The social network X has been largely inaccessible in Brazil since Saturday after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order came after a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X CEO Elon Musk over the company’s misinformation, hate speech and moderation policies.
Brazil’s population of 215 million, mature democracy, vast territory and over 20,000 internet service providers make blocking web platforms a challenge in the South American country. While major ISPs have implemented the bans, many others are still struggling to comply with the order, leaving access to sites fragmented.
“Brazil is making efforts to block X across major internet providers, but our telemetry shows that there are still many local and regional ISPs where the service is available,” said Isik Matar, director of research at internet censorship analysis group NetBlocks.
The Open Network Interference Observatory reported a similar development in April 2023, when Brazilian Federal Police obtained a court order requiring ISPs to block the communications platform Telegram for not fully sharing information about users participating in neo-Nazi group chats. Some major ISPs immediately began blocking Telegram. “However, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor in the same way,” the group wrote. “This suggests a lack of coordination between providers and that each ISP implemented the block autonomously.”
The X-ban follows a similar development. Brazil’s 20,000 ISPs form a competitive market, but only a few have a national infrastructure. About 40% are small regional providers with fewer than 5,000 customers. Human and digital rights watchdog Freedom House rates Brazil’s internet freedom as “partly free,” noting that the country’s widespread efforts to crack down on political misinformation in recent years and its three-day ban of Telegram have led to a trend toward more restrictive practices. Brazil also blocked the secure communications platform WhatsApp in December 2015 and May 2016 for failing to comply with similar data requests.
Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED.
Unlike countries such as Russia, Iran or China, the legal apparatus and technical infrastructure that enable the Brazilian government to systematically and comprehensively restrict access to certain websites or online platforms or impose blocking on its citizens does not currently exist.
Many of the Brazilian ISPs that implemented the ban reportedly block access to X using a technique known as “DNS filtering.” The Domain Name System is the Internet’s phonebook for finding the IP address associated with a URL, such as www.wired.com. DNS queries are sent to DNS “resolvers,” which do the IP address lookup, and ISPs can configure their resolvers to filter or block requests to certain websites.
However, mobile apps such as X’s Android and iOS apps don’t rely on DNS, so DNS filtering alone isn’t enough to block all connections to the web platform. Some ISPs in Brazil also appear to be using IP address “sinkholing” (redirecting online traffic to a different server than the one the user was trying to visit) as a way to send traffic intended for X into the abyss.
“There’s a lot of variability between providers in Brazil, and for now it seems like each one is trying their own methods to see what works,” NetBlocks’ Matter said. “Because Brazil has a diverse network infrastructure and many ways for data to get in and out of the country, there aren’t any centralized choke points or ‘kill switches’ like you see in[some]authoritarian countries.”
The ban this week saw a surge in VPN use in Brazil as a way to get around ISP attempts to block X, but the court-ordered ban includes a clause that makes the use of circumvention tools like VPNs punishable by fines of 50,000 reais (around $8,900) per day.
