On Saturday August 31 I awoke to the usual hum of street life and traffic as São Paulo – South America’s charmingly chaotic business capital and the most populous city in the Western hemisphere – roared to life.
I reached for my iPhone on the bedside table to check the latest updates on the biggest story in Brazil that day: the impending ban on X, formerly Twitter. Bright morning light pierced through the shutters of our 21st-floor apartment.
I opened the app. “Can’t refresh feed,” an error message read, as if my phone wasn’t connected to the internet. Some time in the early hours, Twitter had been blocked in Brazil – the world’s eighth largest economy, with the seventh largest population and the sixth highest number of Twitter users.
For Sam Cowie, a foreign correspondent based in Brazil, X was an essential tool
I first moved here in late 2011 to try my luck as a foreign correspondent and to get a front row seat to a changing world where emerging powers, like Brazil, strive for space at the top table of international politics. Since then, Twitter has been part of my daily routine with up to an hour a day spent on the platform, reading, researching and posting.
The ban was the latest episode in an ongoing feud between owner Elon Musk and Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes, who in recent years has become one of the country’s most powerful figures – much to the displeasure of the online far-right.
I had been following the story closely. And personally, I didn’t think the ban was going to happen.
Brazil’s judiciary has been at odds with big tech in the past. Since 2015 WhatsApp has faced four major shutdowns here, after the company failed to provide courts with data on alleged crimes ranging from paedophilia to drug trafficking (due to its end-to-end encryption).
More recently, in 2022, Justice Moraes moved to block the messaging app Telegram over the company’s repeated failure to comply with court orders. But big tech always caved to Brazil’s demands in the end. Would Elon Musk?
For those who haven’t been following, Brazilian politics has been rocked by intense polarisation in recent years, with the rise of a tech-savvy hard right that boosted the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro.
By January 2023, days after the swearing in of current, left-wing president Lula da Silva, an angry mob loyal to Bolsonaro attacked government buildings in the capital Brasília; the scenes made the January 6th 2021 Capitol uprising look tame in comparison. Many considered it a serious, if somewhat chaotic, coup attempt.
Justice Moraes, a mercurial figure who cut his teeth in the murky world of São Paulo machine politics, as a state prosecutor then public safety secretariat with a hardline reputation, has emerged as the main figurehead charged with punishing the offenders.
Supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro hold a sign thanking Elon Musk – NELSON ALMEIDA
He has staunch supporters. One source of mine, for example, who has a police escort to work each day for his part in investigating corrupt cop “militias” in the Amazon, thinks it is no exaggeration to say that “Big Alex”, as Moraes is known, saved Brazilian democracy.
However, most serious people will concede that his aggressive methods are also highly questionable and worry about the accumulation of unaccountable power.
“He is Brazil’s defender of democracy. Is he actually good for democracy?” read a New York Times headline.
Others maintain that his alleged judicial overreach is merely a case of fighting fire with fire.
To Bolsonaro supporters, Moraes is the greatest enemy of the republic and a menace to free speech, which is not enshrined in Brazilian law.
He has been the target of – laughable – impeachment attempts. The Bolsonaro right, which dominates about a third of congress, powerful in numbers but often poor at execution, hates him.
This August, he took on Elon Musk too, finally ordering the app be turned off after Twitter failed to appoint a legal representative in the country, following court orders to block accounts that had encouraged the January 8 uprising in Brasília.
Back in downtown São Paulo, staring into our phones, we scrambled to make sense of the situation.
“Are yours still on?” a friend asked in a WhatsApp group.
For the first few hours, this depended on your choice of network provider; for some Brazilian users, Twitter was still up and running. For others, including me, the social media site was already down and would no longer refresh.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X was blocked in Brazil in August
After nearly 13 years as an active tweeter in Brazil, having amassed some 20,000 followers, the platform was finally gone from my phone. As a user, I’d noticed a period of notable decline that coincided with Musk buying it.
But still, lying in bed, I felt rattled and annoyed; I’d spent years building up a large and active following. Now I would have to start again? Where?
But at the same time, I felt relief – of the almost euphoric kind. This emotion lasted about a minute and a half.
