After the social media platform X was banned in Brazil last week, scientists in the country began hectically after another online forum to look at their research, communicate with colleagues and to stay up to date with scientific progress . "I owe the pursuit of specialist magazines and important people to always be up to date," says Regina Rodrigues, a physical oceanographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil.

Some feel isolated due to the change. "I have lost contact with colleagues and European research groups that I joined in Spain during my postdoctorate," says Rodrigo Cunha, a communication researcher at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil.

others are more relaxed and point out that many researchers already X (formerly Twitter) left , after Billiard Elon Musk bought it and changed his guidelines, including those for content moderation and confirmation of users as "verified" or as an authoritative source of information. Sabine Righetti, a science communication researcher at Campina State University in Brazil, left the platform at the beginning of last year because of what it perceived as a increase in aggressive news, especially against scientists, journalists and women. "I'm all of these three things," she says.

Ronaldo Lemos, main scientist at the Institute of Technology and Society in Rio de Janeiro, says that the ban could give an insight into what the world would look like without X. Social networks come and go, he says and refers to some that have been closed, such as Google’s Orkut, which was closed in 2014 and was once popular in Brazil. "People adapt and look for ways to reconstruct their networks in other places," he says.

Free expression of opinion

On August 30, the Brazilian senior court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered the ban after a month -long conflict with Musk had occurred across the limits of freedom of expression.

At the beginning of last month, de Moraes issued a judicial order to close a series of accounts that were regarded as the widespread of disinformation and the destabilization of Brazilian democracy. The company did not comply with this and closed his office in Brazil about two weeks later. As a result, de Moraes issued an order according to which X should appoint a new legal representative in the country, since the previous one had not complied with the judicial orders. X ignored the arrangement, which led to the ban. Last week the Supreme Court of Brazil confirmed de Moraes' judgment-this includes a fine of $ 9,000 a day for anyone who is caught in Brazil who is caught using a virtual private network (VPN) or other means. (A VPN usually encrypted the data of a user and camouflages its IP address.) That is more than most Brazilians earn a year.

Alexandre de Moraes; src =

For years, scientists X have not only used to do Comments on research and the search for new employees but also to promote their work To correct misunderstandings. During the Covid 19 pandemic, for example, Átila Iamarino, a microbiologist and science communicator in São Paulo, Brazil, became a preferred source of Coronavirus Sars-Cov-2 and reached more than one million follower. "It was the place where I dealt with colleagues, put together arguments for live broadcasts and exposed false information when they came out."

Karina Lima, climatologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, misses the platform because it was a place where she received opportunities through her science communication work and achieved many people. But she acknowledges that social media should not be "a legal space that favors hate speeches and disinformation".

somewhere else on trial

Despite the increase in this type of news according to Musk's takeover 1 remained. Letícia Sallorenzo, linguistics researcher at the University of Brasília, was still useful. Before the ban, she accidentally studied online hate speech, which aimed at de Moraes. She excluded the ban from this work and she has to ask the court to use X via a virtual private network to continue.

Scientists outside of Brazil also feel the loss of X in the country. Although it had become a less reliable network for scientists, "there are Brazilian researchers and institutions with which I can work with," says Jonathan Vicente, researcher for climate change and health at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

More than two million people in Brazil have now passed to another social media platform called Bluesky. "It is the platform that resembles Twitter the most than it started," says Iamarino. Scientists also try it out, as well as other platforms such as Mastodon and threads, says Lemos. The good news is that "it is not as if Twitter had stopped and there is no alternative," he adds.

However,

social networks online can be difficult, especially for researchers from low -income countries that have little visibility, says Rodrigues. "It is exhausting to build a network of colleagues, especially if you are not a known name," she says.

For Iamarino, it becomes clear which platform has won among the users when you start checking messages before going to sleep. He begins to feel about Bluesky. "I placed the app where Twitter used to be on my cell phone," he says.