Anyone who publishes erroneous news from the Lula administration will be held accountable

Lula’s government (PT) wants to hold those who produce news that – in the view of the current management – “misguided” and supposedly have been produced to “disconstitute a government action”. In this way, content producers, newspapers or people may be sued in court. This statement was made by the chief minister of the Presidency’s Communication Secretariat (Secom), Paulo Pimenta, in an interview with the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

Pimenta explained that when someone publishes false news, according to their assessment – such as accusing the government of having committed something that did not happen – the case will be forwarded to the Advocacy-General of the Union (AGU) and to the Ministry of Justice. “What we are going to do is identify what is a lie, respond and forward it (…) We are not going to remain silent in the face of the industrial spread of lies concerning government actions,” he said.

Even so, for Secom’s chief minister, this does not mean barring political or ideological content. The focus would be on news involving norms, laws and decrees that were disseminated with misinformation. “The big challenge is to protect freedom of expression and at the same time have some level of regulation, so as not to allow these platforms, the lack of regulation, to end up destroying democracy itself”. He also stated that the Marco Civil da Internet needs to be updated.

Pimenta also stressed that “there is freedom to criticize the government”. However, already during the elections, several actions were filed by the Workers’ Party (PT) to prevent newspapers from criticizing Lula. The PT tried to block Gazeta do Povo’s coverage of Lula and Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega; Jovem Pan was obliged to say that Lula was innocent, and the TSE determined the withdrawal of journalistic content at the request of the PT campaign.

In addition, reporting by People’s Gazette has already presented the possible consequences of the creation of the ‘Ministry of Truth’ – as the new bodies of the Union created allegedly in defense of democracy and freedom of expression have been called.

The decrees that established the National Attorney of the Union for the Defense of Democracy and the Department for the Promotion of Freedom of Expression – within the Advocacy General of the Union (AGU) and the Social Communication Secretariat (Secom) of the Presidency of the Republic, respectively – are vague regarding the attributions of the bodies. Depending on the content of media regulation that the PT intends to advance, there is a risk that they may serve as vehicles for censorship instituted by the State, according to the experts interviewed by the report.