Brazil gives single person power over online speech
RIO DE JANEIRO>> Brazilian authorities, grappling with a torrent of online misinformation before the presidential election, granted the nation’s elections chief unilateral power to order tech companies to remove many online posts and videos — one of the most aggressive actions taken by any country to combat false information.
Under rules passed Thursday, the elections chief can order the immediate removal of content that he believes has violated previous take-down orders. Social networks must comply with those demands within two hours or face the potential suspension of their services in Brazil.
The move culminates an increasingly assertive strategy by election officials in Brazil to crack down on divisive, misleading and false attacks that have flooded the country’s presidential race in recent days, including claims that candidates are Satanists, cannibals and pedophiles.
But by allowing a single person to decide what can be said online in the run-up to the high-stakes election, which will be Oct. 30, Brazil has become a test case in a swelling global debate over how far to go in fighting “fake news.”
The decision drew outcry from supporters of rightwing President Jair Bolsonaro, as well as concern from many internet- law and civil- rights experts, who said it represented a potentially dangerous, authoritarian expansion of power that could be abused to censor legitimate viewpoints and swing the presidential
contest.
The elections chief, Alexandre de Moraes, is also a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court, which has placed him at the center of a separate fight over the court’s increasing authority.
As a court justice, he has ordered investigations into Bolsonaro and jailed some of the president’s supporters for what Moraes said were attacks on the nation’s democratic institutions.
He has been perhaps the nation’s most effective check on Bolsonaro, who for years has assailed the press, the courts and the nation’s elections systems. But in the process, Moraes has raised concerns that his efforts to protect the country’s democracy have instead eroded it.
“It’s a very complicated balancing act,” said Philip Friedrich, an elections and technology analyst at Freedom House, an American group that promotes the expansion of democracy.
“Trying to protect the integrity of Brazil’s democratic institutions and people’s right to free expres
sion, while also keeping people safe online.”
Carlos Affonso Souza, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, said Thursday’s ruling “could go too far, depending on how” Moraes wields his power.
Still, the move was cheered by many in Brazil who see it as a necessary tool to fight an avalanche of false claims from Bolsonaro’s supporters that has only accelerated in recent days.
The new rules were passed unanimously by seven federal judges who make up Brazil’s electoral court.
When he proposed the rules at a court session Thursday, Moraes said complaints about misinformation had increased nearly seventeenfold, compared with past elections.
“There has been a proliferation of not only false news but of the aggressiveness of this news, this hate speech, which we all know leads to nothing but an erosion of democracy,” he said. “This is precisely why we need a faster way.”