The social network X has been largely unavailable in Brazil since Saturday after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexander de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company’s misinformation, hate speech and moderation policies.
With Brazil’s population of 215 million, its mature democracy, its vast territory, and more than 20,000 Internet service providers, blocking a web platform in the South American nation is not easy. And while the biggest ISPs have implemented the ban, many are still struggling to comply with the order, leaving a patchwork of site access.
“Brazil has made progress in blocking X on major ISPs, but our telemetry shows that there is a long queue of local and regional ISPs where service is still available,” said Isik Mater, director of research at the Internet Analysis Group the NetBlocks censorship.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference reported that a similar progression occurred when Brazil’s Federal Police received a court order in April 2023. for ISPs to block the Telegram communication platform because it will not fully share information about users participating in neo-Nazi group chats. Some major ISPs immediately started blocking Telegram. “However, blocking was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. “This suggests a lack of coordination between providers and that each ISP implemented the block autonomously.”
A similar progression is playing out with the X ban. Brazil’s 20,000 ISPs make for a highly competitive market, but only a few have nationwide infrastructure. About 40 percent are small regional providers with 5,000 customers or fewer. Human rights and digital rights organization Freedom House rates internet freedom in Brazil as “partly free” and has tended to be increasingly restrictive, due to the country’s sweeping efforts to tackle political disinformation in recent years and the three-day ban on Telegram. Brazil also blocked the secure communication platform WhatsApp in December 2015. and again in May 2016 when she did not respond to similar requests for data.
