RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — The social media platform X began returning to Brazil on Wednesday, after remaining inaccessible for more than a month following a clash between its owner, Elon Musk, and a justice on the country’s highest court.
Internet service providers began restoring access to the platform after Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes authorized lifting X’s suspension on Tuesday.
“TWITTER IS ALIVE,” Lucas dos Santos Consoli, known as luscas on X, wrote on the platform to his more than 7 million followers.
“I'm happy that the platform decided to follow the laws of Brazil and finally adapted, after all I’ve been using the app for almost 15 years so I can’t deny that I was missing it,” the 31-year-old told The Associated Press.
De Moraes ordered the shutdown of X on Aug. 30 after a monthslong dispute with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Musk had disparaged de Moraes, calling him an authoritarian and a censor, although his rulings, including X’s nationwide suspension, were repeatedly upheld by his peers.
Musk’s company ultimately complied with all of de Moraes’ demands. They included blocking certain accounts from the platform, paying outstanding fines and naming a legal representative. Failure to do the latter had triggered the suspension.
Brazil — a highly online country of 213 million people — is one of X’s biggest markets, with estimates of its user base ranging from 20 million to 40 million.
“X is proud to return to Brazil,” the company said in a statement posted on its Global Government Affairs account. “Giving tens of millions of Brazilians access to our indispensable platform was paramount throughout this entire process. We will continue to defend freedom of speech, within the boundaries of the law, everywhere we operate.”
The Aug. 30 ban came two days after the company said it was removing all its remaining staff in Brazil. X said de Moraes had threatened to arrest its legal representative in the country, Rachel de Oliveira Villa Nova Conceição, if the company did not comply with orders to block accounts.
Brazilian law requires foreign companies to have a local legal representative to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action — particularly, in X’s case, the takedown of accounts.
Sleeping Giants Brazil, a platform for activism that seeks to combat fake news and hate speech, said the resumption of X's activities in Brazil marked “a significant victory for Brazilian democracy.”
“We understand that the actions taken to ensure that X complies with Supreme Court decisions, though severe, set an important precedent: no company, regardless of its global influence, is above the law,” it said in a statement.
Some of Brazilian X’s users have migrated to other platforms, such as Meta’s Threads and, primarily, Bluesky. It’s unclear how many of them will return to X.
In a statement to the AP, Bluesky reported that it now has 10.6 million users and continues to see strong growth in Brazil. Bluesky has appointed a legal representative in the South American country.
“Never get back with your eX,” Paul Frazee, a developer at Bluesky, wrote on the platform on Tuesday.
Brazil was not the first country to ban X — but such a drastic step has generally been limited to authoritarian regimes. The platform and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest.
X’s dustup with Brazil has some parallels to the company’s dealings with the Indian government three years ago, back when it was still called Twitter and before Musk purchased it for $44 billion. In 2021, India threatened to arrest employees of Twitter (as well as Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp), for not complying with the government’s requests to take down posts related to farmers’ protests that rocked the country.
Musk’s decision to reverse course in Brazil after publicly criticizing de Moraes isn’t surprising, said Matteo Ceurvels, research firm Emarketer’s analyst for Latin America and Spain.
“The move was pragmatic, likely driven by the economic consequences of losing access to millions of users in its third-largest market worldwide, along with the millions of dollars in associated advertising revenue,” Ceurvels said.
“Although X may not be a top priority for most advertisers in Brazil, the platform needs them more than they need it,” he said.
Ortutay reported from San Francisco
Elon Musk's X is back in Brazil after its suspension, having complied with all judicial demands
FILE - An ad by Valor media shows a photo of Elon Musk at a shopping center in Brasilia, Brazil, Monday, Sept. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)
Elon Musk's X is back in Brazil after its suspension, having complied with all judicial demands
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Three scientists who discovered powerful techniques to predict and even design novel proteins — the building blocks of life — were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday. Their work used advanced technologies, including machine learning, and holds the potential to transform how new drugs are made.
The prize was awarded to David Baker, who works at the University of Washington in Seattle, and to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who both work at Google DeepMind, a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory based in London.
Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the award honored research that unraveled long-standing scientific mysteries.
“That was actually called a grand challenge in chemistry, and in particular in biochemistry, for decades. So, it’s that breakthrough that gets awarded today,” he said.
Proteins are complex molecules with thousands of atoms that twist, turn, loop and spiral in a countless array of shapes. The shape of a protein determines its biological function. For decades, scientists have dreamed of being able to efficiently design and build new proteins.
Baker, whose work has received funding from the National Institutes of Health since the 1990s, created a computer program called Rosetta that helped analyze information about existing proteins in comprehensive databases in order to build new proteins that don't exist in nature.
