SAO PAULO: The blocking of social media platform X in Brazil divided users and politicians over the legitimacy of the ban, and many Brazilians on Saturday had difficulty and doubts over navigating other social media in its absence.
The shutdown of Elon Musk’s platform started early Saturday, making it largely inaccessible on both the web and through mobile apps after the billionaire refused to name a legal representative to the country, missing a deadline imposed by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The blockade marks an escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.
Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users.
“I’ve got the feeling that I have no idea what’s happening in the world right now. Bizarre,” entertainment writer and heavy X user Chico Barney wrote on Threads. Threads is a text-based app developed by Instagram that Barney was using as an alternative. “This Threads algorithm is like an all-you-can-eat restaurant where the waiter keeps serving things I would never order.”
Bluesky, a social media platform that was launched last year as an alternative to X and other more established sites, has seen a large influx of Brazilians in the past couple of days. The company said Friday it has seen about 200,000 new users from Brazil sign up during that time, and the number “continues to grow by the minute.” Brazilian users are also setting records for activities such as follows and likes, Bluesky said.
Previous users of other platforms welcomed Brazilians to their ranks. “Hello literally everyone in Brazil,” a user wrote on Threads. “We’re a lot nicer than Twitter here,” said another.
Platform migration isn’t new for Brazilians. They were huge adopters of Orkut and, when Orkut went kaput, they very gladly moved to other platforms.
X is not as popular in Brazil as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. However, it remains an important platform on which Brazilians engage in political debates and is highly influential among politicians, journalists and other opinion makers.
It’s also where they share their sense of humor. Many of the country’s most famous memes originate from posts on X before spreading to other social networks. Last week, for instance, Brazilians collaboratively crafted an absurd storyline for a fictional telenovela, complete with a theme song created using artificial intelligence tools.
Pop stars and their fanbases were also hit by Brazilians being left off the platform.
“Wait a lot of my fan pages are Brazilian!!! Come back hold up!!,” Cardi B said Friday on X. A fan page dedicated to Timothée Chalamet, known by the handle TimotheeUpdates, said it would temporarily cease updating as all of its administrators are Brazilian.
De Moraes said X will stay suspended until it complies with his orders, and he also set a daily fine of 50,000 reais ($8,900) for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access it. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced. Others suggested the move was authoritarian.
The Brazilian Bar Association said Friday in a statement that it would request the Supreme Court review the fines imposed on all citizens using VPNs or other means to access X without due process. Brazil’s bar association argued that sanctions should never be imposed summarily before ensuring an adversarial process and the right to full defense.
“I’ve used VPNs a lot in authoritarian countries like China to continue accessing news sites and social networks,” Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said on the platform before its shutdown. “It never occurred to me that this type of tool would be banned in Brazil. It’s dystopian.”
A search Friday on X showed hundreds of Brazilian users inquiring about VPNs that could potentially enable them to continue using the platform by making it appear they are logging on from outside the country.
“Tyrants want to turn Brazil into another commie dictatorship but we won’t back down. I repeat: do not vote on those who don’t respect free speech. Orwell was right,” right-wing congressman Nikolas Ferreira, one of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s closest allies, published before X went off. Musk replied with an emoji suggesting agreement: “100”.
Ferreira is a 28-year-old YouTuber who received the most votes of the 513 elected federal lawmakers in the 2022 election. De Moraes ordered the block of his social media accounts after a mob of Bolsonaro supporters attacked Brazil’s Congress, presidential palace and Supreme Court in January 2023 seeking to overturn the election.
Lawmaker Bia Kicis said “the consequences of Alexandre de Moraes’ attacks to Elon Musk, X and Starlink will be regrettable for Brazilians.” She also urged Rodrigo Pacheco, the president of the country’s Senate, to act. Kicis has repeatedly urged Pacheco to open impeachment proceedings against the Supreme Court justice.
“We need to leave this state of apathy and stop the worst from happening,” the pro-Bolsonaro lawmaker, whose profiles were temporarily blocked by de Moraes in 2022, also said.
The former president said Saturday on Instagram that X’s departure from Brazil was “another blow to our freedom and legal security.”
“It not only affects our freedom of expression, but also undermines the confidence of international companies in operating on Brazilian soil, with impacts ranging from national security to the quality of the information that reaches our citizens,” Bolsonaro said.
On Friday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva backed de Moraes’ decision and took aim at Musk for positioning himself as though he was above the law during an interview with Radio MaisPB.
“Any citizen, from anywhere in the world, who has investments in Brazil, is subject to the Brazilian Constitution and Brazilian laws. Therefore, if the Supreme Court has made a decision for citizens to comply with certain things, they either have to comply or take another course of action,” Lula said. “It’s not because the guy has a lot of money that he can disrespect it.”
Ana Júlia Alves de Oliveira, an 18-year-old student, shared that many young people like her no longer watch newscasts or read newspapers, relying solely on social media platforms like X for their news. Without this platform, she felt disconnected.
“I kind of lost touch with what’s going on around the world,” she said. “I saw a lot of entertainment there too, so this is a new reality for me.”
On the first day without X, many Brazilians say they feel disconnected from the world
https://arab.news/9ajv3
On the first day without X, many Brazilians say they feel disconnected from the world

- Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users
McCann Content Studios expands footprint to Saudi Arabia

- Studio is part of FP7 McCann Riyadh
DUBAI: Middle East Communications Network’s social media and creator-focused practice McCann Content Studios is expanding to Saudi Arabia.
Operating as part of creative network FP7 McCann in Riyadh, the studio aims to meet clients’ requirement for social media-led campaigns and influencer partnerships.
“Our expansion into Saudi Arabia is a strategic step forward — not just in footprint, but in how we partner with brands in a market that continues to lead regional transformation,” Tarek Miknas, CEO of FP7 McCann Middle East, North Africa and Turkiye, told Arab News.
He added: “For us, this is about more than scaling services; it’s about building enduring partnerships rooted in trust, performance and relevance — and ensuring we’re structurally set up to support the ambitions of the Kingdom’s most dynamic brands.”
The studio first launched just over a year ago and has since doubled in size, with operations across Dubai, Cairo and Beirut.
It employs more than 100 people, and its services include strategy, creative, social, influencer marketing, production, community management and performance tracking.
Fahad Mugharbel, social media director of FP7 McCann, will lead the practice from Riyadh. Before joining FP7 McCann in April, he worked at Saudi-based entertainment firm UTURN for more than four years.
The Kingdom is defined by “pace, ambition and evolving expectations,” and clients believe “content must do more,” said Amr El-Kalaawy, regional managing director of FP7 McCann Saudi Arabia.
The move is therefore a “natural next step in our growth — one that reflects both the scale of opportunity and the level of partnership our clients expect,” he added.
Going forward, McCann Content Studios plans to expand its “capabilities in data-led content performance and deepen our creator ecosystem,” El-Kalaawy said.
Fortune reveals 100 Most Powerful Women in Business list for 2025

