As billionaire Elon Musk’s clash with a Brazilian Supreme Court justice came to a head last week, there were legal twists, insults, ultimatums, defiance and then, finally, capitulation. When the digital dust settled, X had become an ex.

Musk’s social media platform was banned nationwide and Justice Alexandre de Moraes set a whopping $9,000 daily fine for anyone using a virtual private network (VPN) to skirt the suspension. Brazil’s X users, left casting about for a new platform, mostly started washing up on Threads and Bluesky.

“Hello literally everyone in Brazil,” Shauna Wright posted on Threads the day de Moraes ordered X’s suspension.

Everyone hadn’t been on X; Brazil’s social masses are primarily on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. But X had outsize influence in terms of newsmakers, agenda setting and thought leaders. It was the local battleground of the global culture war and the peanut gallery for soccer games and reality shows, especially Big Brother. So as X went dark in this highly online country of 213 million, its users started migrating.

Wright’s post was an in-joke for fellow former employees of the company then known as Twitter, and an homage to its award-winning post when Meta’s Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp all went down in 2021, sending users flocking to Twitter for info. But Wright also intended her throwback as a genuine greeting to all the friendly Brazilians.

“It took off even among those who didn’t get the reference, but they didn’t have to!” Wright, a content designer who posts as “goldengateblond”, told the Associated Press from San Francisco. “I was glad it made people feel welcome.”

Meta launched Threads last year amid widespread backlash to Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter and his upending many of its policies and features — from content moderation to its user verification system.

Opening a Threads account was seamless for Instagram users, so it scaled rapidly; it had 175 million monthly users globally as of July, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced. Meta declined to provide specifics on Brazilian users.

More Brazilians went to Bluesky, a lesser-known platform that not only looks and feels very much like the former Twitter, but also grew out of it. The pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey was supposed to replace it eventually. Whether it can remains to be seen, but Brazilians have started doing their part. Bluesky gained 2.6 million users since last week, 85% from Brazil, the company said Wednesday, boosting its total to over 8 million.

“Good morning everyone,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva posted Sunday on Bluesky and Threads. “What do you think of it here?”

“Our mental health is already showing signs of improvement,” Tatiane Queiroz, 43, replied on Bluesky, where she describes herself as a “Twitter refugee in Mato Grosso,” a state in Brazilian farm country.

Bluesky has been posting in Portuguese to get Brazilians situated and find those with whom they previously shared connections. They celebrated Wednesday as TV network Globo’s evening news program, which gets over 20 million viewers, presented its new Bluesky account on air. Pioneers with prior footholds are giving tips and sharing so-called “starter packs” of accounts to follow.

Jefferson Nascimento, a human rights lawyer in Sao Paulo, has created 10 starter packs to help newbies navigate.

“In some way, to strengthen the environment, make the environment more favorable for other people to go there, so that when Twitter (X) comes back — if it does come back at some point — there isn’t a mass stampede again,” said Nascimento, 42, whose follower count on X was 135,000, more than triple his Bluesky amount.

Some compared Bluesky to the halcyon days of early-2010s Twitter. Egerton Neto, 30, opened his Bluesky account on the day of X’s shutdown. He has just 8 followers — far below his 252 on X — but appreciates Bluesky’s more peaceful discourse and less intentional addictiveness. He said by phone from Recife that he also likes seeing its developers interact with the community as they build the platform.

Starting over from scratch online is a bit of déjà vu for Brazilians — at least millenials. They were early adopters of Google’s former social network Orkut and dominated the platform before its 2014 shutdown. They migrated en masse to Facebook.

Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber told the AP on Monday that this wave of Brazilians underscores one of its missions: allowing users to move platforms and keep connections, similar to switching cell phone carriers without losing your number or contacts.

On established social networks like TikTok or Facebook, users can only interact with people on the same platform. There’s no interoperability. Big Tech companies have largely built moats around their online properties, which helps serve their advertising-focused business models. Bluesky is building the technical foundation — what it calls “a protocol for public conversation” — that could make networks work more like email, blogs or phone numbers.

“The situation users are in today is a bit of a trap because users are locked in and developers are locked out of these social platforms. And then that means that you’re essentially stuck in a place where it should be offering you a service, but now it’s owning your entire social life,” Graber said. “One of the fundamental things we believe is that a user’s social relationships, like their social graph, their connections to their friends, should be something that they own.”

X had 22 million users in Brazil, according to estimates in the Digital 2024: Brazil report, just one-sixth the number on Instagram, and about one-fifth of Facebook or TikTok. But skimpy figures bely its importance as a gathering place for journalists, politicians, academics and celebrities whose interactions resounded far beyond, according to David Nemer, who specialises in the anthropology of technology at the University of Virginia.

“Even though Twitter may not have this direct impact on the everyday, common Brazilians, it would impact the press, which eventually would impact indirectly common Brazilians,” said Nemer, who is Brazilian. “That’s the sort of impact that Twitter has — or used to have — in Brazil.”

According to data from research firm Similarweb, X was Brazil’s fourth-most downloaded social media app from the Google Play store the day before its suspension; Bluesky has since surpassed it. On Apple’s app store, Bluesky became the top downloaded app of any type, social media or otherwise. Bluesky saw daily active Brazilian users reach 3.4 million on August 30, the day de Moraes ordered the shutdown, versus X’s 6.1 million that day.

