Bluesky is suddenly a lot more popular.
The X rival had around 6.2 million global users a week ago but thanks to the suspension of Elon Musk’s platform in Brazil, it’s suddenly had another 2 million signups. That’s about a tenth of X’s Brazilian erstwhile user base.
“A very warm welcome,” the Bluesky team wrote in an update yesterday. Meta’s Threads has also reportedly had a large influx of Brazilian users, though it hasn’t published figures.
To recap: X got banned in Brazil because of a drawn-out showdown between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes regarding a court-ordered blocking of several accounts in the country. Musk’s X has previously blocked users’ accounts on the orders of the Turkish and Indian governments—both times in the context of looming elections—but drew the line when it came to taking down accounts associated with a Jan. 6-style far-right insurrection in Brasília early last year.
On Friday, Moraes ordered X’s suspension until it takes down the accounts, and until it appoints a legal representative in Brazil, as it is also legally required to do. The Brazilian Supreme Court unanimously upheld the order yesterday, and also backed Moraes’s threat of a daily fine of $8,900 for any Brazilian who uses a VPN to access X.
Moraes also ordered the blocking of the bank accounts of satellite-based Internet service Starlink, owned by Musk’s SpaceX, on the grounds that X hadn’t paid fines that it received for refusing to hand over certain documents. The Supreme Court has reportedly yet to discuss whether to uphold that order, but Musk is certainly seething.
“Unless the Brazilian government returns the illegally seized property of X and SpaceX, we will seek reciprocal seizure of government assets too. Hope [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] enjoys flying commercial,” Musk announced yesterday on X, citing the recent seizure of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s plane. It’s unclear what legal mechanism Musk could invoke to seize Lula’s plane, given that—unlike Maduro’s regime—Brazil’s government is not under U.S. sanctions.
Hedge fund billionaire and Musk pal Bill Ackman has also weighed in, claiming that Moraes’s orders will make Brazil an “uninvestable market” and warning of “capital flight and a collapse in valuations.” Again, it’s unclear how this would happen, unless other business leaders also intend to start calling senior Brazilian judges “Voldemort,” as Musk has, and demanding their imprisonment.
Musk and Moraes’s machismo-fueled clash is a real Rorschach test. From one angle, it’s a clear case of a company thinking it can indefinitely flout a country’s laws while continuing to operate there, and discovering that actually it can’t. From another, it looks like a court system going too far in its attempt to prove a point.
The Financial Times reports that most Brazilians think Moraes was “exceeding the limits” of his authority, and that there has been a particularly strong backlash against the idea of fining regular people for daring to use a VPN to access a banned platform. Freezing Starlink’s assets also seems over-the-top.
Reuters also reports that the Brazilian telecoms regulator may revoke Starlink’s license to operate in Brazil for failing to block X in the country, unlike most other internet service providers. Starlink is refusing to comply because of its frozen funds. Countries, of course, can enforce their own laws, but—with Starlink’s reported 200,000 users in Brazil—this seems like a wild overreaction.
In short, nobody comes out of this looking good—except maybe Bluesky. “I confess that I’m (truly) rooting for Elon Musk not to comply with the court orders and for Twitter to remain offline,” the popular Brazilian YouTuber Felipe Neto posted yesterday from his shiny new Bluesky account, which already has over 150,000 followers.
More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Intel’s blue-chip status. Intel, shares of which have declined nearly 60% this year, is likely to lose its place in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, analysts and investors told Reuters. The news agency also reported that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger will make proposals to the board later this month about selling some business units and cutting some factory construction plans, including a delayed facility in Germany. Intel’s Foundry contract chipmaking business isn’t likely to be chopped just yet, but programmable chip unit Altera might be.
Filtering for kids. A Texas judge has blocked part of the state’s recent Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment (SCOPE) Act, specifically the part that says big web platforms must identify underage users and filter the content they see accordingly. The judge agreed with tech lobbyists that this violates the First Amendment. As The Verge reports, the move came late Friday, just before the SCOPE Act was due to fully come into force on Saturday. Its other elements, such as banning the targeting of ads at kids and limiting the collection of their data, are nonetheless a thing now.
Clearview AI fine. The Dutch privacy watchdog has fined the facial recognition provider Clearview AI €30.5 million ($33.7 million) for building “an illegal database with billions of photos of faces, including of Dutch people.” The U.S. company populates that database by scraping photos from the web, without the subjects’ permission. Clearview says it only serves intelligence and investigative agencies outside the EU, but Aleid Wolfsen, the watchdog’s chairman, said: “We have to draw a very clear line at incorrect use of this sort of technology.”
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
2
—The age at which toddlers in Sweden can start getting a bit of screen time each day, under a recommendation from the country’s Public Health Agency.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
HP confirms it will pursue Mike Lynch’s grieving family for $4 billion, by Ryan Hogg
Telegram’s financials: It’s a loss-making company (which holds a lot of crypto), by Jim Edwards
Russian public fear they may lose ‘main information source’ after Telegram founder’s arrest, by AFP
Taiwan says Trump ‘might have some misunderstanding’ when he says island took U.S. chip industry, by Bloomberg
China-linked ‘Spamouflage’ network of fake social media users mimics Americans to sway U.S. political debate, by the Associated Press
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pulled off a dramatic culture change that led to profitability. Here’s how it’s done, by Terence Mauri (Commentary)
BEFORE YOU GO
China AI setback. Huawei is the biggest hope for Chinese companies that want powerful AI chips, now that the West has insisted on holding back Nvidia’s most cutting-edge wares. But, according to a report in the Financial Times, Huawei’s Ascend chips have stability issues and come with buggy software in the form of Cann, Huawei’s counterpart to Nvidia’s widely used Cuda. “When random errors occur, it is very difficult to find out where it comes from due to poor documentation,” one of Huawei’s own (and understandably anonymous) researchers claimed, according to the article. “You need talented developers to read the source code to see what the issue is, which slows everything down.”