Justice orders TikTok to remove Hugo Soares’ video about Barbie

A 4th Civil Court of Curitiba issued an injunction determining that the TikTok make a video of the Portuguese comedian unavailable on the platform Hugo Soares. In the video, Soares talks about the doll Barbie with Down Syndromelaunched by Mattel in April 2023. “It’s not an original idea, everyone knows that the Chinese sell defective dolls”, says the comedian.

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In the decision, issued on June 12, Judge José Eduardo de Mello Leitão Salmon determines that TikTok make the video unavailable within five days. On the morning of this Thursday (15), however, the post was still up. The injunction sets a fine of R$ 1,000 per day, limited to 60 days, if the decision is not complied with.

A People’s Gazette contacted TikTok, asking for a position on the case, but did not get a response until the publication of the report. The space remains open for demonstrations.

“I’m not sorry,” said comedian

The injunction was issued in a lawsuit filed by the Public Defender’s Office of Paraná, started at the request of a group of 12 families of children with Down Syndrome who live in Curitiba. Families considered the content of the video discriminatory and cruel. The Defender had already sent letters to Google and TikTok asking for the post to be removed. Google, which controls YouTube, had taken it down, but TikTok claimed it couldn’t delete the video because the content was foreign.

The comedian took to YouTube and, last week, had an appeal approved by the platform. With that, the video was made available again. to the website G1Soares said that the comment made in the video it was a joke, part of a “black humor” show he did in a bar in Portugal. “I have no regrets and no apologies. It’s my job,” he said.

“Anyone who is offended by my jokes or any other comedian is within their rights but, as I am not to blame for the lack of intelligence of these people, I will not apologize and I will maintain my position in defense of freedom of artistic expression. If the Public Defender Public does not know how to differentiate this either, it only demonstrates incompetence and very strange priorities. G1.

Judge José Salmon understood that the video “offends and ridicules” people with Down Syndrome, since it “associates the genetic condition of the carrier of the T21 chromosome to a human being with a defect”. “It appears that the content of the video violates freedom of expressionsince it constitutes a discriminatory discourse that offends the rights of people with Down Syndrome”, completes the decision.