Charles Hoskinson, founder of the Cardano blockchain, said in a post on X that he plans to launch a decentralised social media platform in Brazil after the country’s Supreme Court banned Elon Musk’s social media platform.
“While Brazil has silenced our brothers and sisters on X, their work will still stand and matter to us all,” he wrote. “I can not wait to recruit many Brazilians to help us build a decentralised social network.”
Latin America’s biggest nation has become another front in a global struggle over the regulation of free speech on the internet, Bloomberg reported, as X began to go dark over the weekend.
Many of X’s 20 million users in Brazil, the world’s fifth-most-online nation, were left platformless after the court ordered the suspension following Musk’s refusal to appoint a legal representative to deal with the Brazilian government, the report said.
For his part, the billionaire owner of X posted: “Just a reminder that you can always access this platform via http://X.com, even on your phone. No app is needed. Now would also be a good time to download a VPN in case you get blocked.”
Musk also posted a string of attacks against Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who handed down the decision and who is leading an investigation into online hate speech that he says endangers democratic institutions.
Hoskinson’s project as envisioned would create an alternative, incorporating the values of decentralisation and free speech.