"It seems that you can almost construct any type of protein now with this technology,” said Johan Åqvist of the Nobel committee.
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.
The duo "managed to crack the code. With skillful use of artificial intelligence, they made it possible to predict the complex structure of essentially any known protein in nature,” Linke said.
The ability to custom design new proteins — and better understand existing proteins — could enable researchers to create new kinds of medicines and vaccines. It could also allow scientists to design new enzymes to break down plastics or other waste materials, and to design fine-tuned sensors for hazardous materials.
“I think there’s fantastic prospects for making better medicines — medicines that are smarter, that only work in the right time and place in the body,” Baker told The Associated Press.
One example is a potential nasal spray that could slow or stop the rapid spread of specific viruses, such as COVID-19, he said. Another is a medicine to disrupt the cascade of symptoms known as cytokine storm.
“That was always the holy grail. If you could figure out how protein sequences folded into their particular structures, then it might be possible to design protein sequences to fold into previously never seen structures that might be useful for us,” said Jon Lorsh of the NIH.
Baker said Hassabis and Jumper's artificial intelligence work gave his team a huge boost.
“The breakthroughs made by Demis and John on protein structure prediction really highlighted to us the power that AI could have. And that led us to apply these AI methods to protein design and that has greatly increased the power and accuracy,” he said.
Baker told the AP he found out he won the Nobel during the early hours of the morning alongside his wife, who immediately started screaming.
“So it was a little deafening, too,” he said.
Hassabis said in a statement that “receiving the Nobel Prize is the honor of a lifetime."
One of Britain’s leading tech figures, he co-founded the AI research lab DeepMind in 2010, which was later acquired by Google. DeepMind’s breakthroughs include developing an AI system that mastered the Chinese game of Go and was able to defeat the game’s human world champion much faster than expected.
Jumper said in the same statement that it was an honor to be “recognized for delivering on the long promise of computational biology to help us understand the protein world and to inform the incredible work of experimental biologists.”
“It is a key demonstration that AI will make science faster and ultimately help to understand disease and develop therapeutics,” Jumper said.
Baker gets half of the prize money of 11 million Swedish Kronor ($1 million) while Hassabis and Jumper share the other half.
It’s the second Nobel prize that has gone to someone with links to Google. Physics prize winner Geoffrey Hinton also previously worked at the tech company, but later quit so he could speak more freely about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
Last year, the chemistry award went to three scientists for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.
Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize. Two founding fathers of machine learning — Hinton and John Hopfield — won the physics prize.
The awards continue with the literature prize on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the economics award on Oct. 14.
The prize money comes from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands, and Larson reported from Washington, D.C. Kelvin Chan contributed reporting from London.
Researcher John Jumper, left, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, the AI division behind Gemini, speak to Associated Press at the Google DeepMind offices in London, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024 after being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Researcher John Jumper poses for a photo at the Google DeepMind offices in London, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024 after being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, the AI division behind Gemini, poses for a photo at the Google DeepMind offices in London, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024 after being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
American biochemist David Baker poses for a photo at his home on Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)
Researcher John Jumper, left, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, the AI division behind Gemini, speak to Associated Press at the Google DeepMind offices in London, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024 after being awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.(AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
American biochemist David Baker speaks to reporters at his home, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Seattle. (Ian C Haydon via AP)
American biochemist David Baker, 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry speaks on the phone with the two other winners Demis Hassabis and John Jumper at his home, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024, in Seattle. (Ian C Haydon via AP)
This combo of pictures show American biochemist David Baker, from left, American researcher John Jumper and Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, the AI division behind Gemini. (UW Medicine/Google DeepMind via AP/AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
View at the Google DeepMind office building in London, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their breakthrough work predicting and designing the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Hassabis and Jumper both work at Google Deepmind in London. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Johan Åqvist, right, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, explains the work of David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper, winners of this years Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
Johan Åqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Hans Ellegren, Permanent Secretary and Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry award this years Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
Johan Åqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Hans Ellegren, Permanent Secretary and Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry award this years Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
Johan Åqvist, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Hans Ellegren, Permanent Secretary and Heiner Linke, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry award this years Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John M Jumper at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024. (Christine Olsson/TT News Agency via AP)
FILE - Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attendsthe UK Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit, at Bletchley Park, in Bletchley, England, Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE - Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis answers a reporter's question during a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)
FILE - Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, speaks at a Google I/O event in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday, May 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
FILE - A Nobel Prize medal is displayed before a ceremony at the Swedish Ambassador's Residence in London, Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)
FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
The Nobel prize in chemistry is being awarded in Stockholm
The Nobel prize in chemistry is being awarded in Stockholm
FILE - A bust of Alfred Nobel on display following a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (Henrik Montgomery/TT News Agency via AP, File)
