The Stan accounts that continue to post despite Brazil's X ban

For a few weeks 40 million Brazilian X users were beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country's government. Back in April, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes launched an investigation into the social network after Musk rejected a court order that ordered the company to block accounts that supported former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro and alleged hate speech and misinformation spread.

On August 30, Brazil's Supreme Court suspended

During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians tried to reach around 8 million. According to a report from TechCrunch, Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users. However, many users found it difficult to restore the followers present on X.

“It is undeniable that for many companies, the suspension of X is having an impact on the way they communicate with customers,” says Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia. (His work has appeared in WIRED.) “The same goes for artists and influencers who watched a major advertising platform disappear overnight.”

Those who couldn't transfer all of their followers from X to other platforms still vowed to keep the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brasil, an account with more than 93,000 followers, says: “While Keep Bluesky and X, at least for a while. So we don’t have to start from scratch again.”

While the platform was unavailable, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they had put into curating them, Driessen notes, losing “precious pieces of pop culture history” in their memory in the process. Even the accounts that were able to continue posting sporadically are still unavailable to fans in the country who want to scroll through their old posts.

On September 18th When X briefly redirected internet traffic to avoid Brazil's roadblocks, fans cheered. “I know it's just a silly app, but it's where I [feel] sure,” wrote Thaís Garcia, the person behind the Taylor Swift account @thalovestay. “I'm not feeling well mentally and the last week has been terrible without me here to distract me.”

The reprieve was short-lived, but on September 20, lawyers said the company is now complying with some of Brazil's other demands and hopes to have the X ban lifted, perhaps as soon as next week.

Once that happens, and it looks like it will, Brazilian stans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of communities they've built on Musk's platform – even those who have already moved on .

Amaral points out that many of the fan accounts are linked to more progressive artists and some of them may not be willing to return to X due to a lack of moderation. “We know that for many fandoms, being a minority (be it gender, race, etc.) is a core aspect of their identity,” she adds. There's a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this kind of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the people behind the accounts will have to think about whether they want to return.

Even before X's suspension, Beyoncé Brasil's administrators had been working on revamping and expanding her website. It was nice to have something that was “100 percent ours,” Silveira says. “I would say [the X account is] like a photo album: it’s good to revisit it, but we won’t die if we don’t have it.”

Gabriel Leão contributed reporting from São Paulo.