Attacks on schools and 8/1 become a pretext to radicalize Fake News PL

The President of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), confirmed that he will include the Fake News PL in the plenary voting agenda until Wednesday (26). The decision comes after intense pressure from the Executive and the governing base in the Chamber, which explored the acts of January 8 and the attacks on schools to make a version of the Bill of Fake News possible, facilitating the censorship of opponents on social networks.

Declarations associating these events with the need to regulate the internet helped to create the climate to justify the urgency of the agenda. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and members of the government resorted to 8/1 and the tragedies in schools as a pretext to rush the vote on a project laden with imprecise concepts that could serve as an instrument for censorship.

On his recent trip to Portugal, Lula once again made use of this resource. On Saturday (22), in an interview after a meeting with President Marcelo Rebelo, the PT said that Portugal and Brazil are “threatened by the phenomenon of extremism, political violence and hate speech, fueled by false news”.

“You followed the last elections in Brazil, you saw what happened. When you start to deny politics, what comes after is always much worse,” he said. “In Brazil we are working hard. We are even working on a Bill that will enter the National Congress next week to create certain regulations to prevent the dissemination of lies through the internet”, he added.

On Tuesday of last week (18), in a meeting with authorities of the Three Powers on the attacks on schools, Lula also blamed “hatred on the web” for the recent tragedies. “It’s not possible that I can preach hate on the digital network, that I can advertise guns, teach children to shoot,” he said.

At the same event, Flávio Dino, Minister of Justice and Public Security, said that there is a “terrible flow of hate speech” on the internet and that this would be related to the attacks. Alexandre de Moraes, president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), established the same causal link and brought out again an idea that he has been insistently repeating for months: that “hate speech” must be fought by the networks with the same strategies they use against child pornography.

The statements by Dino, Lula and Moraes occur at the same time that the government and the Judiciary are pressuring the Legislature for the approval of a Bill of Fake News with an emphasis on combating what has been called “disinformation”, “attacks on democracy” and “discourse of hate”.

Expressions like these have been useful for the left because they indiscriminately group both objectively illegal speeches and common criticisms of institutions, putting in the same basket, for example, a blunt but legitimate statement by a right-wing parliamentarian and the criminal call for the practice of a violent attack. With that, these terms became “dog whistles” (dog whistles) from the left to condemn speeches from the right. (In political science, “dog whistle” is a form of thinly-veiled communication in which a message is fully understood by those who are familiar with the underlying context, but only partially understood by the majority of the population; “people’s sexual and reproductive rights women”, for example, can be considered a “dog whistle” of feminists to talk about the legalization of abortion. The concept of “dog whistle” refers to a type of whistle that emits a sound inaudible to human beings, but which can be heard by dogs.)

The term “hate speech” does not exist in Brazilian legislation and is not even well defined in the academic context, where it came from. In the Judiciary, it was used during elections to refer to criticisms against the TSE or the Federal Supreme Court (STF), and practically only resulted in lawsuits against right-wingers, as well as the term “extremism”.

For Alessandro Chiarottino, professor of Constitutional Law and Doctor of Law at USP, the category “hate speech” is “too open to appear as a parameter for limiting the right to free expression of thought”. “The allegation of practice of ‘hate speech’ reminds me of the accusation of ‘action contrary to the healthy feeling of the German people’ used by the Nazi regime: it is a catch-all [termo genérico, em tradução livre] under which anything can fit, and it seems done ad hoc to silence the ideological opposition”, he says.

Since January 1, 2023, the terminology applied by the Judiciary during elections has been appropriated by the Executive. At the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship (MDHC), for example, the government has already created a working group with the mission of “fighting hate speech and discouraging extremism in the country”.

In the drafts already released to the press of possible texts for the Fake News PL, the use of these expressions is frequent. The government’s objective is, in summary, that social networks have a much greater responsibility in the surveillance of content published on social networks, which includes curbing “hate speech”, “attacks on democracy” and “disinformation” on their own, without lawsuit. For platforms that do not agree with the idea, this could represent the need to actively censor content that fits into these new and vague categories, at the risk of fines in case of non-compliance.

Chiarottino asserts that limits to freedom of expression under the rule of law must “necessarily be justified according to the real and imminent possibility of serious harm to persons or property”. Any limitation that does not meet this criterion, according to him, is characterized as censorship and prohibited by the Constitution.

For Moraes and Dino, 8/1 and attacks on schools really have “ethos”, “matrix of thought” or “modus operandi”

The harmony between the Judiciary and the Executive in the pretense of criminalizing a type of thought and a social group is evident in recent statements by Alexandre de Moraes and Flávio Dino comparing attacks on schools with 8/1.

For them, both attacks could be attributed to a category of people associated with a certain ideology, whose activities on networks should be criminalized through the Fake News PL. Dino says that 8/1 and the school attacks have the same “ethos” and the same “thought matrix”. Moraes claims that the two events depart from the same “modus operandi”.

In a press conference on April 10, Dino attributed the attacks on schools to the “influence of the idea of ​​extremist violence at any price, at any cost” and said he saw “a connection between one thing and another”, in reference to the 8/ 1. “The ethos, the world organizing paradigm that political coup plotters and child abusers, child murderers have is the same. It’s the same matrix of thought, the matrix of violence.”

Moraes, in turn, said on the 18th that “the modus operandi of these instrumentalized, publicized attacks, encouraged by social networks in relation to schools is exactly identical to the modus operandi that was used against electronic voting machines, against democracy, the modus operandi instrumented for the 8th of January”.

The identification of this “ethos”, “matrix of thought” or “modus operandi”, in the view of both the Executive and the Judiciary, would already be clear enough to be enshrined in a law that allows censorship of this alleged criminal ideological group. “If there is no self-regulation and regulation by certain models to be followed, we will see the continuity of this instrumentalization by the networks to encourage attacks on schools”, stated Moraes in the same speech.

On April 5, Dino followed the same path: “Why does this violence against children and young people happen? Because today we have a proliferation of hate speech in various spheres of society, and this obviously reaches schools. It is a social tragedy . Due to all that we are experiencing in Brazil, and this deregulated, deregulated internet, it emerged with great force [a violência] in schools”, said the Minister of Justice, according to the R7 portal.

For Alessandro Chiarottino, generalizations of this type about demonstrations on social networks are intended to shield “certain categories of people, movements and groups from any more incisive criticism”. “The problem is that there is no democracy without freedom of criticism, even the most aggressive and virulent”, he says. The only constitutional exception to this freedom, he points out, are acts that pose a real and imminent risk to people or property.