SAO PAULO: The blocking of social media platform X in Brazil divided users and politicians over the legitimacy of the ban, and many Brazilians on Saturday had difficulty and doubts over navigating other social media in its absence.
The shutdown of Elon Musk’s platform started early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through mobile apps after the billionaire refused to name a legal representative to the country, missing a deadline imposed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The blockade marks an escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.
Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users.
“I’ve got the feeling that I have no idea what’s happening in the world right now. Bizarre,” entertainment writer and heavy X user Chico Barney wrote on Threads. Threads is a text-based app developed by Instagram that Barney was using as an alternative. “This Threads algorithm is like an all-you-can-eat restaurant where the waiter keeps serving things I would never order.”
Bluesky, a social media platform that was launched last year as an alternative to X and other more established sites, has seen a large influx of Brazilians in the past couple of days. The company said Friday it has seen about 200,000 new users from Brazil sign up during that time, and the number “continues to grow by the minute.” Brazilian users are also setting records for activities such as follows and likes, Bluesky said.
Previous users of other platforms welcomed Brazilians to their ranks. “Hello literally everyone in Brazil,” a user wrote on Threads. “We’re a lot nicer than Twitter here,” said another.
Platform migration isn’t new for Brazilians. They were huge adopters of Orkut and, when Orkut went kaput, they very gladly moved to other platforms.
X is not as popular in Brazil as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. However, it remains an important platform on which Brazilians engage in political debates and is highly influential among politicians, journalists and other opinion makers.
It’s also where they share their sense of humor. Many of the country’s most famous memes originate from posts on X before spreading to other social networks. Last week, for instance, Brazilians collaboratively crafted an absurd storyline for a fictional telenovela, complete with a theme song created using artificial intelligence tools.
Pop stars and their fanbases were also hit by Brazilians being left off the platform.
“Wait a lot of my fan pages are Brazilian!!! Come back hold up!!,” Cardi B said Friday on X. A fan page dedicated to Timothée Chalamet, known by the handle TimotheeUpdates, said it would temporarily cease updating as all of its administrators are Brazilian.
De Moraes said X will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and he also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access it. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced. Others suggested the move was authoritarian.
The Brazilian Bar Association said Friday in a statement that it would request the Supreme Court review the fines imposed on all citizens using VPNs or other means to access X without due process. Brazil’s bar association argued that sanctions should never be imposed summarily before ensuring an adversarial process and the right to full defense.
“I’ve used VPNs a lot in authoritarian countries like China to continue accessing news sites and social networks,” Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said on the platform before its shutdown. “It never occurred to me that this type of tool would be banned in Brazil. It’s dystopian.”
A search Friday on X showed hundreds of Brazilian users inquiring about VPNs that could potentially enable them to continue using the platform by making it appear they are logging on from outside the country.
“Tyrants want to turn Brazil into another commie dictatorship but we won’t back down. I repeat: do not vote on those who don’t respect free speech. Orwell was right,” right-wing congressman Nikolas Ferreira, one of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s closest allies, published before X went off. Musk replied with an emoji suggesting agreement: “100”.
Ferreira is a 28-year-old YouTuber who received the most votes of the 513 elected federal lawmakers in the 2022 election. De Moraes ordered the block of his social media accounts after a mob of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil’s Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court in January 2023 seeking to overturn the election.
Lawmaker Bia Kicis said “the consequences of Alexandre de Moraes’ attacks to Elon Musk, X and Starlink will be regrettable for Brazilians.” She also urged Rodrigo Pacheco, the president of the country’s Senate, to act. Kicis has repeatedly urged Pacheco to open impeachment proceedings against the Supreme Court justice.
“We need to leave this state of apathy and stop the worst from happening,” the pro-Bolsonaro lawmaker, whose profiles were temporarily blocked by de Moraes in 2022, also said.
The former president said Saturday on Instagram that X’s departure from Brazil was “another blow to our freedom and legal security.”