- First Abu Dhabi Bank Group CEO Hana Al-Rostamani, National Bank of Kuwait’s Deputy Group CEO Shaikha Al-Bahar both feature
DUBAI: Fortune has announced the 2025 Most Powerful Women in Business list, featuring 100 leading businesswomen from sectors including finance, tech, healthcare, telecom, retail and energy.
Its publication coincides with Fortune’s inaugural Most Powerful Women International conference which is taking place in Riyadh on May 20-21.
This year’s edition of the list features 52 women from the US and 48 from other countries, including one each from the UAE and Kuwait.
Hana Al-Rostamani, group CEO of First Abu Dhabi Bank, comes in at No. 76. She is currently the only female chief executive of a publicly listed corporation in the UAE, and serves on several boards, including the Institute of International Finance, the US-UAE Business Council, and the Arab Monetary Fund’s cross-border payment system Buna.
Shaikha Al-Bahar, deputy group CEO at the National Bank of Kuwait, features at No. 92. She has risen through the ranks since joining the bank in 1977 and was appointed to her current role in 2014.
Al-Bahar is the only woman on NBK’s executive management team. She is also chair of the National Bank of Kuwait France, and the National Bank of Kuwait Egypt, as well as a board member of the bank’s UK subsidiary.
“The rise of women as CEOs is continuing, which is great,” said Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune.
She told Arab News: “There have been some years we’ve been doing the list where it has taken a step back. (But) this year, 11 percent of Fortune 500 (companies are) run by women, and that’s the highest it has ever been.”
There are several studies showing the correlation between “diversity of thought and background” in leadership ranks and the financial outcome of a company, and so, “we track it, and we track the progress (in) the hopes of making business better,” Shontell added.
Mary Barra, CEO of @GM and No.1 on the 2025 #FortuneMPW list, shares what power means to her. pic.twitter.com/AWkC6R6XI9
— FORTUNE (@FortuneMagazine) May 20, 2025
The top 10 Most Powerful Women in Business 2025 are:
1. Mary Barra, chair and CEO, General Motors.
2. Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture.
3. Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup.
4. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD.
5. Ana Botin, executive chairman, Banco Santander.
6. Tan Su Shan, director and CEO, DBS Group.
7. Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO, TIAA.
8. Marta Ortega, chairperson, Inditex.
9. Abigail Johnson, chairman and CEO, Fidelity Investments.
10. Meng Wanzhou, deputy chairwoman, rotating chairwoman, and chief financial officer, Huawei.
Compiled by Fortune editors, the list is based on several factors such as company size and health, as well as an executive’s career trajectory, influence, innovation, and efforts to make business better.
The full list can be found here.
Gary Lineker to leave BBC amid antisemitism row

- Lineker had earlier shared a post criticizing Zionism, accompanied by a rat emoji
- He will not be part of the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup or next season’s FA Cup coverage
DUBAI: BBC sports presenter Gary Lineker will leave the corporation following a controversial social media post that drew accusations of antisemitism, according to a statement.
Lineker had earlier shared a post criticizing Zionism, accompanied by a rat emoji, an image historically associated with antisemitic tropes, before deleting it following backlash.
In an Instagram post on Monday, Lineker apologized for the post and announced he would step down early, with the final episode of his show “Match of the Day” airing as the Premier League concludes on Sunday.
He will not be part of the BBC’s coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup or next season’s FA Cup coverage as previously agreed with the broadcaster.
Lineker acknowledged that the post “contained an emoji that has awful connotations.”
He added: “Unfortunately, I did not see the emoji. If I had, I would never, ever have shared it.
“I have stood up for minorities and humanitarian issues, and against all forms of racism all of my life, including, of course, antisemitism, which I absolutely abhor. There’s no place for it and never should be.”
The BBC confirmed Lineker’s departure in its statement on Monday. BBC Director-General Tim Davie said: “Gary has acknowledged the mistake he made. Accordingly, we have agreed he will step back from further presenting after this season.
“Gary has been a defining voice in football coverage for the BBC for over two decades. His passion and knowledge have shaped our sports journalism, and earned him the respect of sports fans across the UK and beyond.”
The incident was the latest controversial post by the 64-year-old, who has found himself at the center of several rows over his social media usage, most of which involve him sharing his political views, which goes against the BBC’s rules on impartiality.
In March 2023, he was temporarily suspended over comments he made criticizing the Conservative government’s asylum policy.
Earlier in February, he was among 500 high-profile celebrities who signed an open letter urging the BBC to reinstate a documentary on Gaza that had been removed from iPlayer after it emerged its narrator was the son of a Hamas official.
In his written statement, Lineker said: “Football has been at the heart of my life for as long as I can remember — both on the pitch and in the studio.
“However, I recognize the error and upset that I caused, and reiterate how sorry I am. Stepping back now feels like the responsible course of action.”
Microsoft wants AI ‘agents’ to work together and remember things

- Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own
- Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do: Exec
REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft envisions a future where any company’s artificial intelligence agents can work together with agents from other firms and have better memories of their interactions, its chief technologist said on Sunday ahead of the company’s annual software developer conference.
Microsoft is holding its Build conference in Seattle on May 19, where analysts expect the company to unveil its latest tools for developers building AI systems.
Speaking at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, ahead of the conference, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott told reporters and analysts the company is focused on helping spur the adoption of standards across the technology industry that will let agents from different makers collaborate. Agents are AI systems that can accomplish specific tasks, such as fixing a software bug, on their own.
Scott said that Microsoft is backing a technology called Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source protocol introduced by Google-backed Anthropic. Scott said MCP has the potential to create an “agentic web” similar to the way hypertext protocols that helped spread the Internet in the 1990s.
“It means that your imagination gets to drive what the agentic web becomes, not just a handful of companies that happen to see some of these problems first,” Scott said.
Scott also said that Microsoft is trying to help AI agents have better memories of things that users have asked them to do, noting that, so far, “most of what we’re building feels very transactional.”
But making an AI agent’s memory better costs a lot of money because it requires more computing power. Microsoft is focusing on a new approach called structured retrieval augmentation, where an agent extracts short bits of each turn in a conversation with a user, creating a roadmap to what was discussed.
“This is a core part of how you train a biological brain — you don’t brute force everything in your head every time you need to solve a particular problem,” Scott said.
‘It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is,’ Fortune editor-in-chief tells Arab News ahead of Riyadh summit on women in business

- Alyson Shontell finds Kingdom’ Vision 2030 transformation “remarkable,” so the magazine wants to see it for itself and show it to the world
- The CCO says aim is to build a global network through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world
RIYADH: The Fortune Most Powerful Women franchise, which includes an annual list of the 100 Most Powerful Women, began in 1998. Now, nearly three decades on, the publication is entering the Middle East region with the Fortune Most Powerful Women International conference in Riyadh on May 20 and 21.
“More and more women were getting into the upper ranks of business,” and “we wanted to be on the ground covering it,” said Alyson Shontell, editor-in-chief and chief content officer of Fortune.
“There’s no more exciting place for us to be right now (than Saudi Arabia) covering the world of business and women’s progress,” she added.
Despite reforms and transformation in the region, some still view it as a place with restricted freedom for women and media. However, Shontell is “excited to go in judgment-free,” and connect with women in the region and “show what they’re doing to the world,” she said.
The transformation in the Kingdom since Vision 2030 has been “remarkable” and, she added, “we want to see it for ourselves and show it to the world.
“It’s a no-brainer to go where the progress is: the Middle East.”
EXPLORE: A New Era for Business: Partnering for Global Prosperity
Fortune’s ambition is “to connect global power and the biggest businesses in the world,” and so “we would love to build the most powerful women’s network into a global network,” through which women in the Middle East feel connected to women in other parts of the world, she explained.
This year, 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies are run by women, which is the highest number it has ever been, Shontell said.
There is still a long way ahead before gender equality is reached in businesses, but “that’s a big reason why we think it’s still important to show the changing evolution of power,” she said.
Last year, Fortune also published a Most Powerful People list — “to recognize powerful people as powerful people” — and that list was dominated by men.
“That’s how the world is, and we’re not going to pretend that it’s otherwise,” Shontell said, adding that it is part of Fortune’s mission to track progress, present the world as it is, and when there are changes, to showcase them as well.

