Co-founder of Sleeping Giants will participate in seminar at STF

According to the schedule of the Seminar “Combating Disinformation and Defense of Democracy”, promoted by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), law student Mayara Stelle is among the speakers at the event. Mayara is a co-founder of the digital militia Sleeping Giants Brasil, a left-wing political activism group known for intimidating companies on the internet to cancel and demonetize advertisements in communication vehicles that do not share the group’s ideological values.

The event will be held on September 14 and 15 and is organized by the Supreme together with the National Association of Directors of Federal Institutions of Higher Education (Andifes) and the College of Communication Managers of Federal Universities (Cogecom).

Stelle is listed as a speaker on a panel that will debate the “regulation of digital social platforms and the monetization of disinformation”. The panel will be led by the Minister of the Supreme, Alexandre de Moraes, who recently filed an inquiry by the Civil Police of São Paulo against Sleeping Giants Brasil, which was being investigated by the Civil Police of São Paulo for allegedly committing the crime of defamation against the broadcaster Jovem Pan.

Also noteworthy is the fact that among all the seminar participants, Mayara Stelle is the only “law student”, while all the other debaters are jurists and academics with a consolidated career.

The suspicious activities of Sleeping Giants Brasil are also in the sights of the Communication and Digital Law Commission (CCDD) of the Federal Senate, which intends to investigate possible abuses by the organization.

“O modus operandi by Sleeping Giants Brasil, copy of an entity created in the United States is the public citation of advertisers in the media and social networks aiming at the removal of their advertising in communication vehicles that may cause damage to brands or to criteria of social responsibility and corporate governance. In practice, it is a campaign to wear out communication vehicles, as well as posting sites on social networks that displease the group’s organizers, creating a kind of index that would promote censorship of the media through the financial squeeze of these groups, technique very common in authoritarian regimes”, says an excerpt from the application approved at the CCDD, on the last 9th.

The first panel of the seminar, which will be led by Minister Luís Roberto Barroso, will have as its theme the “strengthening the justice system and its institutions to combat disinformation”.

Barroso has been the protagonist of several controversies when he has publicly expressed his personal political views. The most recent occurred in July, when he confessed, at an event at the National Union of Students (UNE), that he acted to defeat “Bolsonarism”.

In another case, which took place in April last year, when questioned by federal deputy Tabata Amaral (PSB-SP) about the possibility of re-election of former president Jair Bolsonaro, Barroso stated that it was necessary “not to overvalue the enemies” and concluded: ” We are very powerful. We are democracy”.

In June, during the opening of the 7th Meeting of the Council of Presidents of the Courts of Justice of Brazil, held in Porto Alegre, Barroso admitted that the Judiciary has become a political power. Two weeks after last year’s elections, Barroso returned to the headlines with the phrase: “You lost, mané. Don’t tease”. The phrase was a response to a Brazilian who questioned the minister about the weaknesses of electronic voting machines during the magistrate’s visit to New York.

See the schedule of the event of the STF