One of the world’s most popular social networks, X, has gone offline in Brazil – the country with the fifth largest digital population – after Elon Musk’s refusal to comply with local laws saw it blocked by the supreme court.
Millions of Brazilian X users found themselves unable to access the network on Saturday morning as internet providers and mobile phone companies began to enforce the ban.
When the Guardian tried to access the network on its computer and mobile phone, it received a message reading: “Seems like you lost connectivity. We’ll keep retrying.”
Large numbers of Brazilians sought shelter on the rival network, Bluesky, which reported that it had gained 500,000 users in the past two days. “Welcome to Bluesky!” the company posted to its new adherents in Portuguese.
Bluesky’s new members included Felipe Neto, one of Brazil’s top social media influencers with more than 17 million X followers. “Don’t forget, when you go to another country, you’re obliged to follow its legislation, even if you disagree with it,” Neto wrote.
The banning of X, which has more than 22 million users in Brazil, is the climax of a politically charged, months-long arm wrestle between the country’s top court and the rightwing tech billionaire.
Alexandre de Moraes, the influential supreme court judge responsible for the ban, had been spearheading an attempt to force X to purge anti-democratic, far-right voices in the wake of the January 2023 uprising in the capital, Brasília, carried out by supporters of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
Musk, who has aligned himself with rightwing figures including Bolsonaro and his US ally Donald Trump, pushed back, accusing Moraes of squelching free speech and trying to censor conservative views. Musk’s public attacks on Moraes – many of them infantile and vulgar – were reminiscent of his repeated online digs at the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, during the recent far-right UK riots, which X’s owner was accused of inflaming.
The final straw before X’s blocking in Brazil came on Thursday, when Musk ignored a 24-hour deadline to name a new legal representative after X closed its local office in mid-August. In Friday’s ruling ordering the ban, Moraes accused X of treating the social network “like a no man’s land – a veritable land without law” by allowing the “massive propagation” of misinformation, hate speech and anti-democratic attacks.
Hours later, at shortly after midnight local time, Brazilian X users began noticing that X had expired.
Musk ramped up his attacks on Moraes, calling the judge “Voldemort” and tweeting a meme of a dog dangling its scrotum in the face of another animal.
“He is a dictator and a fraud, not a justice,” Musk wrote on X, although Brazilian users could no longer read his words without using a virtual private network (VPN).
Prominent rightwing voices rallied to Musk’s side, underlining the growing affinity between the Brazilian far right and the world’s richest person.
“I’m going to radicalise, even it I do it on my own,” vowed Nikolas Ferreira, a prominent rightwing congressman, in the hours before X was blocked. “You are a freedom fighter,” Musk replied.
Progressive Brazilians scoffed at Musk’s claim to be defending free speech, with many celebrating the supreme court’s decision to show X’s owner that he was not above the law.
“If billionaires want to have companies that make billions in these parts, they need to learn to respect the laws. Long live the rule of law and national sovereignty,” the leftwing congresswoman Erika Hilton wrote on X late on Friday night.
In a second valedictory message, posted about half an hour before the ban came into force, Hilton announced she had relocated to Bluesky. “See you there soon,” she wrote.
