regulation of social networks advances in Brasilia

State control over what can or cannot be said on social networks should intensify during the Lula (PT) government, as promised by the PT during the election campaign. In addition to the policies of the platforms themselves, which impose certain restrictions on some types of content, actors from the Judiciary, Executive and Legislative powers are advancing in an attempt to create mechanisms to monitor, prohibit and even criminalize certain content. Sources heard by the report point out that the different proposals in progress, if implemented, could be used politically to silence voices contrary to the government and its ideological guidelines and generate various damages to freedom of expression.

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Discussions on the regulation of social networks took on a greater proportion after the violent protests on January 8, alleging that they had been mobilized exclusively by digital platforms. But the PT leadership was already studying to enact, right at the beginning of the government, a regulation by Provisional Measure, that is, without the need for law approval in Congress.

As there is resistance in the Legislature and in the government itself regarding the idea, government parliamentarians articulate to move quickly with the bill (PL) 2.630/20, popularly called the “PL of fake news”, which creates rules for the moderation of content on the platforms. The proposal, whose rapporteur is with federal deputy Orlando Silva (PCdoB-SP), has already been approved by the Senate and is awaiting analysis by the Chamber of Deputies.

A People’s Gazette already published a series of articles and editorials showing that the risks behind this proposal outweigh the benefits. “Interesting measures such as the hunt for robots and fake profiles were mixed with a series of open-ended predictions that give rise to persecution and censorship on political and ideological grounds”, explains one of the articles.

Despite the risks of censorship, also pointed out by experts interviewed by the People’s Gazette In this report, the project’s approval is defended by members of the Lula government on the grounds of curbing the dissemination of content that represents threats to democratic institutions.

A month after the episodes of vandalism to the buildings of the Three Powers, on January 8, the Minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, defended the Fake News PL at a meeting of the Coalition Political Council. “The government’s orientation is to make the most of the initiative that it already has in Congress, approved in the Senate and which is in the Chamber, under the leadership and rapporteurship of Deputy Orlando Silva, with whom I have already had a conversation”, said Padilha.

To move forward with this matter, the government has held meetings with the author of the bill, senator Alessandro Vieira (PSDB-SE), and representatives of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the Civil House, the Advocacy General of the Union (AGU ) and the Social Communication Secretariat (Secom) to improve the proposal.

On another front, Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), heads a commission at the Electoral Court to create new rules for moderating content on the internet. On the last 16th, during the II National Meeting of Electoral Justice Communication, Moraes set the tone of his intention to regulate social networks in Brazil by saying that platforms must treat misinformation, hate speech and attacks on democracy with the same rigor with which they treat crimes such as pedophilia and racism.

In a meeting with Lula, in October of last year, the minister had already signaled his intention to create a TSE commission to send proposals to Congress with “mechanisms for regulating social networks”. , Moraes said that the commission of the electoral body will send proposals to regulate social networks to Congress.

Suggestions for proposals should be inspired by the measures that the minister adopted in the Electoral Court during the 2022 elections – which are the target of various criticisms – to, according to him, give more agility to the fight against “fraudulent news” and “hate speech” ”, a task that had already become Moraes’ main flag as rapporteur of the so-called “fake news inquiries” at the STF, which investigates alleged offenses and threats to colleagues.

This week, in a Unesco forum focused on debating the fight against disinformation, Lula and STF minister Luís Roberto Barroso, who were invited to speak, defended greater state control over speech on the internet.

Experts question measures

In the opinion of lawyer Giuliano Miotto, president of the Freedom and Justice Institute, the current government’s speeches are in line with those of members of other powers in the sense of increasing prior and abusive control over public opinion and the press. “This has the obvious objective of shielding this political class from criticism or questioning. Everything indicates that dark times will come for freedom of expression”, he explained.

For Miotto, Brazil does not need more laws to control social networks. According to him, measures in this sense are not beneficial to society. “The laws that already exist, as well as the control systems of the platforms themselves, already play this role of control. Any law that may be created from now on and within the current scenario will only serve to increase undue government control over freedom of expression and to create an environment of protection for the political system”, he explained.

