By J.R. Guzzo*
(Opinion) Brazil has just taken one of the fundamental steps that the manual for setting up dictatorships presents on its very first page – it has forwarded a censorship bill, in yet another of those shams that place the desks of Congress among the most demoralized things in Brazilian society.
Don’t waste your time thinking that it is not exactly that because it is exactly that.
They say, of course, that it is a law to “combat disinformation”, to stop “fake news”, to ban “lies from the internet” or “news”, and other nonsense.
It is pure deception – that is full-fledged fake news.
In the world of concrete facts, the bill creates and delivers to the government a censorship mechanism in Brazil.
Through it, the “State” starts giving orders about what the citizen can or cannot say on the internet, gains the right to punish those who manifest themselves on social networks, and turns the article of the Federal Constitution that establishes the freedom of speech in this country into a set of useless words, for any practical effect.
The proposed law for approval does not want to “put an order in this internet racket” or forbid people from “lying” or repressing the press – it is aimed at silencing the citizen who wants to express what he thinks through social networks.
As in every civilized society, it does not punish a person’s acts – as in every dictatorship; it represses what he thinks.
It has no purpose to make Brazilian society cleaner, fairer, or more organized, nor to combat the crimes that can be committed through the free word.
Its only purpose is to hand the government a tool of repression, to censor the circulation of views or information that it, the government, does not want to be circulated.
It has nothing to do with the idea of order.
That order is already fully guaranteed by the Penal Code and other existing laws, which punish all the offenses committed with the use of freedom of speech – libel, slander, defamation, injury, coup d’état, incitement to crime, racism, Nazism, threat.
It is all there; there is nothing outside.
The Brazilian citizen is responsible, yes, for everything he says in public, and not only from a criminal point of view.
He is subject, at all times, to pay damages and to compensate for losses, if the courts so decide.
It is simply false to say that “freedom of speech cannot be exercised without limits” or “injure the rights of others” – it has limits marked in law and punishes those who violate any rights of other citizens.
The law is titled “Internet Freedom (?) Law”, which says it all.
Every time a law about freedom is made, without exception, freedom ends up being smaller than it was or disappeared for good; all dictatorships, from Cuba to China, are full of laws about “freedom”.
In the Brazilian case, there is not a single word in the bill that objectively supports freedom of expression; it is the exact opposite all the time.
The essential fact is that the new law creates a “Council” to be formed by 21 “civil society” members with the explicit power to censor – an aberration that has never existed in Brazil, not even in the time of AI-5.
Does anyone think this Council, to be assembled by Lula’s government, will seek the truth, be impartial, and guarantee “freedom on the internet”?
*J. R. Guzzo, published in the newspaper O Estado de S.Paulo on April 26, 2023.
With information from Revista Oeste