Orkut had a pedophilia scandal and harbored extremism – 01/24/2024 – Tech

Orkut, which would celebrate 20 years of creation this Wednesday (24), introduced Brazilians to the dark side of mass social networks, with child pornography, digital violence and political extremism.

The biggest scandal on the social network, launched on January 24, 2004 and officially closed in May 2014, in Brazil was triggered by a complaint from the president of Safernet Brasil, Thiago Tavares, to the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) of São Paulo. This was in February 2006.

The episode showed the resistance of the platform’s owner, Google, to collaborate with the Brazilian authorities and involved allegations of omission in the face of crimes such as racism and pedophilia.

The company became known in the 2000s for not cooperating with Brazilian justice, according to the columnist for Sheet Ronaldo Lemos. When contacted by the report, Google declined to comment on the case.

The 130-page dossier delivered by Tavares to the MPF contained 1,345 reports of child pornography on the social network, received from an anonymous line between May 13, 2005 and November 30 of the same year.

The material led the Public Ministry to file the first public civil action (ACP) against Google Brazil, on August 22, 2006, with a request for R$130 million in compensation for collective moral damages in August 2006.

The prosecutors asked the ACP for access to data from profile creators and criminal communities to identify Brazilian users of the Google service who published “shocking images of child pornography” (in which children under the age of 5 appeared having sex with adults) and demonstrations of hatred against blacks, Jews, Northeasterners, homosexuals and other discriminated groups.

At the time, however, Google refused to share data with Brazilian authorities. Between 2004 and August 2006, there were 52 requests for breach of confidentiality by the MPF in progress, 38 accepted by the Court and all ignored by the Brazilian headquarters of the provider.

According to the article Sheet on August 23, 2006, Google Brazil had declared to the Court that it was unable to provide the information because only the company’s headquarters in the USA, Google Inc., had control over the data.

In a statement to the São Paulo Court, Google Brazil stated that it restricted its activities to marketing and sales.

According to the chief researcher at the Rio de Janeiro Institute of Technology and Society (ITS-Rio), Ronaldo Lemos, this behavior would be impossible after the Internet Civil Rights Framework came into force, which began in June 2014.

“Platforms are now required to store access logs in Brazil and hand them over upon judicial request,” says Lemos.

The crisis was such that the search giant considered closing Orkut’s activities in the country, according to documents obtained at the time by the Sheet at the headquarters of the most accessed search engine in the world, in Mountain View, California.

At the time, Orkut had around 20 million users in Brazil. Despite its popularity in the country in 2006, the social network only gained its first version in Portuguese in 2008.

The action would be taken if Google failed to curb excesses by Brazilian users or did not reach an agreement with the country’s courts.

According to documents obtained by SheetGoogle’s management assessed that Orkut’s image could be irreparably damaged in Brazil, a country that accounted for between 80% and 90% of total users.

A request for breach of confidentiality by the MPF was accepted by the then judge José Marcos Lunardelli on August 31, 2006.

“To sell services in Brazil, Google is present, but to collaborate in the elucidation of crimes, no”, wrote the judge in the decision. “This is a comfortable and complacent stance towards the serious crimes committed on the Orkut service by nationals, and which has no support in the Brazilian legal system”, he added.

Google Brazil, however, chose to continue not to cooperate with the courts.

Report from Sheet in 2006 found that the company was reluctant to give up its users’ data, unless in agreement with the US Court, for fear that it could be used for political purposes. They cited precedents of Chinese and Iranian authorities demanding information from dissidents within their respective regimes.

A year later, on August 23, 2007, the MPF-SP returned to the public to say that Google continued to deny access to the data of the owners of profiles accused of pedophilia and racism.

In the meantime, Safernet continued to receive reports about child pornography on Orkut through the denunciar.org channel, created in January 2006. Based on these reports, the entity’s technicians found over 46 thousand profiles and communities that committed illegal activities.

In a master’s thesis he wrote about this work, Tavares assesses that Orkut’s reporting channels in Brazil did not work.

Google only began to collaborate with Brazilian authorities after the Senate opened the CPI on Pedophilia in April 2008. On May 1 of that year, the Sheet disclosed that parliamentarians had found pedophile material in 100 of the 250 Orkut albums reported by Safernet.

In July 2008, the MPF, the Federal Police and the Pedophilia CPI managed to sign a cooperation agreement with Google.

After the CPI’s intervention, the provider provided information on 3,600 reported profiles. This data motivated operations such as Turko (an anagram of Orkut), which involved search and seizure warrants in 21 states.

The agreement with the MPF also included Orkut’s collaboration with Safernet. By 2014, this cooperation resulted in 2.6 million reports received and more than 117 thousand links removed.

Another feature of contemporary social networks already present on Orkut was the heated political debate.

There were several communities with a political-ideological aspect, such as “Heloísa Helena Presidente”, “Mamãe, eu sou reça”, “PSDB Nunca Mais” and “Anti-PT”, where people met to debate politics.

The columnist for Sheet Camila Rocha mentions in her book “Menos Marx, Mais Mises” how the late self-taught philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, one of the gurus of Bolsonarism, began to gain prominence on Orkut. “There were communities of admirers and detractors,” she says.

Orkut reached 30 million users in Brazil in 2011, when Google’s social network was overtaken in the country by Facebook, then leveraged by the popularity of the news feed.

Google silently stopped updating Orkut’s official blog in 2012. After announcing the end of the social network in May 2014, it deleted all records of the site on May 15.

When contacted by the report via email and WhatsApp, the creator of Orkut, the Turkish engineer Orkut Büyükkökten, did not respond.

While visiting Brazil during the 2022 Campus Party, Büyükkökten criticized the current social media business model.

“Human experience is transformed into data to generate profit,” he said. “A post, no matter how harmful or false, can reach the top of feeds as long as it generates engagement.”