Moraes’ threat to Telegram is a display of muscles and flees the law

This Wednesday (10), Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), threatened the Telegram application with a 72-hour suspension because of the publication of a message contrary to the Fake News PL. In the opinion of jurists consulted by the People’s GazetteMoraes’ decision is an attempt to demonstrate power, is full of internal inconsistencies and has no support in Brazilian legislation.

In the text, Moraes makes a “muscle display” similar to the decision that determined Google to remove links to an article by the company against the Fake News PL. In addition to slogans and catchphrases that have already become clichés in Supreme Court inquiries, the minister abuses bold formatting, capital letters and exclamation marks.

For Pedro Moreira, PhD in Philosophy of Law from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Moraes’ decision is “a complete excess”, outside the scope of Law and is purely related to power.

“It is an act of power. Acts of power do not need to be in accordance with the law for them to be effective and even valid. It is enough for the legal community to accept them without embarrassing those who practice them. And perhaps that is the case”, he says.

The jurist also criticizes the recurrent use of indeterminate concepts to justify censorship decisions. “The minister understands that Telegram’s opinion constitutes disinformation and that, as a result, it encourages the practice of illicit acts by ‘digital militias’, a term that also seems to have been incorporated into legal language. In short, more indeterminate, mobile concepts that can be applied to any desired situation”, he comments.

Alessandro Chiarottino, professor of Constitutional Law and Doctor of Law at USP, draws attention to the internal inconsistency of Moraes’ decision: the minister discusses fundamental rights such as freedom of expression practicing censorship, and calls for discourse in defense of democracy by limiting the plural and democratic debate.

“In the final third of the decision, when the rapporteur wants to say what is not prohibited and what is prohibited, in his view, by our Constitution, he makes an extremely vast and expansive reasoning of the prohibitions and places a large part of what constitutes political discussion normal under the aegis of constitutional prohibition. We are really in a very complicated political-institutional moment”, says the expert.

Telegram issued a legitimate opinion that rarely appears in the mainstream media, say jurists

For Chiarottino, the message released by Telegram “is absolutely moderate” and goes “in line with the political position of parliamentarians, some media and, probably, a large part of Brazilian society”. “Telegram did nothing more than express an opinion, in my opinion, absolutely licit, on a bill that is being voted on.”

There is also, in his view, no abuse of economic power by the app. “We have the wide dissemination of messages in the opposite direction. The large information bodies, in general, support the restrictions presented in the Fake News bill. Telegram, by releasing this note, is doing nothing more than reestablishing a bit of a balance – as the mainstream press is massively supportive, oddly enough, of the bill, even though it will, in reality, restrict freedom of the press.”

Moreira criticizes the use of slogans to delegitimize Telegram’s opinion. “The truth is that Telegram, like Google, has issued an opinion. We can debate whether issuing it could be an abuse of economic power or not. But is the platform’s position ‘fake news’? Is it ‘disinformation’? It is aggression against democracy and the rule of law?”, he asks.

In the same decision, Moraes threatened to fine any user who resorted to a VPN service to try to circumvent the restriction on the use of Telegram, in case the service was suspended (this Wednesday afternoon, the company complied with the order). de Moraes, which makes this possibility more remote).

“It is complete nonsense. He is hitting the citizen himself, directly, with fines that, for anyone, for 99.99% of the Brazilian population, are absolutely priceless. It is a difficult moment, I repeat. It is yet another advance by the STF against our system of freedoms and guarantees”.