Speeches were made this Saturday, 1st, during a panel at the 9th edition of the Brazil Conference, where the Minister of Comptroller General of the Union countered the senator’s arguments and defended the government’s project
This Saturday, the 1st, during a panel on the regulation of digital platforms and the fight against misinformation at the 9th edition of the Brazil Conferencethe senator Sergio Moro (União Brasil) criticized the government’s proposal on the regulation of social networks and stated that the project has errors. Recently, the Federal government sent suggestions to the Fake News Bill, which has the rapporteur of the federal deputy Orlando Silva (B’s PC). According to Moro, the president himself Lula (PT) disclosed serious disinformation by stating that the plan by the First Command of the Capital (PCC) to kidnap and kill the senator and other authorities would be a “framework”: “This current government has also incurred in misinformation and attacks. I won’t go into detail, but we can remember the episodes that took place last week, including speeches by the President of the Republic (…) Any authority is subject to making these mistakes, hence placing a supervisory power over the networks in the executive government, as if it was a kind of blank mandate, it is something very risky”.
The senator is concerned about the government’s idea of creating an autonomous entity to supervise everything that is posted on social networks and also highlighted that Lula and members of the government have made several baseless criticisms of authorities and institutions: “We have seen personal attacks on the president of the Central Bank, not only by the President of the Republic, but by all the media and parties involving the President of the Republic. Last week the President of the Republic gave an interview saying that he wanted to take revenge on me and then used an inappropriate curse word. That was all incitement to hate speech in the party and in the media. Then, on Thursday, he released serious misinformation, at a sensitive time, that there would be a frame by me related to this CCP plan to commit an attack against my family.”
the minister of Federal Comptroller General (CGU), Vinícius de Carvalho, also participated in the table and countered the senator’s speeches: “I am sure that it is not at all the intention of the Lula government to censor what people say or do not say on social media, to control their speeches or anything of that sort. The Lula government is not the Bolsonaro government”. The CGU representative also stated that the creation of rules for digital platforms has nothing to do with censorship: “It is a completely different thing for you to create an ecosystem of disinformation that annihilates democratic debate, which annihilates the need for people to have the minimum of alterity, of listening to others, annihilates these possibilities. It is against this that the debate on disinformation regulation or disinformation inhibition has to be made. We have to deal with this issue from dimensions, speaking of public policy, in which transparency is a decisive element in the public agenda”.
In another panel of the same event, the minister Luis Roberto Barrosodo Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), denied that the court practices judicial activism: “There is a very mistaken perception that the Federal Supreme Court is extremely activist, invents legislation and produces decisions that bring legal uncertainty. I would like to say that none of that happens. What really exists is a judicial protagonism, for what reason? As everything can reach the Judiciary, the Judiciary starts to have an unusual visibility”. Barroso countered criticism of the STF’s decisions, stating that complying with the Constitution with independence and moral courage is not participating in a “tournament of sympathy”.
*With information from reporter David de Tarso