Elon Musk’s X has come under scrutiny since August because of reluctance to ban illegal accounts accused of dismembering misinformation and failure to prohibit them. Musk has been previously cautioned by the Brazilian judge, Alexandre de Moraes, to comply with the country’s laws.
However, Musk neither banned those accounts nor provided any legal representative. The powerful and controversial judge took the measure after Musk, who calls himself a “free speech absolutist,” ignored a series of court decisions. Moraes finally banned his X nationwide.
Amid this recent ban, it has significantly raised the profile of its smaller rival, Bluesky, as people search for alternatives to voice their opinions. Bluesky said in a post that it had attracted two million new users in a week. On Wednesday, it appeared that the application was encountering some difficulties, as several users reported experiencing an outage.
Since the X suspension in Brazil, Bluesky, a social media network founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has grown to have a whopping 7.6 million users.
“There will almost certainly be some outages and performance issues,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee said in a post, adding, “We’ve never seen traffic like this. Hang with us!”
On Wednesday, Bluesky was the most popular free app on Brazil’s iOS App Store. Next came Threads, a new app from Meta Platforms, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.
