PARIS – With its ban of X, which went into effect on Saturday, Brazil joins a small club of countries to have taken similar measures against the social network, most of them run by authoritarian regimes.
Beyond permanent bans, some nations have temporarily restricted access to X, formerly Twitter, which has often been used by political dissidents to communicate.
These have included Egypt in 2011 during the Arab Spring uprisings, Turkey in 2014 and 2023, and Uzbekistan around that country’s 2021 presidential election.
No X zone
Beijing banned Twitter in June 2009, before it secured the prominent place it enjoyed in Western media and politics for much of the 2010s.
The block came two days before the 20-year anniversary of the government’s crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations in the capital’s Tiananmen Square. Since then, many Chinese people have turned to home-grown alternatives such as Weibo and WeChat.
Twitter was also blocked by Tehran in 2009 as a wave of demonstrations broke out following a contested June presidential election. The network has nevertheless been used since then to pass information to the outside world about dissident movements, including the demonstrations against Iran’s repression of women’s rights since late 2022.
Isolated Central Asian country Turkmenistan blocked Twitter in the early 2010s, alongside many other foreign online services and websites.
Authorities in Ashgabat surveyed closely citizens’ usage of the internet, provided through state-run monopoly operator TurkmenTelecom. Pyongyang opened its own Twitter account in 2010 in a bid to woo foreigners interested in the country. But the application has been blocked along with Facebook, Youtube, and gambling and pornography websites since April 2016.
Internet access beyond a few government websites is under tight government watch in the hermit regime, with access restricted to a few high-ranking officials.
X has been blocked since February 2021, when authorities took aim at the app for its use by opponents of the military coup that overthrew Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government.
Since then, the junta has kept a tight grip on internet access in Myanmar.
Access to Twitter was throttled in 2021 by Moscow, which complained the site was allowing users to spread “illegal content”.
A formal ban came in March 2022, just after Russia started a war with Ukraine.
Many Russian users continue to connect to X via VPN services that allow them to get around the block. X has been banned since parliamentary polls in February this year.
Pakistan’s government, backed by the army, said the block is for security reasons.
Former prime minister Imran Khan, now in jail, was targeted by widespread allegations of fraud spread via the platform against his opposition party. Nicolas Maduro, who was declared winner of July’s presidential election despite grave suspicions of fraud, ordered access to X suspended for 10 days on 9 August as security forces were violently putting down nationwide demonstrations.
The block has remained in place beyond the expiry of the 10-day period.
The country’s block on X has come from the judiciary, via Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes.
He has highlighted the reactivation of accounts that had been ordered suspended by Brazilian courts.
Users connecting to X via a VPN face a fine of 50 000 reais (US$8 900) per day.
-Nampa/AFP