Similarweb data also showed many Brazilians using VPNs to stay on X. Nemer said that from his home in Charlottesville he has seen some far-right politicians brazenly posting and defying Brazil’s Supreme Court to levy its exorbitant fine.

But most Brazilians have gone, and there were those on X lamenting their departure. And Brazilian X users who emigrated were settling into their new digital abodes, like columnist and internet personality Chico Barney.

“Bluesky as a post-Twitter refuge proving once and for all that it doesn’t matter the place, but the people,” he wrote Wednesday.

It’s a showdown between the world’s richest man and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice.

The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has threatened to suspend social media giant X nationwide in the coming hours if its billionaire owner Elon Musk doesn’t swiftly comply with one of his orders. Musk has responded with insults, including calling de Moraes a “tyrant” and “a dictator.”

It is the latest chapter in the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. The deadline for compliance is fast approaching, and many in Brazil are waiting and watching to see if either man will blink.

Earlier this month, X removed its legal representative from Brazil on the grounds that de Moraes had threatened her with arrest. On Wednesday night at 8:07 p.m. local time (7:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time), de Moraes gave the platform 24 hours to appoint a new representative, or face a shutdown until his order is met.

De Moraes’ order is based on Brazilian law requiring foreign companies to have legal representation to operate in the country, according to the Supreme Court’s press office. This ensures someone can be notified of legal decisions and is qualified to take any requisite action.

X’s refusal to appoint a legal representative would be particularly problematic ahead of Brazil’s October municipal elections, with a churn of fake news expected, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro. Takedown orders are common during campaigns, and not having someone to receive legal notices would make timely compliance impossible.

“Until last week, 10 days ago, there was an office here, so this problem didn’t exist. Now there’s nothing. Look at the example of Telegram: Telegram doesn’t have an office here, it has about 50 employees in the whole world. But it has a legal representative,” Belli, who is also a professor at the university’s law school, told The Associated Press.

Any Brazilian judge has the authority to enforce compliance with decisions. Such measures can range from lenient actions like fines to more severe penalties, such as suspension, said Carlos Affonso Souza, a lawyer and director of the Institute for Technology and Society, a Rio-based think tank.

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 due to the company’s refusal to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online.

Affonso Souza added that an individual judge’s ruling to shut down a platform with so many users would likely be assessed at a later date by the Supreme Court’s full bench.

De Moraes would first notify the nation’s telecommunications regulator, Anatel, who would then instruct operators — including Musk’s own Starlink internet service provider — to suspend users’ access to X. That includes preventing the resolution of X’s website — the term for conversion of a domain name to an IP address — and blocking access to the IP address of X’s servers from inside Brazilian territory, according to Belli.

Given that operators are aware of the widely publicised standoff and their obligation to comply with an order from de Moraes, plus the fact doing so isn’t complicated, X could be offline in Brazil as early as 12 hours after receiving their instructions, Belli said.

Since X is widely accessed via mobile phones, de Moraes is also likely to notify major app stores to stop offering X in Brazil, said Affonso Souza. Another possible — but highly controversial — step would be prohibiting access with virtual private networks ( VPNs) and imposing fines on those who use them to access X, he added.

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, are banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan.

China banned X when it was still called Twitter back in 2009, along with Facebook. In Russia, authorities expanded their crackdown on dissent and free media after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. They have blocked multiple independent Russian-language media outlets critical of the Kremlin, and cut access to Twitter, which later became X, as well as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.

In 2009, Twitter became an essential communications tool in Iran after the country’s government cracked down on traditional media after a disputed presidential election. Tech-savvy Iranians took to Twitter to organise protests. The government subsequently banned the platform, along with Facebook.

Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored.

Brazil is a key market for X and other platforms. Some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month, according to the market research group Emarketer. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has claimed de Moraes’ actions amount to censorship and rallied support from Brazil’s political right. He has also said that he wants his platform to be a “global town square” where information flows freely. The loss of the Brazilian market — the world’s fourth-biggest democracy — would make achieving this goal more difficult.

Brazil is also a potentially huge growth market for Musk’s satellite company, Starlink, given its vast territory and spotty internet service in far-flung areas.

Late Thursday afternoon, Starlink said on X that de Moraes this week froze its finances, preventing it from doing any transactions in the country where it has more than 250,000 customers.

“This order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X. It was issued in secret and without affording Starlink any of the due process of law guaranteed by the Constitution of Brazil. We intend to address the matter legally,” Starlink said in its statement.

Musk replied to people sharing the earlier reports of the freeze, adding his own insults directed at de Moraes.

“This guy @Alexandre is an outright criminal of the worst kind, masquerading as a judge,” he wrote.

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time in which it is imperiled.

In April, de Moraes included Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation into the executive for alleged obstruction.

X said Thursday in a statement that it expects its service to be shut down in Brazil.

“Unlike other social media and technology platforms, we will not comply in secret with illegal orders,” it said. “To our users in Brazil and around the world, X remains committed to protecting your freedom of speech.”

It also said de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court “are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”