Even President Lula has taken the plunge: the suspension of the social network X in Brazil has caused a mass migration of Internet users to similar platforms such as Bluesky, where Portuguese has become the most used language.
Orphaned from X, which he had been using since 2014, student Leon Leal has adopted Threads, launched a little over a year ago by the American giant Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.
“I feel like I’ve entered a more welcoming and less aggressive community, even if I miss the sincerity that was on X,” he tells AFP.
Access to the old Twitter was blocked on August 30 in Latin America’s largest country, following a long standoff between its owner, American billionaire Elon Musk, and Alexandre de Moraes, a judge on the Brazilian Supreme Court.
This powerful and controversial magistrate ordered this drastic sanction after X, which had 22 million users in Brazil (more than 10% of the population), ignored a series of judicial decisions related to the fight against disinformation.
Since then, Bluesky, a network created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has gained more than 2 million new followers in a few days, while it had less than 6 million before X’s suspension, according to figures provided by the company.
And the number of searches for the term “Threads” on Google has quadrupled since August 30. The social network, which currently has 190 million users worldwide, did not respond to AFP on the number of new subscribers since X’s troubles in Brazil.
– No designated replacement –
Like X, these two platforms allow the instant publication of short texts that can be illustrated with images. Their applications are among the most downloaded in Brazil in recent days.
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The migration to Threads is a natural move in a country that has more than 140 million Instagram users, who can use the same logins and passwords to access it.
Professor Raul Nunes, who created his Twitter account in 2007, preferred to turn to Bluesky.
“Bluesky has the advantage of having the same language and the same references as Twitter. On the other hand, it’s a shame that there are no +trending topics+ (ranking of the most discussed themes on the network, editor’s note) and that we can’t publish videos there,” he comments.
Given the uncertainty over X’s fate, it is too early to know whether this migration will have lasting effects on the social media landscape in Brazil, an ultra-connected country with more smartphones than people.
Raquel Recuero, a specialist at the Federal University of Pelotas (Ufpel), in southern Brazil, believes that the orphans of X will “probably be distributed across different platforms.”
– Distrust –
For Viktor Chagas, professor of cultural and media studies at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), Brazilians are turning to social networks that resemble X to continue taking part in the public debate in their country, but also to stay connected with trends from elsewhere.
But the fact that these other platforms have a much smaller user base globally “can represent a certain isolation for Brazil,” he warns.
Leon Leal, for example, says he has difficulty finding on Bluesky the profiles of personalities he followed on X.
And as for Threads, “the number of users worldwide is higher, due to the link with Instagram, but it arouses more suspicion because it belongs to the Meta group,” analyzes Professor Chagas.
In Brazil, where X had established itself as the privileged arena of an ultra-polarized debate, political figures began to turn to other platforms.
Left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who did not use Threads or Bluesky until a few months ago, has started posting messages there regularly, as he used to on X.
But there are still a few diehards, like his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, a fervent admirer of Elon Musk, who still does not have an account on Bluesky and uses Threads to promote his account on the Telegram messaging service.
One of his loyalists, the fiery MP Nikolas Ferreira, 28, declared on Monday: “I have not created an account on Bluesky. X is my country.”
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