Social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday, after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over misinformation, hate speech and the company’s moderation policies.
With a population of 215 million people, a mature democracy, a vast territorial extension and more than 20,000 Internet service providers, blocking a web platform in the South American country is no simple feat. And while major Internet service providers have implemented the ban, many are still struggling to comply, leaving a patchwork of access to the site.
“Brazil has made progress in blocking X on major ISPs, but our telemetry indicates there is a long queue of local and regional ISPs where the service is still available,” says Isik Mater, research director at Internet censorship analysis group NetBlocks.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference reported A similar progression occurred when the Brazilian Federal Police obtained a court order in April 2023 for ISPs Block the Telegram communication platform Telegram was blocked for not sharing complete information about users involved in neo-Nazi group chats. Some large ISPs began blocking Telegram immediately. “However, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. “This suggests a lack of coordination between providers and that each ISP implemented the block autonomously.”
A similar progression has been taking place with the X ban. Brazil’s 20,000 ISPs make for a remarkably competitive market, but only a few have nationwide infrastructure. 40 percent are small regional suppliers with 5,000 or fewer clients. The human rights and digital watchdog Freedom House Rate Internet freedom in Brazil as “partly free” and trending toward more restrictive, given the country’s extensive efforts to crack down on political misinformation in recent years and its three-day ban on Telegram. Brazil also Blocked the secure communication platform WhatsApp in December 2015 and again in May 2016 because it failed to respond to similar requests for data.
Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency did not respond to WIRED’s multiple requests for comment.
Unlike in countries such as Russia, Iran and China, there is currently no legal apparatus or technical infrastructure through which the Brazilian government can systematically and comprehensively restrict access to certain websites or online platforms, or impose connectivity blackouts on its citizens.
Reports indicate that many Brazilian ISPs that have implemented the ban are using a technique known as “DNS filtering” to block access to X. The Domain Name System is the Internet’s phone book for looking up IP addresses associated with URLs like www.wired.com. DNS queries are sent to a DNS “resolver” that performs the IP address lookups, and ISPs can configure their resolvers to filter or block requests for specific websites.
However, mobile apps like X’s Android and iOS apps don’t rely on DNS, so DNS filtering alone isn’t enough to block all connections to a web platform. Some Brazilian ISPs also appear to be using the method of IP address “sinkholing” (redirecting online traffic to a different server than the one users intended to visit) as a way to send traffic destined for X into the abyss.
“In Brazil we are seeing variations by vendor, and right now it seems like each vendor is trying their own strategy to see what works,” says NetBlocks’ Mater. “Brazil has a diverse network infrastructure with many ways for data to get in and out of the country, so there isn’t that centralized choke point or ‘kill switch’ that we see in (some) countries with authoritarian tendencies.”
The use of VPN has increased in Brazil this week under the ban as a way to prevent ISPs’ attempts to block X, but the court-ordered ban includes a provision stating that people could be charged a fine of 50,000 reais (about $8,900) per day for using circumvention tools like VPNs.
