Social network X has been largely unavailable in Brazil since Saturday, after the country’s Supreme Court ordered all mobile and internet service providers to block the platform. The court order followed a months-long dispute between Judge Alexandre de Moraes and X Chief Executive Elon Musk over disinformation, hate speech and the company’s moderation policies.
Given Brazil’s population of 215 million, its mature democracy, its huge landmass, and its more than 20,000 internet service providers, blocking an internet platform in the South American country is no straightforward feat. And while major ISPs have implemented the ban, many are still struggling to comply, leaving access to the site unchecked.
“Brazil has made progress in blocking X on major ISPs, but our telemetry data indicates that there is a long list of local and regional ISPs where the service is still available,” says Isik Mater, research director at internet censorship analysis group NetBlocks.
Open Network Interference Observatory reported that a similar progression occurred when the Brazilian Federal Police obtained a court order in April 2023 ordering internet service providers block Telegram messaging platform because it did not fully share information about users involved in neo-Nazi group chats. Some major ISPs began blocking Telegram immediately. “However, the block was not implemented by all ISPs in Brazil, nor was it implemented in the same way,” the group wrote. “This suggests a lack of coordination between providers and that each ISP implemented the block autonomously.”
Similar progress was made with the X ban. Brazil’s 20,000 ISPs create an extremely competitive market, but only a few have infrastructure across the country. 40 percent are small regional suppliers with 5,000 or fewer customers. Human rights and digital rights watchdog Freedom House assesses internet freedom in Brazil as “partly free” and moving toward more restrictiveness, due to the country’s far-reaching efforts to crack down on political disinformation in recent years and a three-day ban on Telegram. Brazil also WhatsApp secure messaging platform blocked in December 2015 and again in May 2016 because it failed to respond to similar requests for data.
Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency did not respond to WIRED’s repeated requests for comment.
Unlike countries such as Russia, Iran and China, there is currently no legal apparatus or technical infrastructure through which the Brazilian government can systematically and comprehensively restrict access to specific websites or online platforms or impose connectivity blackouts on its citizens.
Reports indicate that many Brazilian ISPs that have implemented the ban are using a technique known as “DNS filtering” to block access to X. The Domain Name System is an Internet directory for looking up IP addresses associated with URLs such as www.wired.com. DNS queries are sent to a DNS “resolver,” which performs IP lookups, and ISPs can configure their resolvers to filter or block requests for specific sites.
Mobile apps like the X apps for Android and iOS don’t rely on DNS, though, so DNS filtering alone isn’t enough to block all connections to the web platform. Some Brazilian ISPs also appear to be using IP “sinkholing”—redirecting online traffic to a different server than the one users intended to visit—as a way to send traffic intended for X into the abyss.
“We see differences from vendor to vendor in Brazil, and right now it seems like each vendor is trying their hand at it to see what works,” says NetBlocks’ Mater. “Brazil has a diverse network infrastructure with multiple ways to get data in and out of the country, so there’s no centralized choke point or kill switch like we see in [some] “countries with authoritarian tendencies.”
Using a VPN has this week in Brazil there has been a sharp increase under the ban, which is intended to circumvent attempts by ISPs to block the X service, but the court’s ban includes a provision under which people who exploit circumvention tools such as VPNs could be fined 50,000 reais – about $8,900 – per day.