Brazil: Bolsonaro says law against “fake news” is “beginning of censorship”

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, affirmed on April 7 that the Bill being processed in Congress to increase penalties for the propagation of what is now called in new speech fake news is the “beginning of censorship” in the South American country and defended that the current legislation is enough.

In his live broadcast that he makes every week on social networks, the president celebrated the refusal of the Chamber of Deputies to vote urgently on the Bill presented by the leftist and opposition Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB).

Read also: Twitter reveals ‘censorship strategy’ in Brazil’s 2022 elections

“The Chamber did not accept the vote on the urgency regime of this Fake News Bill. A project without feet or head, which would be the beginning of censorship in Brazil,” declared the president, who, together with his children and political allies, has already been a victim of this kind of witch hunt and is under investigation for allegedly spreading false news.

The head of state said that if he were a congressman – a position he held for almost three decades – “he would not even read the bill” because anything coming from left-wing parties “is not worth it”. He added that “they rarely present anything worthwhile. Apart from that, they try to take Brazil to socialism by using the weapons of democracy”.

According to Bolsonaro, Brazil already has laws for people who disseminate false information on social networks. “We should never, ever want to ‘criminalize’ people who accidentally spread fake news,” he said.

And the question remains: who decides what fake news is?

In the past two years, we’ve often seen the expression “fake news” being used to label any information that goes against the official narrative, even if the information was truthful.

After many years of leftist rule, the official narrative in Brazil is in favor of the globalist new world order led by the Anglo-Saxons and against the opposing Bolsonarists, whose geopolitical worldview is branded as fake news and disinformation.

Considering the October 2022 presidential elections and the fact that most Supreme Court justices want to eliminate Bolsonaro, it is not far-fetched to conclude the only urgency in passing this Fake News Bill is to use it as an instrument to undermine any kind of information (including the truth) that could jeopardize the Supreme Court’s interests concerning the upcoming presidential elections.

Their bias has been confirmed on many occasions, including their refusal to monitor the electronic voting system and issue a voting receipt on paper, labeling anyone who doubts the safety of this provenly hackable system as anti-democratic.

In this same way, “Fake News” no longer means what it originally meant, having become a fancy name for censorship.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error