The lie and the crime – 05/05/2023 – Demétrio Magnoli

Whenever I read the arguments of those who oppose the Fake News PL, I root for its approval. When, however, I read the arguments of the defenders of the PL, I root for its rejection.

If I write a criminal text in this space, the Sheet share the legal burden; if a social network spreads the same text, I suffer the potential consequences alone, while the platform accounts for the profits. Internet platforms fear, above all, the correct core of the PL: co-responsibility for the criminal speeches they publish. Their business model is organized around promoting the word that stirs up primitive emotions – that is, most of the time, extremist discourse. Therefore, they reject the liability laws that regulate the press.

Opponents of the PL stretch the concept of freedom of expression to encompass crime. Facebook was the primary vehicle for the Myanmar military’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims. It was also the megaphone for the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi’s hate campaign against Indian Muslims.

Exterminist speeches circulate on the networks, targeting Jews, Christians, blacks and a multitude of other groups. In Brazil, the platforms served Bolsonaro’s anti-vaccination campaign and the articulation of the coup acts of 8/1. What is off-network crime is on-network crime. The PL’s enemies aim to perpetuate the “freedom” to disseminate criminal speeches.

But do we want to criminalize crime or lying? In its text, correctly, the PL is limited to the first. Its most enthusiastic defenders call for the elimination of “lies”, “disinformation”. Have the spotless nuns forgotten that untruth has been part of political discourse since (at least) the debates in the Roman Senate in the century before the Christian Era?

The Google episode highlighted the extent of holy wrath. Google violated the trust of its users by transforming the neutral search page in support of an editorial link. It was an unethical gesture by a company in its private relationship with consumers. It planted the seed of distrust over its most prized possession, which is the search engine, but it did not commit a crime against public order.

According to the logic of the PL, Google must be treated as a vehicle for the press. In this case, what he produced was just an editorial. The nuns reacted by wrapping themselves in the sacred auriverde banner and invoking nothing less than the Fatherland and Sovereignty (capital letters, there). Judges without brakes entered the game, announcing preventive sanctions and demanding an “impartiality” that does not appear in any law. For a few hours, Brazil dressed in the fantasies of China, Russia, Iran or Saudi Arabia…

Ban “disinformation”? Will we arrest the Bolsonarist who qualifies the AI-5 as an instrument of the “war on communism”? Will we imprison Putin’s Brazilian herald who justifies the invasion of Ukraine by “combating Nazism”? Will we also sentence Lula for classifying an impeachment overseen by the STF as a coup d’état?

The hysterical nuns do not hide their most dangerous utopia: enthroning the Truth (with a capital letter). However, as is well known, the Kingdom of Truth is invariably the other name for totalitarianism. Democracy refuses the official truth. In it, what exists are truths, in the plural – and, precisely for this reason, party freedom is admitted and competitive elections are demanded.

The PL has obvious defects, such as the shameful clause that allows the parliamentary caste to produce speeches that are forbidden to others and the ambiguities about the source and nature of an undefined regulatory body. Its enemies, however, found a weaker point, which is located outside it: the speech of its defenders. It’s just that, in fact, many of them dream of the Censorship of Good.

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