“It not only affects our freedom of expression, but also undermines the confidence of international companies in operating on Brazilian soil, with impacts ranging from national security to the quality of the information that reaches our citizens,” Bolsonaro said.
On Friday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed de Moraes’ decision and took aim at Musk for positioning himself as though he was above the law during an interview with Radio MaisPB.
“Any citizen, from anywhere in the world, who has investments in Brazil, is subject to the Brazilian Constitution and Brazilian laws. Therefore, if the Supreme Court has made a decision for citizens to comply with certain things, they either have to comply or take another course of action,” Lula said. “It’s not because the guy has a lot of money that he can disrespect it.”
Ana Júlia Alves de Oliveira, an 18-year-old student, shared that many young people like her no longer watch newscasts or read newspapers, relying solely on social media platforms like X for their news. Without this platform, she felt disconnected.
“I kind of lost touch with what’s going on around the world,” she said. “I saw a lot of entertainment there too, so this is a new reality for me.”
On the first day without X, many Brazilians say they feel disconnected from the world
https://arab.news/9ajv3
On the first day without X, many Brazilians say they feel disconnected from the world
- Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users
Israel extends closure of Al Jazeera’s West Bank office
- Israel suspended Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office for 45 days in September on charges of “incitement to and support for terrorism”
- Announcement comes days after Palestinian Authority also suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories: Israeli authorities renewed a closure order for Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, days after the Palestinian Authority suspended the network’s broadcasts for four months.
An AFP journalist reported that Israeli soldiers posted the extension order Tuesday morning on the entrance of the building housing Al Jazeera’s offices in central Ramallah, a city under full Palestinian Authority security control.
The extension applies from December 22 and lasts 45 days.
In September, Israeli forces raided the Ramallah office and issued an initial 45-day closure order.
At the time, staff were instructed to leave the premises and take their personal belongings.
The move came months after Israel’s government approved a decision in May to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from Israel, also closing its offices for an initial 45-day period, which was extended for a fourth time by a Tel Aviv court in September.
Later in September, Israel’s government announced it was revoking the press credentials of Al Jazeera journalists in the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has long been at odds with Al Jazeera, a dispute that has escalated since the Gaza war began following Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7.
The Israeli army has repeatedly accused the network’s reporters in Gaza of being “terrorist operatives” affiliated with Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The Qatari channel denies the accusations, and says Israel systematically targets its staff in Gaza.
Meta replaces fact-checking with X-style community notes
- Meta cited bias and excessive content reviews as key factor in ending fact-checking program
- The social media company also announced plans to allow “more speech” by easing restrictions on discussions of mainstream topics like immigration and gender
LONDON: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta said Tuesday it’s scrapping its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes program written by users similar to the model used by Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
Starting in the US, Meta will end its fact-checking program with independent third parties. The company said it decided to end the program because expert fact checkers had their own biases and too much content ended up being fact checked.
Instead, it will pivot to a Community Notes model that uses crowdsourced fact-checking contributions from users.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X – where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a blog post.
The social media company also said it plans to allow “more speech” by lifting some restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discussion in order to focus on illegal and “high severity violations” like terrorism, child sexual exploitation and drugs.
Meta said that its approach of building complex systems to manage content on its platforms has “gone too far” and has made “too many mistakes” by censoring too much content.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the changes are in part sparked by political events including Donald Trump’s presidential election victory.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech,” Zuckerberg said in an online video.
Meta’s quasi-independent Oversight Board, which was set up to act as a referee on controversial content decisions, said it welcomed the changes and looked forward to working with the company “to understand the changes in greater detail, ensuring its new approach can be as effective and speech-friendly as possible.”
India press watchdog demands journalist murder probe
- Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing
NEW DELHI: India’s media watchdog has demanded a thorough investigation after a journalist’s battered body was found stuffed in a septic tank covered with concrete.
