizure of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s plane. It’s unclear what legal mechanism Musk could invoke to seize Lula’s plane, given that—unlike Maduro’s regime—Brazil’s government is not under U.S. sanctions.
Hedge fund billionaire and Musk pal Bill Ackman has also weighed in, claiming that Moraes’s orders will make Brazil an “uninvestable market” and warning of “capital flight and a collapse in valuations.” Again, it’s unclear how this would happen, unless other business leaders also intend to start calling senior Brazilian judges “Voldemort,” as Musk has, and demanding their imprisonment.
Musk and Moraes’s machismo-fueled clash is a real Rorschach test. From one angle, it’s a clear case of a company thinking it can indefinitely flout a country’s laws while continuing to operate there, and discovering that actually it can’t. From another, it looks like a court system going too far in its attempt to prove a point.
The Financial Times reports that most Brazilians think Moraes was “exceeding the limits” of his authority, and that there has been a particularly strong backlash against the idea of fining regular people for daring to use a VPN to access a banned platform. Freezing Starlink’s assets also seems over-the-top.
Reuters also reports that the Brazilian telecoms regulator may revoke Starlink’s license to operate in Brazil for failing to block X in the country, unlike most other internet service providers. Starlink is refusing to comply because of its frozen funds. Countries, of course, can enforce their own laws, but—with Starlink's reported 200,000 users in Brazil—this seems like a wild overreaction.
In short, nobody comes out of this looking good—except maybe Bluesky. “I confess that I'm (truly) rooting for Elon Musk not to comply with the court orders and for Twitter to remain offline,” the popular Brazilian YouTuber Felipe Neto posted yesterday from his shiny new Bluesky account, which already has over 150,000 followers.
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David Meyer
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