Virginia Woolf Bot wasn’t the only loss. Earlier this month, as Brazil suspended X across the country, fan accounts of all types seemed to blink out of existence. Feeds for Beyoncé, for Taylor Swift, and for Miley Cyrus. Each posted some version of a goodbye post, as everyone from mainstream news outlets to Cardi B lamented the disappearance of what’s broadly known as Brazilian stan Twitter.
“Time to drop the character to say that unfortunately I’m Brazilian,” @botvirginia posted. “I’ve been inactive here for a while but I had plans to change that, apparently I can’t anymore. So maybe this is my swan song.”
Thing is, Brazilian stan Twitter—er, stan X—never fully went away. Even as accounts like @botvirginia posted “I do not want to pay 50,000 reais” (or roughly $9,000) in fines for accessing X through a backdoor, others stuck around. Some accounts were automated to keep posting; others logged onto X using VPNs. But “many,” says Adriana da Rosa Amaral, a communications professor at Paulista University in São Paulo whose research focuses on the intersection of pop culture and technology, “relied on a kind of digital solidarity.” They gave their credentials to friends abroad to post for them during the blackout.
Beyoncé Brasil, which boasts nearly 184,000 followers, kept posting, says one of the curators, Rafaella Silveira, because one of the administrators’ access wasn’t shut off by their ISP. “Since he was able to access it without using a VPN or illegal means,” Silveira says, “we ended up publishing some updates for the fans who remained.”
Another account, Beyoncé Press, which has nearly 98,000 followers, was able to keep posting because one of the three people responsible is based in the US. Still, the volume of what the account shared went down significantly. “Since the other Brazilian colleague and I are the ones who post the most, the impact was huge,” says Paulo Marçal, one of the account’s administrators, who is based in São Paulo. “We missed out on a lot of news and events in Beyoncé's career, but we tried to keep the page as minimally updated as possible.”
Brazil’s online fandoms are very unique, and very passionate. “The running joke is that Brazilians always say ‘Come to Brazil!’ because so many artists skip the country” when they tour, says Simone Driessen, an assistant professor of media and popular culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam. As the country’s X ban went into effect, the size and influence of those fandoms, particularly pop music fandoms, became more clear. Suddenly X users outside the country realized their favorite account had been run by someone in Brazil.
“The ‘global north’ often underestimates the intensity and pervasiveness of fan culture in Latin America, especially in Brazil, within the realm of digital platforms,” says Amaral. People in the country have been early adopters of and heavy users of social media since the early days of the internet, she adds, and fans in Brazil “are very intense in how they experience their parasocial relationships.” All those “Come to Brazil!” posts are about both fandom and a sense of national pride.
For weeks, some 40 million Brazilian X users have been beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country’s government. Back in April, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes opened an inquiry into the social network after Musk snubbed a court order asking the company to block accounts that backed former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and allegedly spread hate speech and misinformation.
On August 30, Brazil’s top court suspended X, giving internet service providers five days to comply and causing fan accounts to send up flares alerting their followers that they’d be going quiet.
During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians on X tried to bring their followers over to platforms like Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, the latter seeing a 2 million user jump in the days after the ban went into effect, bringing its total users to around 8 million. Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users, according to a report in TechCrunch. But many users found it hard to rebuild the followings they had on X.
“It’s undeniable that, for many businesses, the suspension of X has affected 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 have seen an important platform for promotion disappear overnight.”
Those who couldn’t transfer all of their followers from X to other platforms still vowed to maintain the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brasil, an account with more than 93,000 followers, says that “while X is under a businessman who thinks he is bigger than the laws of a country,” she and the other admins on the account will “keep Bluesky and X, at least for a while. So we don’t have to start from scratch again.”
While the platform has been down, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they’d put into curating them, Driessen notes, memory-holing “valuable pieces of pop cultural history” in the process. Even the accounts that have been able to continue posting sporadically still aren’t available for fans within the country who want to scroll through their old posts.
On September 18, when X briefly rerouted internet traffic to get around Brazil’s roadblocks, fans rejoiced. “I know it’s just a silly app, but it’s where I [feel] safe,” wrote Thaís Garcia, the person behind the Taylor Swift account @thalovestay. “I’m not in a good place mentally, and these past week was horrible without having here to distract myself.”
The reprieve was short-lived, but on September 20 X’s lawyers told the Supreme Court they’d found a legal representative for Brazil, a step toward getting the platform turned back on in the country. The company is now reportedly complying with some of Brazil’s other requests in hopes that the X ban will be lifted, perhaps as early as next week.
Once that happens, and it seems like it will, Brazilian stans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of the communities they built on Musk’s platform—even those who have already moved on.
Amaral notes that because many of the fan accounts are linked to more progressive artists, some of them may be reluctant to return to X due to the lack of moderation. “We know that for many fandoms, being part of a minority (whether in terms of gender, race, etc.) is a key aspect of their identity,” she adds. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this sort of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the folks behind the accounts will have to consider whether they want to return.
Even before X’s suspension, Beyoncé Brasil’s administrators had been working on revising and building out their website. It’s been nice to have something that’s “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.
