For more than two weeks, Brazilians have been without access to X. Brazil’s Supreme Court blocked the platform after Elon Musk failed to comply with court rulings. As X evades the ban and Musk’s companies work slowly toward a resolution, the real concern for many isn’t just the absence of social media. It’s Musk’s power play over the government as he backs Brazil’s far right.

X was banned on August 30th after months of back-and-forth between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The conflict began in April when Musk publicized government requests for information and then removed all restrictions imposed on X profiles by Brazilian court orders. Moraes responded by including Musk in an investigation over organized political disinformation and subpoenaing X’s Brazilian legal representative. Musk abruptly shuttered its local operations, leading Moraes to ban it for violating local laws.

Since then, negotiations between both sides have proceeded gradually. The Supreme Court announced a transfer of R$ 18.3 million from X and Starlink to the national treasury, indirectly paying a fine for not removing content. Moraes subsequently ordered the unblocking of both companies’ bank accounts. Musk has reportedly met with Vanessa Souza, a Brazilian specialist in cyber law, and he’s appointed a pair of attorneys to represent X in Brazil — leading Moraes to ask if X has reopened operations, which could eventually clear the way for a lifted ban.

But Musk’s public response has largely been confrontational. In the past couple of weeks, he has criticized the Brazilian Supreme Court’s decision as well as the president, claiming the ban violates free speech and sets a dangerous precedent. He’s rallied public support, primarily from far-right influencers and politicians.

And this week, some Brazilians briefly got access to X again. According to the Brazilian Association of Internet and Telecommunications Providers (ABRINT), X made a “significant” update early on September 18th, changing its design to use IP addresses linked to Cloudflare and routing around service providers’ blocks. ABRINT said the update put providers in a “delicate situation” while regulators attempted to get it blocked again. X officially called the ban “inadvertent and temporary,” but Moraes levied extra fines against it for what he dubbed “willful, illegal and persistent” evasion, citing a Musk tweet that seemed to celebrate the move.

Musk’s defiance is part of a long flirtation with Brazil’s currently out-of-power far right. “He is not just an influencer of the far right, he is an activist,” says Camila Rocha, a researcher at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and a political scientist. “The collaboration, the harmony between what is happening in Brazil and what is on the networks, is huge.” Whatever happens next in the X–Brazil saga, Musk could claim it’s a win.

Luiz Augusto D’Urso, a lawyer specializing in digital law, describes X’s closing of its Brazilian office as a dramatic gesture that forced Moraes’ hand. “It’s important to note that the Supreme Court’s initial ruling was never to block the platform. Things escalated,” D’Urso says. “The last decision before the ban required the platform to appoint a legal representative in Brazil, which is a legal obligation. When Musk refused, the result was suspension.”

Musk wasted no time turning the issue into a political spectacle. On August 29th, he referred to Justice Moraes as “the tyrant, @Alexandre, dictator of Brazil” in a post about Starlink’s assets being frozen, saying “[Brazilian President] Lula is his lapdog.” Another post calls Moraes “a declared criminal of the worst kind, disguised as a judge.”

Brazil’s right wing has seized the moment, too, framing the X ban as a fight for freedom of speech. Musk has interacted with supporters of the far right using emoji of the Brazilian flag (in context, a symbol of the movement). He supported demonstrations on September 7th, or Brazilian Independence Day, by sharing Jair Bolsonaro-supporting profiles and calling on users to participate, and he posted a photo of himself alongside former President Bolsonaro.

Rocha notes that Musk’s support for Brazil’s far right has been obvious for years. The billionaire has become popular in parts of Brazil thanks to his Starlink satellite internet service, which operates across the country and particularly in the Amazon. Starlink also provides services to the Brazilian Armed Forces. 

This activism tallies with his support of right-wing politics globally, including elsewhere in Latin America. Musk has an ongoing friendly relationship with Argentinian President Javier Milei, with whom he’s agreed on “the importance of technological development for the progress of humanity.” Milei has supported Musk throughout the conflict with the Brazilian Supreme Court, accusing it of wanting to “prohibit the space where citizens exchange ideas freely.”

Musk has even (perhaps jokingly) suggested that “we’ll coup whoever we want” in Latin America, responding to an accusation that the US government intervened against Bolivian President Evo Morales to secure lithium supplies for Tesla.

In Brazil, Musk — who despite his public commitment to free speech has blocked content at the behest of conservative governments — stands to gain by resolutely supporting Bolsonaro’s far right. “He presents himself as a defender of freedom, but he is exclusively business-oriented and has no commitment to democracy,” says Sérgio Soares Braga, a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Digital Democracy (INCT.DD). The far right offers a clearer path to the “unregulated capitalism” Musk favors.

