Brazil’s electoral justice will have more power to fight false news

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, the court in charge of organizing the elections, approved a resolution that gives it more power in the fight against fake news being spread in the final stretch of the campaign that pits incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva against each other.

“The rule establishes that, after the collegiate decision that determines the withdrawal of disinformative content, the presidency of the TSE itself may determine the extension of such decision to identical content republished,” the agency reported in a statement.

Until now, when a party resorted to Justice to point out that its adversary was spreading lies on a particular website, the TSE ordered the removal of the content on that URL, but as they are quickly replicated on other sites, the measure ended up being almost innocuous.

From now on, it will not be necessary for the lawyers of each campaign to file a new court decision for each platform or website, “there will be an extension and immediate removal of this fraudulent news”, said the TSE president Alexandre de Moraes.

Another novelty is that it is now forbidden to pay for any advertising 48 hours before the elections and 24 hours after the voting.

Moraes recalled that there was a 1,671 percent increase in the volume of disinformation complaints directed to digital platforms in this year’s elections compared to the 2020 municipal elections.

In addition, episodes of political violence via social networks (threats, coercion, etc.) increased by 436 percent compared to the 2018 presidential elections.

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