For social communicator Pedro Franco, an expert on political polarization and freedom of expression, the attempt to regulate social media is a misguided way of trying to regain public trust in Brazilian institutions. “They are trying to censor what they call ‘coup speech’. But it is not by forbidding a speech that trust in institutions will be regained. This will provoke more distrust. The best strategy is to argue against what they think is wrong,” he explains.

For Franco, the strategy of the current government, government parliamentarians and Minister Alexandre de Moraes demonstrates lack of preparation. “It will further erode our democracy,” he says.

In the opposite direction, Rodolfo Assis, master in Theory of the State and Constitutional Law and member of the research group on Freedom of Expression in Brazil at PUC-Rio, sees the regulation of digital platforms as something natural and that is already being debated by other countries , “including in liberal democracies”.

“The regulation movement is due, among other aspects, to a latent legal uncertainty in relation to a new technology, which provides countless variables and different legal relationships – platforms among themselves, platforms and governments/authorities, platforms and users, etc.). Given such variation, authorities have had difficulty producing reasonably consistent responses,” he says.

According to Assis, the variation in conduct and rules between platforms makes it difficult to make judicial decisions, so “the legislation can function as a mechanism that establishes standards, which tends to increase the predictability and security of the parties involved”.

Attempts to control speech are “open door to censorship”

Before being re-elected president, Lula said on several occasions that one of the priorities of his eventual administration would be precisely to approve a media regulation project. Right at the beginning of the current mandate, the PT created the ‘Ministry of Truth’ – as the new Union bodies created under the allegation of defending democracy and freedom of expression have been called.

The decrees that established the National Attorney of the Union for the Defense of Democracy and the Department for the Promotion of Freedom of Expression – within the Advocacy General of the Union (AGU) and the Social Communication Secretariat (Secom) of the Presidency of the Republic, respectively – are vague regarding the attributions of these two bodies. Depending on the content of media regulation that the PT intends to advance, there is a risk that they may serve as vehicles for censorship instituted by the State.

In an interview for the magazineLook Last Friday (17), the head of the government’s Communications Secretariat, Paulo Pimenta, even said that digital platforms should be held responsible for the dissemination of criminal content. He pointed out, however, that the government still does not have a conclusive opinion on the matter.

“I think the idea that platforms are not responsible for the content they publish is not sustainable. This is a concept defeated by real life. Just look at what happened here in the electoral process, when we saw the Judiciary in a way legislating, standardizing mechanisms to protect democracy,” explained Pimenta.

Pimenta disagrees that freedom of expression was violated on occasions when the judiciary ordered the removal of “anti-democratic content”. According to him, “the concept of freedom of expression is important, but relativized by another, which is the collective right, the right of society, of democracy”.

Other Lula ministers also took a stand on the need to impose control over what may or may not be published on the internet. In a meeting with businessmen, on February 15, the Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, defended the regulation of social networks in order to avoid criminal practices. “We are proposing a serious debate on this, which is in line with international best practices, where there is obviously no restriction on freedom of expression, but there is an understanding that absolute freedom of expression does not exist,” he declared.

However, for jurist Fabricio Rebelo, responsible for the Center for Research in Law and Security (Cepedes), the PT government’s attempt to control social networks is an open door to censorship and that the Brazilian law system already has enough means to hold criminally and civilly responsible individuals who misuse freedom of expression.

“Social networks are just a means of communication, and the rules for those who commit crimes in any of them already exist in our legislation. The idea of ​​a law to control this is just an open door to censorship, exactly as we have seen in some judicial decisions, which go beyond the restriction of illegal content and advance on people, banning their profiles. This is censorship,” he explains.

Miotto reinforces that the limit of freedom of expression to avoid possible censorship must be common sense and what has already been defined as a crime by the country’s legislation. “For example, a person should have the broadest possible right to criticize a certain behavior, movement or ideology as long as he or she does not commit the crime of defamation, libel or slander. person must have the right of free expression, but with the due possibility that the offended person can trigger the appropriate legal means to cease the offense or be compensated for any damage actually caused”, he explains.

The lawyer, finally, points out that all appropriate measures to curb disinformation or offense are in the Federal Constitution. “Imposing any other type of limitation, such as prior censorship or the possibility of a judge interfering with the right to free expression in a general and abstract way, can generate a dictatorial state”, he declares.