The Wednesday morning’s (3) raid on Bolsonaro, who is accused of falsifying his Covid vaccination certificate, diverted the focus of public opinion for a few hours from the news of the week, namely the heated debate over Brazil’s Fake News Law (PL 2630, also called Censorship Law), or Law on Internet Freedom, Accountability and Transparency.
Whereas last week rapporteur Orlando Silva of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB-SP), and with him part of Congress, had pushed through a request for an emergency vote, on Tuesday Silva himself asked the chamber’s president, Arthur Lira, to remove the vote from the agenda when he determined it would not have enough votes to pass.
“If there are no votes,” Lira declared shortly before the decision, “there will be no vote on the fake news bill today.”
The bill passed in the Senate in 2020, but the last week before it went to the Chamber of Deputies, the text underwent profound changes that have divided the country and scared the leading players, from Google to Meta.
Elon Musk even had to intervene to calm tempers. Some Brazilian journalists accused the platform of censoring his news in favor of the law.
“This is ridiculous,” Musk personally responded in a tweet. “We’ve had problems around the world with too many simultaneous logins. We gave our authentication servers more power, and now the problem is solved.”
In recent hours, however, the hard-line has come mainly from the government, which preferred to confront the big tech companies rather than engage in a debate they demanded.
In a heated press conference Tuesday, Justice and Public Security Minister Flávio Dino said the tech giants had tried to “censor and manipulate” the debate on the law.
“They wanted to censor parliament, censor the legislative process, and they did it with a violence rarely seen in Brazil,” he said.
The reason was that for several days, the Google search page had been displaying a message alerting users that “the fake news law could increase confusion about what is true and what is a lie in Brazil.”
Clicking on it brings up an institutional message from Google Brazil signed by Marcelo Lacerda, director of government relations and public policy: “If the law is passed in its current form,” the text reads, “it would run counter to its original goal of combating the spread of fake news.”
For example, one of the unintended consequences would be that the law would protect those who produce disinformation, resulting in even more disinformation,” the text continues.
Under the new text of the law, platforms must compensate the media for all journalistic content published by their users, even if it contains fake news.
Most importantly, the legal text prohibits platforms from removing false journalistic content and considers any media outlet that has existed for at least two years, even as a sole proprietorship, a journalistic vehicle.
Minister Dino prohibited Google from promoting positions that are contrary to the text of the law without adequately informing users that they are advertisements.
“In addition to being ordered to remove the content,” he said at a press conference, “I will assess a fine of up to 20% of gross revenue, in addition to the precautionary freezing of Google’s bank accounts.”
Dino reiterated yesterday, “Google has violated the Consumer Protection Act, specifically the section on abusive advertising and surreptitious advertising, which is a form of misleading advertising.”
Under the threat of having to pay 1 million reais per hour (about US$200,000), which later became 150,000 reais per hour (about US$30,000), Google removed the link from its homepage.
Representatives of the company, however, responded to Minister Dino’s propaganda accusations.
“Claims that we are changing our algorithms so that anti-law enforcement content appears at the top of the page to the detriment of other positive posts are false.”
“Recently, we have publicly and transparently stated our position on PL 2630 on our official blog.”
“In addition, we have invested in marketing campaigns to make our concerns more visible through advertisements in traditional media, such as newspapers and digital media, including our advertising platforms and social media.”
“We believe that the debate on laws that can affect the lives of millions of Brazilians and businesses should involve all sectors of society.”
Google’s words, however, went unheard.
Federal Court Judge/Justice Alexandre de Moraes gave representatives of Brazil’s leading “big tech” companies 48 hours to explain themselves to the federal police.
A sharp Estado de São Paulo newspaper editorial said, “Alexandre de Moraes’ decision contains serious errors.
It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the judiciary’s role in the democratic rule of law.
No judge is the arbiter of public debate in the country, certainly not in ex officio decisions, and even less so in proposed legislation in Congress.”
One of the reasons that officially prompted the government to act urgently and with such severity was the recent increase in attacks on schools in the country.
However, the Discord platform, which investigators consider to be central to radicalizing attackers or potential attackers, is not touched in the slightest by the law, which does not even address the international debate over Tik Tok, which was accused of transmitting data to the Chinese government at a recent hearing in the U.S. Congress.
For this reason, the use of Tik Tok by government officials has recently been banned in many countries, such as the United States, Canada, and several European institutions, such as the European Commission, while in Brazil, even President Lula maintains his profile on the platform without security concerns.
The main criticism of the proposed law concerns some sections of the text, which were amended by your rapporteur last week.
Although the article provides for the creation of an “autonomous but elected by the executive” control body to decide which content should be removed for alleged falsity and which should not and to control the imposition of fines on tech giants, the question remains who will perform these tasks that remain in the text.
According to Meta, the company that owns Facebook, “government agencies would be responsible for rulemaking in areas such as risk analysis, external review of platforms and content moderation, leading to legal uncertainty.”
In the new version, the major tech companies will also have to compensate the creators of journalistic and artistic content distributed on their platforms.
However, they stress that the way the bill provides for these mandatory remunerations would not allow them to offer free services to users.
Another critical issue is civil liability for content posted by third parties on social networks, which does not currently exist. If the law is passed in this sense, the platforms will be personally liable in court.
The text also obliges them to inform the police if they suspect a crime has occurred or may occur.
The “big tech” companies claim they can only do this if they act as “Internet police” and create a permanent surveillance system.
Under PL 2630, platforms must submit semi-annual transparency reports on content moderation procedures.
They must also commission an external audit to assess compliance with the law. And all of this must be made available to the public in Portuguese.
Google’s defense is that the model “poses serious risks to free expression” and that “companies would be encouraged to remove legitimate expression, leading to excessive blocking and a new form of censorship.”
Finally, the parliamentary immunity this law extends to politicians’ social networks makes it impossible for tech giants to remove false content they produce or content that violates their codes of conduct, which has caused much confusion.
If the fake news law is indeed put to the vote in two weeks, its passage will represent a Rubicon, the crossing of which will make clear which direction Lula’s new government intends to take.