But Musk’s resistance is also a direct fight over how and whether American tech (and particularly internet) companies can be regulated abroad. An open letter sent on September 17th, as translated by The Verge, called the ban part of an “evolving global conflict between digital corporations and those seeking to build a democratic, people-centered digital landscape focused on social and economic development.” It accused Musk of sabotaging “and operate against the public sector’s ability to create and maintain an independent digital agenda based on local values, needs and aspirations.” The letter was signed by more than 50 intellectuals, including economist Mariana Mazzucato and author Cory Doctorow.

“Musk wants to control a wide array of industries, from big tech to electric vehicles, which grants him significant economic power and geopolitical influence,” says Braga. But in Brazil, Braga argues, he’s overstepped his bounds. “He can’t abuse this power to interfere in a nation’s sovereignty.”

Musk is making sacrifices by keeping X offline. Competing social networks have reaped gains from the block — Bluesky, for instance, says it’s gained millions of new users largely from Brazil. “There are growing suspicions that Musk has ulterior motives,” says Rocha. “Why would he let X remain offline for so long? What does he stand to gain?”

One potential answer is that Musk doesn’t have much left to lose by shrinking Twitter’s base in Brazil. The platform has already reportedly lost at least 71 percent of its value since Musk acquired it, and it shows little sign of recovery. (By contrast, Musk’s Starlink eventually caved to demands that it block X, though it’s said it’s still pursuing legal action.) It’s more important to take a stand against Brazil’s policies — not out of idealism, but a pragmatic bid for more control.

But for D’Urso, Musk’s endgame is clear: he benefits either way. “If he backs down, he portrays himself as the man who stood up to the Supreme Court. If X remains banned, he becomes a martyr, claiming persecution. It’s a win-win situation for him.”

Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta — and since then, he has been focused on building the “metaverse,” a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta’s Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion. 

But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn’t given up on the metaverse — he’s just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend of the digital and the physical.

At Connect this year, Zuckerberg emphasized that the modern “real world” combines the physical world and the digital world still being built — and that it all builds up to “this concept we call the metaverse.”

“Pretty soon, I think we’re going to be at a point where you’re going to be there physically with some of your friends, and others will be there digitally as avatars or holograms, and they’ll feel just as present as everyone else. Or you’ll walk into a meeting and sit down at a table. There will be people who are there physically and people who are there digitally as holograms, but also sitting around the table with you are going to be a bunch of AI guys who are embodied as holograms and are helping you get different stuff done too,” he said. 

These aren’t new ideas for Zuckerberg — Meta has been working on blending virtual and physical space for years. But the speech was markedly different from his presentation in 2021. Amidst the covid-19 pandemic, he promised that in the next decade, most people would spend time in a fully immersive, 3D version of the internet — particularly Meta’s Horizon Wolds platform. The keynote saw him donning a VR headset to meet his friends in space to play poker as a cartoon avatar. It played up the wonder of meeting up in an unreal world, showing cards and players floating in zero gravity. 

This year’s keynote, by contrast, was centered far more on your living room. “You see the physical room around you,” Zuckerberg promised. “You can solve Lego puzzles or build your creations on any flat surface in your room. You can play games with your friends sitting around a table.”

The fully virtual Horizon Worlds platform made an appearance this year, but it got a lot less attention than another topic: AI.

He announced a number of new features powered by Meta AI tech, including AI chatbots that can help the user brainstorm a birthday party or an AI assistant users can bring into any chat on Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp. And he said Meta would use this technology to advance the metaverse. 

Most people still have limited experience with these AI advances. According to Zuckerberg, Meta has done a lot of testing and red-teaming to make sure its AI bots aren’t problematic, but he also said the company is rolling its new products out more slowly than usual.

It’s not clear, though, how many people would immediately associate chatbots with “the metaverse.” There are places where 3D worlds and AI intersect; Meta has mentioned, for instance, bots becoming characters in these worlds. But a lot of AI usage right now consists of typing prompts into a text box — it’s a distinctly non-embodied interaction. And right now, it’s where much of Meta’s enthusiasm seems to lie.

Meta can’t abandon the metaverse the way many companies have done. After all, it’s right there in the name. But fortunately for it, the metaverse has always been a slippery term. Is it VR? Is it AI? Is it video games? The best answer might be that whatever Meta does is the metaverse, by definition — at least for Mark Zuckerberg.