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A Brazilian trade association says it will now be ‘much more complicated’ to block X in the country.
Some Brazilian users were able to access their X accounts on Wednesday (18 September) despite the country’s top court banning the social media platform.
However, this may be short-lived as X circumvented the ban after changing its network provider resulting in “an inadvertent and temporary service restoration”, a spokesperson for X said in a statement published on the platform.
“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team. To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers,” the statement read.
The country’s trade association for internet and telecoms service providers, Abrint said in a statement that X’s Cloudflare update resulted in a “significant change in its structure,” making “blocking the application much more complicated”.
Now X is using dynamic IP addresses shared with other legitimate services in Brazil including banks and other platforms, “making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services”, Abrint explained.
An advisor to Abrint, Basílio Rodriguez Pérez believes X may have made the change on purpose.
Tensions between X and Brazil arose out of months-long legal proceedings where Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered X to block certain “digital militia” accounts accused of spreading fake news during former president Jair Bolsonaro’s reign.
Musk called the order “unconstitutional”.
“The fundamental issue at stake here is that Judge Alexandre de Moraes demands we break Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that,” X said on its platform.
But X also did not have a legal representative in Brazil – which social media networks are legally meant to, in order to receive and consider government takedown notices.
The country’s top court gave X a 24-hour notice to name a representative, which X failed to do. As a result, Judge de Moraes banned the platform in Brazil.
Five Supreme Court judges then later voted to uphold the ban. One of the judges – Flávio Dino – said that economic power or the size of one’s bank account does not give “strange immunity from jurisdiction”.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court temporarily froze Starlink’s bank accounts in the country, one of Musk’s other businesses that provides satellite-based internet services.
Justice de Moraes then seized around €2.9m in X fines from Starlink’s frozen accounts and from X frozen accounts. The accounts have since been unfrozen.
“After the payment of the full amount that was owed, the justice (de Moraes) considered there was no need to keep the bank accounts frozen and ordered the immediate unfreezing of bank accounts/financial assets,” the Court said.
Within days of X’s ban in Brazil, the Bluesky social media platform reported a surge in new users in the country. The decentralised platform launched by Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, has been publicly available since early 2024.
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