After weeks of battling with the courts in Brazil, it appears the social media platform formerly known as Twitter will comply with court orders and restart operations in the country after being banned for repeatedly breaking local laws. And it’s just the latest example of X owner Elon Musk talking a big game before ultimately folding to keep his business interests alive.
X told the Brazilian Supreme Court late Friday that the company was ready to comply with orders to block extremist accounts on the site and to name a legal representative in the country, according to the Washington Post. Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court judge at the center of the case who’s drawn cartoonish comparisons to villains by Musk, issued an order on Saturday giving X five days to complete the legal paperwork to get back up and running in the country. X has also reportedly paid the fines issued over its non-compliance, according to the Post.
Musk has a history of aligning himself with extremists on the world stage, including in Brazil. The billionaire even received an award in 2022 from former president Jair Bolsonaro, who’s been accused of money laundering and attempting to overturn the results of a recent election in a move not unlike Donald Trump’s attempt to stay in power in 2021 with his coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Musk is also attempting to get Trump elected this November, of course.
X has been given five days to complete the paperwork necessary to get un-banned in the country, but the timeline for when the site may become live for Brazilian users is unclear. There’s also no guarantee that X users in Brazil who’ve found alternatives to the site will return to their old accounts.
Musk’s mismanagement of X in Brazil has been a boon to other sites, including both legacy platforms and newer upstarts. Tumblr, for example, has reported 349% growth lately, though it’s important to keep in mind how far that site has fallen since its peak about a decade ago. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that Bluesky, a site launched to the broader public just last year, has seen 4 million new users since Musk’s confrontation with Brazil started. Bluesky told Gizmodo on Friday the site now has over 10.1 million users.
As we told you last week, the disintegration of X has created an environment where far-right extremists have been handed a louder microphone. Tweets about Holocaust denial and fringe conspiracy theories can regularly rack up millions of views and it’s a direct result of Musk creating the conditions for that garbage to thrive. How? One big reason is that Musk stripped legacy accounts of blue checkmarks, a public badge simply meant to communicate that an account’s identity had been verified. Musk abolished that program, instead allowing anyone with $8 per month to get “verified,” despite the fact that no actual identity verification was happening.
That change to the blue checkmark system also allowed anyone with $8 to get boosted by the algorithm, showing up in the For You stream of average users. In a similar way, Musk also altered the platform to make sure “verified” accounts show up at the top of all the replies in any given tweet. That creates an environment not just conducive to extremism, but also a situation where the dumbest people alive (read: those willing to pay Musk for a checkmark) get the most attention when there’s a controversial topic being discussed.
X didn’t immediately respond to questions email Monday morning. Gizmodo will update this post if we hear back.
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