Freelance journalist Mukesh Chandrakar, 28, had reported widely on corruption and a decades-old Maoist insurgency in India’s central Chhattisgarh state, and ran a popular YouTube channel “Bastar Junction.”
The Press Council of India expressed “concern” over the suspected murder of Chandrakar, calling for a report on the “facts of the case” in a statement late Saturday.
Chandrakar’s body was found on January 3 after police tracked his mobile phone records following his family reporting him missing.
Three people have been arrested.
More than 10,000 people have died in the decades-long insurgency waged by Naxalite rebels, who say they are fighting for the rights of marginalized indigenous people in India’s resource-rich central regions.
Vishnu Deo Sai, chief minister of Chhattisgarh from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), called Chandrakar’s death “heartbreaking” and promised the “harshest punishment” for those found responsible.
India was ranked 159 last year on the World Press Freedom Index, run by Reporters Without Borders.
Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump
- Ann Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press
- Wapo exec says the cartoon was rejected only to avoid repetition, because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon
A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.
Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations.
Telnaes said that she’s never before had a cartoon rejected because of its inherent messaging and that such a move is dangerous for a free press.
“As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable,” Telnaes wrote. “For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’”
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement Saturday accusing the Post of “political cowardice” and asking other cartoonists to post Telnaes’ sketch with the hashtag #StandWithAnn in a show of solidarity.
“Tyranny ends at pen point,” the association said. “It thrives in the dark, and the Washington Post simply closed its eyes and gave in like a punch-drunk boxer.”
The Post’s communications director, Liza Pluto, provided The Associated Press on Saturday with a statement from David Shipley, the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Shipley said in the statement that he disagrees with Telnaes’ “interpretation of events.”
He said he decided to nix the cartoon because the paper had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and was set to publish another.
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. ... The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said.
Al-Qaeda has executed Yemeni journalist abducted 9 years ago, says media watchdog
- Mohamed Al-Maqri disappeared in the Arabian Peninsula while covering an anti-group protest in Al-Mukalla
LONDON: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has executed Yemeni journalist Mohamed Al-Maqri after holding him captive for nine years, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported on Thursday.
Al-Maqri, a correspondent for the television channel Yemen Today, was abducted in 2015 while covering an anti-AQAP protest in Al-Mukalla, the capital of the southern governorate of Hadhramaut.
He was executed along with 10 other individuals after years of enforced disappearance.
“The killing of Mohamed Al-Maqri highlights the extreme dangers Yemeni journalists face while reporting from one of the world’s perilous conflict zones,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA (Middle East and North Africa) program coordinator.
“Enforced disappearances continue to endanger their lives.”
Rezaian condemned the act and called for accountability, urging all factions in Yemen to abandon such “abhorrent practices.”
The Yemeni Journalists Syndicate also condemned the execution, saying it was working with “the relevant authorities to investigate the crime, prosecute the perpetrators, recover the journalist’s body, and deliver it to his family.”
Al-Maqri had been held incommunicado by AQAP since Oct. 12, 2015, following his abduction during the protest.
The group accused the individuals of “spying against the mujahedeen,” a label the group uses for its fighters.
His death underscores the increasing dangers for journalists operating in Yemen, where armed groups have targeted media professionals as part of broader efforts to suppress dissent and control narratives.
At least two other Yemeni journalists remain subjected to enforced disappearances, a practice characterized by abduction and the refusal to disclose a person’s fate or whereabouts.
Waheed Al-Sufi, the editor-in-chief of the independent newspaper Al-Arabiya, has been missing since April 2015 and is thought to be being held by the Houthi movement.
Naseh Shaker, who was last heard from on Nov. 19, 2024, is believed to be being held by the Southern Transitional Council, a secessionist organization in southern Yemen.
Yemen continues to rank among the deadliest countries for journalists, with armed conflict and factional violence leaving media workers vulnerable to abductions, disappearances, and killings.
