For weeks, some 40 million Brazilian X users have been beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country’s government. In April, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes opened an investigation into the social network after Musk rejected a court order asking the company to block accounts that supported former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and allegedly spread hate speech and disinformation.
On August 30, Brazil’s top court suspended X, giving internet service providers five days to comply and prompting fan accounts to send out flares alerting their followers that they would go silent.
During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians on increasing the total number of users. to around 8 million. Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users, according to a report on TechCrunch. But many users found it difficult to rebuild the next thing they had in X.
“It is undeniable that, for many companies, the suspension of X has affected the way they communicate with customers,” says Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko García. (His work appeared in WIRED.) “The same goes for artists and influencers who have seen an important promotional platform disappear overnight.”
Those who were unable to transfer all their followers from X to other platforms promised to keep the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brazilan account with over 93,000 followers, says that “as long as , at least for a while.” while. So that we don’t have to start from scratch again.”
While the platform was down, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they had put into curating them, Driessen notes, saving “valuable pieces of pop culture history” in the process. Even accounts that have been able to continue posting sporadically are still not available to fans within the country who want to scroll through their old posts.
On September 18, when x Internet traffic briefly redirected to overcome Brazil’s obstacles, fans rejoiced. “I know it’s a silly app, but it’s where I feel safe.” wrote Thaís García, the person behind Taylor Swift’s account @thalovestay. “I’m not in a good place mentally and last week was horrible without having to be here to distract me.”
The pardon was short-lived, but on September 20, X’s lawyers told the Supreme Court They had found a legal representative for Brazil, a step towards the platform being active again in the country. the company is now supposedly complying with some of Brazil’s other requests in the hope that the ban on X will be lifted, perhaps as soon as next week.
Once that happens, and it looks like it will, Brazilian fans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of the communities they built on Musk’s platform, even those that are already gone.
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,” he adds. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this kind of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the people behind the accounts will have to consider whether they want to return.
Even before X’s suspension, Beyoncé Brazil’s administrators had been working on the revision and construction your website. It’s been nice to have something that is “100 percent ours,” Silveira says. “I would say that (account
Gabriel Leão contributed reporting from São Paulo.
