PL of Fake News is vague, says Google director – 04/28/2023 – Politics

The Director of Government Relations and Public Policies at Google Brasil, Marcelo Lacerda, assesses that the PL for Fake News is vague. He also argues that the company already takes measures to moderate hateful content and that the responsibility for violence in schools is not just the platforms.

Lacerda makes a series of criticisms of the project reported by Deputy Orlando Silva (PC do B-SP), which should be voted on next Tuesday (2). According to him, the text leaves uncertainties about how the platforms will be regulated and is wrong in equating the care required by search engines to that of social networks.

The discussion around the project gained strength after the attack on a school in São Paulo that ended with the death of a teacher and an attack on a day care center in Blumenau (SC) that left four dead. The argument is that regulating networks could help prevent new waves of violence.

The movement caused a reaction from big techs, who claim that the project reported by Orlando is generic and that violence in schools is a social problem, not just a digital one.

“We are looking at a problem that has several facets under only one specific point. It is no use for us to just attack the networks and say that it was the platforms [as responsáveis pela violência] when there are a series of other issues that also need to be addressed, of a social nature, from the school itself, from the parents themselves, and that we also help, such as media education”, he tells Sheet Lacerda.

“If we look at it from just one point of view, we can eventually resolve or harden [as leis]but there are a number of other aspects that won’t,” he continues.

Lacerda defends that the opinion presented on the night of this Thursday (27) is vague and contains provisions that may be “perverse”.

When questioned whether Google’s internal control rules are sufficient to prevent the spread of hate speech on the internet, in view of the attacks on schools, the director defended that the project needs to be further debated and that there is always room for improvement.

“The point is that we are not against any type of regulation that says, ‘OK, from now on you will have to do x, y or z’. The only thing is that we still have doubts about the text that is on the table, if this is really going to have that positive effect that everyone is waiting for”, he says.

“Because there is still a lack of concreteness in several of the devices that are there and, for that, I would need a little more time to understand and discuss whether these solutions that are on the table will really give the expected result”, he says.

He also says that Google, between March and April, complied with 740 requests for access to data from government authorities related to terrorism and attacks on schools. But he understands that the project, as it is written, opens loopholes for the law to be used against its principles.

“The text continues with many uncertainties and vague in many aspects. In general, we understand that these uncertainties, this lack of concreteness of how that will happen in reality, will end up harming the user because, instead of fighting misinformation, runs the risk of fomenting misinformation”, he says.

“There are several perverse incentives that the law brings to actually encourage misinformation and not combat it,” he says.

The company defends that the project be debated in a special committee. He also criticizes the lack of a public hearing and discussion of the matter since it was rejected in plenary in the Chamber, in 2021.

According to him, several bodies are asking for more discussion on the subject, such as the OAB (Brazilian Bar Association). “There is still a need for a slightly deeper debate for us to have a little more clarity about how it will be applied, what the consequences [lei] and if that will generate the result that we expect, which is to fight disinformation”, he said.

The text under discussion brings together contributions from the proposal approved by the Senate and modifications incorporated by the rapporteur in the Chamber. If approved by deputies, it should return to the Senate, where the original text passed in 2020.

Lacerda says that the project brings obligations that platforms are not clear on how they should be done.

“There are a series of obligations there that we don’t know exactly how they will be done, they are being thrown for regulation. We also don’t know who will regulate this. Will it be the federal power? The Presidency? A specific agency? A specific ministry? Because there is no more forecast by the regulatory authority,” he says.

In the latest version of the text, presented this Thursday (27), Orlando removed from the newsroom the creation of a regulatory agency to supervise the platforms and made explicit the free exercise of religious cults and the “full exposure” of their dogmas and sacred books. .

The decision came after pressure from the opposition and the evangelical bench against these two points of the text.

The director of Google criticizes the fact that the project, in the way it is structured, stipulates the same rules for social networks and search engines. For example, the prediction of the exclusion of posts, a mechanism that, according to him, does not work in the logic of search engines — which do not make posts, just organize published content.

Another point that brings controversy in the project are copyrights and remuneration for journalistic content.

Artists intend to hold a demonstration in Brasília next week so that the text is approved with instruments for remuneration of material produced by them and replicated on social networks.

Lacerda criticizes the text for not providing for the exclusion of content produced by journalistic companies. According to him, currently, companies that claim to be in the business are great disseminators of fake news — he preferred not to name names.

For this reason, he argues, the project should also provide for forms of sanctioning this activity, and not just remuneration.