Lira Group says it maintains the Fake News PL vote – 04/24/2023 – Politics

Party leaders allied with the mayor, Arthur Lira (PP-AL), expect to vote and approve this Wednesday (26) the urgency of the Fake News PL, despite pressure from the opposition and platforms, which defend the creation of a special commission to debate the text in greater depth.

Urgency is a requirement used to speed up the voting on a proposal. With this, the project does not need to go through committees and can be taken directly to the plenary, later this week.

The position is in line with that of the rapporteur, Orlando Silva (PC do B-SP), who sees no risk of postponing the vote because of the crisis that caused the resignation of General Gonçalves Dias from the GSI (Institutional Security Office) and the possible creation of the CPMI (Mixed Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry) of the coup acts of January 8.

Leaders and deputies of centrão, center-right and government base parties privately said they agreed with the calendar established by Lira last Wednesday (19). In the session, the mayor mentioned the possibility of voting, in addition to the urgency, on the merits of the project this week.

The troubled political scenario, however, is the opposition’s bet to be able to postpone the urgency vote. In April last year, a request to accelerate the appreciation of the text was defeated by eight votes – it received 249 votes in favor, but needed 257.

In an attempt to postpone the vote, deputy Mendonça Filho (União Brasil-PE) collected more than one hundred signatures on a request that sought to create a special commission to debate the merits of the project.

“I believe that three months, 90 days, or 60 days would be a reasonable period for us, within the scope of a special commission, with the proportional representation of the benches of this House, to have a proposition that represents the average of the thoughts of the Brazilian people”, defended in the session of the 19th.

The idea of ​​a special commission is defended by some members of the government base parties. Deputies Marcos Tavares (PDT-RJ) and Professor Luciene Cavalcante (PSOL-SP) are authors of requests for the creation of a collegiate destined to extend the debate.

Tavares, for example, alleges the risk of the project embedding censorship and mass surveillance of data to defend the creation of the special commission.

The PSOL representative, in turn, stated that Internet regulation measures to deal with situations such as violence against schools and children require further discussion on the part of governments, technology companies, civil society and users.

Lira, in response to attempts to postpone the vote, stated that the project has already been debated “in all aspects”. “Today it interferes with the safety of schools, it interferes with the economic life of large and gigantic interests”, she said.

“Here we have huge interests of big techs, monetization, accountability, and everything fell on top of freedom of expression. This freedom of expression took dozens of networks of parliamentarians off the air, dozens of networks”, he criticized.

“It is not fair for this House that its right to material immunity is not extended to the internet, to guarantee parliamentarians’ access to social networks. It is not fair for this House not to be able to investigate who plants terror in the lives of our children in schools.”

The extension of parliamentary immunity to social media was one of the points included by Orlando Silva in a text that was approved by the Chamber’s working group in December 2021. The rapporteur maintained the device in the opinion he concluded last Monday (17).

In the view of some parliamentarians, voting on the project under the influence of episodes such as the attacks on schools is detrimental to the regulation of networks.

“There is no consensus at the base. As a leader, I don’t think it’s appropriate, in a contaminated moment that we are living, of full commotion and fear in society with the issue of schools, to discuss such an issue in a hasty way”, says deputy Aureo Ribeiro (Solidariedade-RJ), who sees the risk of disrupting the vote. “I still don’t feel comfortable voting on this issue.”

Over the past week, platforms have intensified pressure to try to stop the urgency vote. On the 19th, three entities representing the technology sector released a note asking parliamentarians to reject the project’s urgency requirement and support the creation of a special commission to deal with the issue.

The next day, Google published a letter in which it argues that the approval of the current text could exacerbate the problem of misinformation. The company is also going to run an advertising campaign on the internet and in newspapers warning of the risks, according to the platform, of voting on the project without discussing points that, in its opinion, were not the subject of debate in Congress.