Google withdraws text against PL of Fake News

The Ministry of Justice and the National Consumer Secretariat (Senacon) announced, this Tuesday (2), a precautionary measure against Google to oblige the company to treat the link that appeared on its home page since Friday as advertising. , with the title “The bill of fake news can increase the confusion about what is true or false in Brazil”. Less than an hour after the notification, Google removed the text from the air.

The link directed users to the company’s official blog with an opinion text. For the company, the approval of the project could harm freedom of expression, favor fake news producers and jeopardize the distribution of free content over the internet.

For Senacon, the distribution of the text would be illegal for interfering “in the formation of political opinion” of civil society through “directed moderation of content on such legislative proposal”.

“The advertisement against PL 2630, published on the opening page of the Google search engine, without transparency, is an advertising report by Google itself expressing its position regarding the PL, without any advertising signs”, wrote the national secretary for the Consumer , Waldir Damous.

The government’s precautionary measure also requires the company to inform Senacon if it is prioritizing this content in searches over the Fake News PL and flag it as advertising.

The government also determined a fine of R$ 1 million per hour, in case of non-compliance with the precautionary measure, by Google. The fine, according to the government, is “due to the nature of the misleading and abusive advertising practiced, given the proximity of the date of the vote on the legislative proposal”, which affected the “harmony and neutrality of the networks”.

According to Minister Flávio Dino, Google’s action is an “immoral attempt to reverse the terms of the debate”, with the idea of ​​conveying that the Brazilian government wants to censor social networks.

To defend the measures against Google, Flávio Dino cited two leftist organizations: the Sleeping Giants and the NetLab activism laboratory, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

NetLab pointed out an alleged Google targeting in searches about the project, for articles on the platform with criticism of the Fake News PL. This announcement was questioned by experts, like Pedro Burgos, professor at Insperwhich tested with anonymous tabs and did not find the same result.

The Federal Public Ministry of São Paulo notified this Monday (1), Google and Meta – the company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – to provide clarification for alleged practices on their platforms contrary to the Fake News PL. The body questions whether there was a change in search results and unidentified advertisements against the proposal.

Google has not yet commented on the government’s precautionary measure. In a note, published on Monday night (1), the company denied that it was expanding the reach of pages with content contrary to the Fake News PL to the detriment of publications favorable to the text. “We do not manually alter the results lists to determine the position of a specific page under any circumstances. Our ranking systems apply consistently to all pages, including those managed by Google,” said the big tech.