At the beginning of this year, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his second day in office calling titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”
He has issued multiple orders since then aimed at rolling back the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) policies of major corporations, foundations, non-profits, educational institutions and even the government.
One order, which deems DEI policies “illegal,” suggests that these policies are a “guise” for “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”
The directives have raised several concerns, some around women’s participation in the workforce.
Shontell, however, remains optimistic. “There’s a pretty strong commitment from women in the United States,” she said.
“We have made a lot of progress over the last 50 years here, and I don’t think many people would like to see that backslide.”

Shontell herself has been part of that commitment. She joined Business Insider in 2008, as the company’s sixth employee going on to become editor-in-chief in 2016.
When she was appointed as editor-in-chief at Fortune in 2021, she became the youngest and only woman to serve in that role in the company’s 95 years.
“When you think of who the editor-in-chief of Fortune, or even Business Insider, is, you don’t think of a young woman,” Shontell said.
To illustrate her point, she said that even if one asked AI what it thought the editor of a business magazine looks like, it would draw up someone like JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon.
And she was right. We asked Meta AI and ChatGPT: “Can you generate an image of the editor-in-chief of a major global business publication?” The former gave us four images: one of a woman and three of men, while the latter gave a single image featuring a man

The most common reaction Shontell receives is surprise. But she doesn’t mind. Rather, she likes surprising people and the feeling that “no one sees you coming.”
It “kind of gives you something to work toward something to be extra proud of when you achieve it,” she said.
For Shontell, the industry has been nothing but change since she stepped into it, which was well after the days of leisurely business lunches and thick magazines, she says.
“A lot of the trends that we’re seeing now are just completely different than they were before,” and much of the conversation in the newsroom is around future-proofing the company, she said.
The key, according to her, is a flexible team and the knack to recognize trends and understand which ones are here to stay.
When she was at Business Insider, her goal was to get everyone to read it. Fortune, on the other hand, is not about scale.
“My goal is to continue to up our relevance and to broaden the audience just a little bit, but to keep it very much thought leadership,” she said.
Shontell explained that it is hard to run a company in a fast-changing and unpredictable world, and so, the question is: “How can we be the best asset for this global leadership reader?”
The aim is to “give them the information they need to do their jobs through the best of their abilities, so that the rest of us can all benefit from them making better decisions.”

Fortune was relatively slow to embrace digital media with its website only launching in 2014.
By the end of 2024, it had 24 million global users, and its social channels have a total of 7 million followers.
Still, not many younger audiences are aware of the brand or consume its content. Shontell admits that while Fortune has been very good at reaching C-suite audiences, “we have increasingly been bad at reaching the next generation and pulling them up through their career path.”
But now, with social media, she says “we have permission to show up differently on different platforms” to reach a potential reader.
That means speaking in a different tone of voice perhaps to reach GenZs and millennials on platforms like TikTok, which would be “their first experience with us,” she said.
It is a “delicate balance” of “how do you get that next gen reader so that Fortune will continue to exist and be read and widely known in 20 years, and how do you maintain that thought leadership at the same time?”
As part of this effort, Fortune is reinventing its video offering this year and launching podcasts.
Artificial intelligence is at the core of technology and any conversation about it, and undoubtedly is an “incredibly powerful tool,” said Shontell.
Despite the dangers of AI — fake news, misinformation, deepfakes — and concerns about potential job losses, Shontell believes AI will bring journalism back to its roots.
Any news or information that can be rounded up and aggregated does not need humans and will be done by AI, but that is an “exciting opportunity, because it will bring journalism back to its core roots of seeking original information and facts and bringing it to readers first with the best analysis (and) the best new information that you can get,” she said.
Shontell says that in the last decade or so, the news media industry has almost lost its way, partly because the business model is predicated on cutting through noise and grabbing attention, instead of delivering news in a way that is aligned with the news company’s specific approach.
There will be “hard change,” and news firms can either be a big publication with scale and a “solid” business model like The New York Times or Bloomberg, or a smaller, niche publication; anything in the “messy middle” will have a difficult time, she said.