“It’ll probably be back at some point,” my wife, a respected Brazilian business and economics journalist with her own substantial Twitter following, shrugged as she prepared for her Saturday morning yoga class.
“Yeah probably,” I said, then scrolled through Instagram to see if I’d missed any of the morning news alerts.
People have already written thousands of words about the decline of Twitter, its naffness, its echo chamber tendencies and its recent deterioration into a digital hellscape.
But from a foreign correspondent’s perspective, trying to make sense of a country you temporarily call home – especially an enormous, beautiful and complex one like Brazil – it had been essential.
For me, Twitter’s greatest strength was always its simplicity, being able to scroll and read multiple headlines from across the country and region. For a fast paced, extremely online country like Brazil – of mass protests, impeachments, fraught elections, mega sports events, the rise of the far-right and the return of the left, all of which I covered – it was the perfect tool.
Twitter was always, mostly at least, a means to an end for me, a place where I could gather information, make contact with potential sources and showcase my work and knowledge, which often led to more work opportunities.
Over the years people have contacted me through Twitter direct messages asking to come on radio or TV to discuss the latest political drama unfolding or to help produce investigative documentaries about environmental crime in the Amazon.
Part of my job involves scouring the local press in search of story ideas or leads. At one point I aimed to publish five quality tweets a day. If I am posting about it, I will have to fully understand it, I thought to myself.
It was also useful for gathering information. Brazil is a vast country to report from and activists, scientists, local politicians or business figures in far-flung regions outside the typical interest zones of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and the halls of power in Brasília, would often post interesting content.
Alongside my investigative stories, I would post pictures of Brazilian beach landscapes, curious places I was travelling in on assignment, or Brazilian bar snacks live on location, that would often get warm interactions; a kind of “come for the photos, stay for the stories” approach.
But it was also a community. It’s a strange, modern phenomenon to know people online before you know them in real life, but one that I can’t say is unpleasant.
At parties for Brazilian journalists people would say “Oh, I know you from Twitter”. Others would be kinder; “You are great on Twitter.”
When our friend and colleague Dom Phillips – himself a prolific and kind tweeter, always keen to offer praise on others’ work – was murdered in the Amazon in June 2022, while researching for a book alongside Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, we posted in his memory, continuing to do so each year. Will we be able to in 2025?
Friends would congratulate each other on birthdays, or plug each other’s stories and books.
Then there were the very Brazilian Twitter politics moments.
In 2018, a reactionary general famously threatened the Supreme Court via a tweet, a chilling moment in a fragile democracy that had suffered a 21-year US backed military dictatorship from the mid-1960s.
The first carnival after Bolsonaro was elected in 2019, his Twitter account posted an amateur pornographic video shot at the festivities, suggesting the scene was common, in what seemed like an attempt to rile up his conservative Christian base and decry Brazil’s legendary party celebrations.
But if Twitter was wielded to advance the interests of Brazil’s most powerful people, it was also used to advance citizenship, however remotely.
In the early 2010s, activists in Rio favelas would live-tweet often violent police incursions into their neighbourhoods. Indigenous groups in the Amazon would use it to document and decry deforestation and criminal forest fires.
Cowie interviewing Antonio Denarium, the governor of the Brazilian Amazon state of Roraima, in 2022
Brazilians are tech-savvy and communicative people. They are also, generally, fiercely proud of their country, an imperfect global south superpower; the poorest of the rich countries and the richest of the poor, as a dear friend – who I met on Twitter – once told me.
While relatively stubborn rates of adult functional illiteracy guaranteed that Twitter would never go on to have the reach of Facebook, Instagram or even TikTok, in a golden period from 2012 until 2022, Twitter was a genuine forum of debate.
Brazilian Twitter was filled with footballers, journalists, Youtubers and politicians, it was a space to watch the country’s politics play out; Bolsonaro became the most followed politician.
Most country character traits are double edged.
Britain’s penchant for (mostly hilarious) self-deprecating humour can be a bit tiresome online. Something about Brazil’s generalised congratulatory approach, a kind of online joie de vivre, like the country itself, carries a seductive charm.
Perhaps it’s the fact that, outside of the internet, many Brazilians live incredibly difficult lives. Of the G20 economies, only South Africa and Mexico match it in terms of inequality and murder.
