Photo illustration of the logo of the social media platform X (former Twitter) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo: AFP
Thaís Garcia, 32, has accepted that she can no longer scroll through X in São Paulo, Brazil, but her fingers haven’t quite gotten the memo.
Out of habit, Garcia, a graphic designer and Taylor Swift stan account owner, clicked to open the app on Saturday, as she has done for more than a decade, and even tried to refresh her page -- to no avail.
Instead, she has bounced from Instagram to Bluesky to WhatsApp, but none of them quite compare.
“I know it’s social media, but at the same time, it’s more than that,” Garcia said. “It’s the place where I’ve met amazing friends, some of them who became friends in real life. We support each other. We’ve laughed, cried and celebrated together there. It was part of my daily routine.”
On Friday, a months-long fight between the Brazilian government and X, formerly Twitter, came to a head when Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X to be suspended in the country.
The decision came after X’s owner, Elon Musk, refused to appoint a representative in Brazil who could help suspend accounts the government identified as spreading disinformation. The social media company also accused Moraes of “censorship” in a statement last month. Now, anyone in one of the platform’s largest markets caught using a virtual private network to use X could be fined nearly $9 000 (R160 944) a day, the judge said.
Brazilians’ exodus from the platform has left both entertainers and their fans in a lurch, as many of the internet’s most engaged celebrity fandom account owners are based in the country.
Many users have scrambled to reconnect with their followers on sites such as Instagram and Bluesky, which recently reported gaining more than 500 000 new users in two days.
It’s not just the account owners who are alarmed.
“Wait a lot of my fan pages are Brazilian!!!” Cardi B posted on X on Friday. “Come back hold up!!”
Alessia Cara shouted out one of her fan pages after the change. “You’ll be deeply missed @alessiacarabr,” she wrote on X. “Thank you for everything ... YOU’LL BE BACK.”
And as the account holders lose access to their daily passion projects, they also see the deterioration of a community that has changed their lives for the better -- online and in real life.
“Americans in particular … might underestimate the global reach of all of these platforms,” said Azadeh Aalai, an adjunct professor for New York University’s psychology department.
For as long as Jenny Müller, a 21-year-old biomedical science student and TikToker in London, can remember, Brazilian stans have had an outsize influence online, she said, reposting content, making hashtags trend, and flooding comment sections with “come to Brazil” -- so ubiquitous it became a meme.
Being a stan means being an extremely devoted and enthusiastic fan of a particular celebrity, musician, or public figure.
“If you don’t have someone that’s ever commented ‘Come to Brazil’ or ‘When you come to Brazil, we’ll show you around, we’ll be welcoming’ and whatnot, you are unloved,” she said in a TikTok in November.
K-pop groups don’t stop in Brazil as often as they might the US or Europe, Müller said. But when they do, the energy is palpable as she watches the concerts online.
“When NCT 127 went to Brazil, I saw them having so much fun. The crowd was so live, the idols were posting about it on their Instagram Stories and saying, ‘Brazil, you’re on fire',” she said.
“And I was like, ‘Wow!’ Because I’ve been to an NCT 127 concert in London, and it was good, but the energy was not as good as the Brazilian fans. They always bring their energy tenfold. Always.”
Caroline Metta, a 27-year-old Dua Lipa fan account co-owner in São Paulo, said she found solace meeting other Dua Lipa stans on the site in 2019 while she was struggling with depression and anxiety.
That same year, she joined five other fans of the “New Rules” singer from around Brazil to help run two Dua Lipa fan account pages, @dualipacentral_ and @dualipacentrall, which now collectively have nearly 75 000 followers.
Amid the X suspension, Metta said the team is posting content to its Instagram page, but the fans have only a fraction of their following on the platform. They’ve recently joined Bluesky, but without video uploading capabilities, they’re still experimenting.
“Twitter -- not just for me, but for a lot of people -- is entertainment in the middle of our difficult life,” she said.
Although the change has wrenched the routines of account owners and their followers, Sally Theran, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, sees some beneficial outcomes from the situation.
With their newfound downtime, fan account owners can re-evaluate whether they still find joy in their stan accounts or whether they want to try something else.
“There could be this sense of disorientation or feeling adrift,” she said, “but I suspect there’s always something to fill the void.”
Stan accounts out of Brazil also allowed tight-knit communities to flourish around hyper-specific interests and less-prominent figures, said Lexie Albuquerque, a 28-year-old TV writing and producing graduate in Los Angeles who helps run the Brazil fan page for “Once Upon a Time” actor Colin O’Donoghue.
When Albuquerque came to the US for college, she said she relied on the pages to stay connected to broader Brazilian culture, keeping up with what people were listening to, the latest reality TV shows everyone was obsessing over, and memes and jokes.
While she watched the ABC drama in high school and college, she befriended her now co-administrators and, eventually, those running other Brazilian fan pages for other characters on the show.
As a teen, she started writing speculative scripts and fan fictions based on “Once Upon a Time” that were formatted like episodes. The admins have even received appreciative messages from O’Donoghue and his family members.
Although the show ended in 2018, the friendships live on in group chats, and the connection to O’Donoghue remains as they update the page with his other projects.
While people are making the switch to Bluesky, Albuquerque has been reluctant, hoping that X will recognise the power of Brazilian fan accounts and change course soon.
“Brazil’s such a huge part of Twitter,” she said. “As everyone’s seen, every stan account is coming out as Brazilian.”
WASHINGTON POST