The Lights Go Down on Stan Twitter
5 min read
When X was blocked in Brazil on Saturday—the result of a legal skirmish between the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, and Alexandre de Moraes, a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court—a sizable crater was left behind. More than 20 million people lost access to the site, yet the effect was about more than numbers. Brazilian users have played an unusually large role in developing the site’s well-known super-fan culture. Now they’re gone, and they’re not sure whether they’ll get to come back. It “felt like a huge funeral,” Júlia Bonin, a 25-year-old X user from Brazil, told me.
Back when X was known as Twitter, Brazilian pop-culture fans developed a reputation for exuberance and visibility. Memorably, they repeatedly replied “Come to Brazil” under basically any and every post from a celebrity. The phrase was a sincere expression of Brazilian fans’ regret that their relationships with international stars were often “unilateral,” says Mayka Castellano, a professor of cultural and media studies at the Federal Fluminense University, in Brazil. Many pop stars on international tours skipped South America entirely or Brazil in particular.
“Come to Brazil” was posted so often, starting around 2009, that it became a meme among Americans and other English-speaking Twitter users. The meme did its work over the years, and it may be a measure of its success that Taylor Swift finally made a tour stop in Brazil for the first time last year (though not without incident). This was such a significant event that fans convinced the mayor of Rio de Janeiro to turn the city’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue into a welcome sign.
To be removed from the site, then, is more than a minor inconvenience—Luana Silva, a 24-year-old Harry Styles fan, referred to the ban as “a great injustice.” She joined Twitter when she was 10 years old. “That’s 14 years of tweeting every day,” she told me. “In all these years, I never imagined something like this could happen.” The incident has underscored yet again that, although users may define a platform’s culture, their status is ultimately contingent. Sites close, change their rules, or, yes, get banned by governments. (Brazil once blocked WhatsApp three times in an eight-month period.)
Fans talk about the internet as though it’s a physical space, which means they have to talk about where to go when one space is no longer available. The history of the web is full of stories of users being shunted from one platform to another, frequently in response to new ownership or some disruptive policy change. This time, many displaced X users have moved over to Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter-like platform backed by Jack Dorsey, which has reportedly signed up about 2 million new users in the past several days. But it’s not ideal for fan activity: It doesn’t have trending topics, it doesn’t support video, and celebrities don’t really use it. According to Bonin, her friends will go anywhere but to Instagram’s Threads, which she said is stigmatized as being for “losers” and “weird people.”
“I think it’s a huge loss for Twitter,” Bonin said. “We are very smart and charismatic, and we are really fast at making memes.” Her friends now talk about X like it’s a phantom limb—they can’t stop reaching for their phone whenever they have the perfect idea for a post. She has no idea where they’re supposed to get their news now (“From news on TV? From websites, like old people?”). And because Bonin is currently living in Budapest and her account has been unaffected, she’s been left behind like the last woman standing in a ghost town, posting about Formula One and American pop stars to no one. “I just want you guys back,” she tells her friends. “Now I’m all alone with the English tweets.”
In the hours before the ban, major fan accounts run by Brazilians said their goodbyes, one after another. (“It’s lindaover guys,” a Linda Cardellini fan account wrote.) Many of them had always posted in English and thus had enormous followings in the United States and elsewhere. They executed emergency-response plans, listing all of their other accounts on other platforms, unsure which one would win out. Then they waited. “I’m going to brush my teeth,” a BTS fan account wrote in Portuguese. “If I don’t come back, see you sometime.” A bot posting Virginia Woolf quotes, run by someone in Brazil, ended on a series of eerie lines from the writer’s diary (“Now is life very solid, or very shifting?”). Bonin saw non-Brazilians expressing horror about the ban, too, “saying, ‘This website is nothing without Brazilians; this is so wrong; Elon Musk is so wrong.’” Even Cardi B took issue, posting, “Wait a lot of my fan pages are Brazilian!!! Come back hold up!!”
Access to the site may be reinstated once the political matters are settled, of course. But Musk has not appeared interested in bowing to pressure. The conflict leading to the ban started when he refused to remove dozens of X accounts that Moraes claimed were violating Brazilian law. Musk has been stirring up support from the American political right by framing the dispute as a major free-speech issue, and last week, he called Moraes “an evil dictator.” X did not respond to a request for comment.
Setting aside the intricacies of the political arguments involved, Brazilians I spoke with resented suffering someone else’s consequences. They expressed anger toward Musk, suggesting that he is a remote, self-interested billionaire with little respect for their country. (A post reading “VAI SE FUDER ELON MUSK”—Portuguese for “Fuck you, Elon Musk”—was reposted 127,000 times.) They also thought the Brazilian government should find some way of dealing with its problems with Musk that didn’t involve punishing the users of a site he owns. “At the end of the day, it’s us with fan clubs, friends, and the desire to connect with the world who are affected,” Silva said.
The first two years of Musk’s ownership of X has been marked by upheaval and exodus movements. This isn’t the first time many, many people have left at once. But because fan culture is such a huge part of the site’s identity and purpose, and has been for so long, these users’ absence is especially noticeable. It affects the experience of users who weren’t raptured as well. One viral post from a non-Brazilian, non–fan account rattled off a litany of all the changes on the platform since 2022, culminating with the Brazil event. Then she asked, “Why are we even here,” suggesting that the site has nothing left of value.
The irony of this week’s forceful separation of user from platform is that fans may be the only people who still really, really want to be on X. They didn’t call it hell. They didn’t delete their accounts—they left them there just in case. They’re holding out hope that this is all temporary, and would come right back if the ban were reversed. “We would return that very second,” Silva told me. “We miss Twitter so much.”
