Big techs demand regulatory criteria from the government – 03/31/2023 – Power

Target of attempts at regulation, internet platforms defended this Friday (31) their actions against misinformation, and part of them asked for clear rules from the public power for content moderation.

The statements were given by representatives of big techs at an event on democracy and digital platforms at the USP Faculty of Law.

In the morning, the Minister of the STF (Supreme Federal Court) Alexandre de Moraes defended that companies are responsible for any monetized or boosted content and stated that there is currently irresponsibility in the way the subject is treated.

In exhibitions, representatives of YouTube and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, defended that the public authorities establish clear parameters.

Meta’s head of public integrity policy, Monica Guise said that, contrary to what is often said, the company is in favor of regulation and would like to participate in debates on the subject — even to find out how moderation should be carried out of content.

“The beacons of what is or is not democratic [em um conteúdo] need to be given preference by the Legislative”, he says.

Without citing Moraes, she also refuted the minister’s assertion that platforms act irresponsibly.

Guise said it’s easy to talk about content moderation, but very difficult to implement, as many cases remain in what she called a gray area. “Hate speech is extremely subjective. The same word in one context may be used to attack and, in another, to warn and confront.”

She also dismissed the comparison between the ease that networks have to remove child pornography with the difficulty of vetoing anti-democratic content.

According to Guise, the platforms have the ability to compare any audiovisual material with a large database of child pornography videos that leave a kind of fingerprint (called a hash, in the technical term).

In this way, content of the type, which is often recirculated, is much more easily identifiable than others.

In her presentation, Alana Rizzo, YouTube’s public policy manager in Brazil, said that governments must provide very clear guidelines on what constitutes illegal content, in addition to a certain degree of autonomy for platforms to react to unprecedented situations, since the legislator’s time is slower.

She also listed measures that the company took to favor content with credibility in the elections and during the Covid pandemic, for example.

Director of public policies for TikTok in Brazil, Fernando Gallo asked for the maintenance of article 19 of the Marco Civil, which exempts platforms from responsibility for third-party content.

But he defended that, if the STF declares the device unconstitutional, there should be very clear parameters regarding the responsibility of the platforms, preferably established by Congress, under the risk of “private censorship” —that is, companies suppressing more content than they would normally do to avoid punishment.

Gallo stated that TikTok is willing to “build good regulation” and rejected the idea that platforms do not self-regulate. He argued that the application regulates itself, for example, when it updates rules, improves tools for detecting problematic content and increases transparency.

Dario Durigan, from WhatsApp, admitted that there is a challenge of how to guarantee democracy while maintaining the privacy of communications. He said that the challenge is also from WhatsApp, but not only. According to him, it would be of society as a whole.

He said that the company cooperates a lot with the authorities, for example with metadata that can be provided, but he strongly defended the guarantee of the encryption of the information.

He also stated that restrictions on message forwarding made mass shooting, a major issue in the 2018 election, no longer a relevant problem in the 2022 election.

Durigan also emphasized that WhatsApp is not a social network and therefore does not work with boosting, monetization or algorithms.