Access to the online world in Brazil has far outpaced citizens rights in the real world; poorer Brazilians post selfies on new smartphones they bought on credit but too often are forced to live in crime ridden neighbourhoods without access to basic sanitation.
Of course, like Twitter everywhere else, it could be a cesspit too, also in its own Brazilian way. Violent images of murder, vicious gossip, tedious one-upmanship and fake news, were also part of the Brazilian Twitter experience.
Things noticeably changed for the worst after Musk finally took it over in late 2022: the number of followers I had began to drop by the day, I no longer saw the posts I wished to see, the pictures of Brazilian beaches and fried snacks got more traction than stories I’d spent months researching and writing due to the demotion of Tweets with links.
“We never see each other (on Twitter) anymore,” a fellow correspondent friend told me over coffee in a bakery earlier this year.
By the end I was barely posting once a day. As with our relationships with people, it is often external factors beyond our control that cause our relationships with things to fall apart.
On September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, some 45,000 pro-Musk and pro-Bolsonaro supporters gathered on Paulista Avenue, São Paulo’s main thoroughfare. Wearing a gold and green Brazil football shirt atop a sound truck, Bolsonaro called for an “amnesty” regarding Brazil’s January 8 2023 attacks in the capital Brasília and referred to Justice Moraes as a “dictator”.
Some friends and colleagues have been using Twitter with a VPN, as a way to beat the ban. Justice Moraes initially said VPN users would face a heavy fine, but shortly after backed down. Most observers agreed it would be difficult to enforce.
Personally, I haven’t bothered with the VPN. Like many others in Brazil, I have switched to Bluesky, a Twitter alternative with around 10m users. I am slowly, if not enthusiastically, trying to claw back my following.
Then, towards the end of September, there were rumblings that the ban wouldn’t hold. While on a flying visit to England, at my parents’ house in suburban Essex, where I had Tweeted a bit as a tourist, I read the news that it had briefly been reinstated back in Brazil, only to go off again.
Musk had named a legal representative, it appeared that it was coming back. But perhaps the damage has already been done. Many Brazilians I hear from say they are now committed to BlueSky.
Back in Brazil, at the time of writing, Twitter remains off. Apparently it’s coming back. But who cares?
I can’t say I miss it right now. But I suspect that in time I’ll begin to post more elsewhere to fill a void. It would be nice if it returned, not least of all so I could share this article there.
While Instagram is good enough for scrolling headlines in the morning, it’s less useful for communicating ideas, and more time-consuming, while Bluesky and Threads (Meta’s text-based social network) still don’t have the reach of Twitter.
While my work has been published by Brazil’s top newspapers and websites, in general, the majority of my job involves me trying to explain Brazil to foreigners. Without access to Twitter (at least without using a VPN) and with BlueSky full of Brazilians who know more about Brazil than I, where do I stand?
If the ban continues and indeed, as perhaps appears more likely, Twitter’s decline does too, it’s inevitable that journalism from Brazil will suffer, as will culture and communication in general, at least in the short term until we reinvent or find something better.
For the science community especially, in a time of climate crisis in which Brazil is one of the world’s most important protagonists, the ban has been frustrating. According to a report in Nature, without the platform, Brazilian scientists have not been able to post about research or communicate with collaborators.
Ultimately, the lessons of this ban have not been about technology itself but how humans use it. For the 2010s, a decade of decentralised mass protests and frustrated revolutions, including in Brazil, Twitter was perhaps the technology best suited to the moment.
For me, Twitter’s ban in Brazil is not an issue of free speech. As mentioned, Musk has caved to the demands of countries in the past, albeit after some initial resistance. While Justice Moraes can credibly be accused of overreach, in some cases at least, the Twitter ban follows a familiar pattern in Brazil and the wider question of big tech vs national sovereignty. It’s just that Musk has been more theatrical about it.
If this episode has shown me anything, it’s that we journalists – and humans in general – are adaptable creatures, able to break our tech habits and move on quickly. Big tech CEOs would do well to remember that.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66fab48fd81542e485bb1576e1267109&url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fnews%2Flive-country-where-twitter-banned-083000885.html&c=12598906987811825682&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-30 02:40:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
