For weeks, some 40 million Brazilian X users have been beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country’s government. Back in April, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes opened an inquiry into the social network after Musk snubbed a court order asking the company to block accounts that backed former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and allegedly spread hate speech and misinformation.
On August 30, Brazil’s top court suspended X, giving internet service providers five days to comply and causing fan accounts to send up flares alerting their followers that they’d be going quiet.
During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians on X tried to bring their followers over to platforms like Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, the latter seeing a 2 million user jump in the days after the ban went into effect, bringing its total users to around 8 million. Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users, according to a report in TechCrunch. But many users found it hard to rebuild the followings they had on X.
“It’s undeniable that, for many businesses, the suspension of X has affected the way they communicate with customers,” says Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia. (His work has appeared in WIRED.) “The same goes for artists and influencers who have seen an important platform for promotion disappear overnight.”
Those who couldn’t transfer all of their followers from X to other platforms still vowed to maintain the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brasil, an account with more than 93,000 followers, says that “while X is under a businessman who thinks he is bigger than the laws of a country,” she and the other admins on the account will “keep Bluesky and X, at least for a while. So we don’t have to start from scratch again.”
While the platform has been down, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they’d put into curating them, Driessen notes, memory-holing “valuable pieces of pop cultural history” in the process. Even the accounts that have been able to continue posting sporadically still aren’t available for fans within the country who want to scroll through their old posts.
On September 18, when X briefly rerouted internet traffic to get around Brazil’s roadblocks, fans rejoiced. “I know it’s just a silly app, but it’s where I [feel] safe,” wrote Thaís Garcia, the person behind the Taylor Swift account @thalovestay. “I’m not in a good place mentally, and these past week was horrible without having here to distract myself.”
The reprieve was short-lived, but on September 20 X’s lawyers told the Supreme Court they’d found a legal representative for Brazil, a step toward getting the platform turned back on in the country. The company is now reportedly complying with some of Brazil’s other requests in hopes that the X ban will be lifted, perhaps as early as next week.
Once that happens, and it seems like it will, Brazilian stans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of the communities they built on Musk’s platform—even those who have already moved on.
Amaral notes that because many of the fan accounts are linked to more progressive artists, some of them may be reluctant to return to X due to the lack of moderation. “We know that for many fandoms, being part of a minority (whether in terms of gender, race, etc.) is a key aspect of their identity,” she adds. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this sort of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the folks behind the accounts will have to consider whether they want to return.
Even before X’s suspension, Beyoncé Brasil’s administrators had been working on revising and building out their website. It’s been nice to have something that’s “100 percent ours,” Silveira says. “I would say [the X account is] like a photo album: It’s good to revisit it, but we won’t die if we don’t have it.”
Gabriel Leão contributed reporting from São Paulo.
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Publish date : 2024-09-26 21:30:00
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