Lula launches information checking website maintained by the government

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) announced this Monday (27) the launch of a platform for checking information to be maintained by the federal government. The announcement was made on social media by Lula and the government’s Communication Secretariat. “Brazil has suffered a lot from lies on social networks in recent years. We need to strengthen a network of truth,” wrote Lula.

The launch of the tool takes place three days after the president himself said, without evidence, that a Federal Police operation that defeated a plan against Senator Sergio Moro (União-PR) was a “framing”.

The platform, called “Brasil contra Fake”, aims to select news with disinformation potential that may harm members of the government, or that are related to topics of interest to the Executive, and oppose it with the “official” version of the government.

An institutional video was released with the motto “Who spreads fake news, spreads destruction”. “This is a call to unite against the hatred spread by fake news, false information that can destroy democracy, and more than that, destroy families, reputations, lives”, says the campaign.

On the newly launched website, there are steps to report content from each of the social networks, but there is no detail on what can be classified as fake news. Among the fact-checking news published on the site, there are some such as: “It is false that the Lula government ordered the pumps in São Francisco to be turned off” and “It is false that those immunized against the flu receive a bivalent vaccine against Covid without knowing it”.

This is not the first initiative by the Lula government to determine what is and is not fake news. In January, the Attorney General’s Office (AGU) created a structure to combat misinformation, but the proposal is still under review, after receiving a barrage of criticism.

Platform reviews

The Lula government’s initiative has been criticized by the opposition, especially due to the fact that the announcement of the launch of the platform took place three days after Lula said, without evidence, that the Federal Police operation that defeated a plan against Moro and other authorities linked to the fight against organized crime would be a “framework”.

One of the critics of the measure, federal deputy Deltan Dallagnol (Pode-PR) published this Monday afternoon an edited video of the government campaign on the checking platform with excerpts from several of Lula’s speeches with false statements or hate speech.

“I got tired of traveling the world talking badly about Brazil. It was beautiful for us to travel the world talking ‘in Brazil there are 30 million street children’. We didn’t even know, ‘there are I don’t know how many millions of abortions’. We were quoting numbers, you know? If the guy asked the source, we wouldn’t have it, but we would quote numbers”, says Lula in one of the excerpts shown. In the statements, he has fun confessing that, in Paris, he invented data on the number of children who lived on the streets of Brazil. On the occasion, Lula even said that there were 25 million homeless children in the country.

Another to express himself critically at the launch of the tool was Fabio Wajgarten, former Secretary of Social Communication for Jair Bolsonaro. “The Federal Government’s campaign “Brazil against Fake” precisely in the week in which the PRESIDENT commits fake news is a beating in the face of Brazilians”, he declared.