The mobilization of the technology giants was one of the factors that prevented the vote on the Fake News Bill. The assessment is by the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira (PP-AL). “A mobilization of the so-called big techs, which went beyond the limits of the democratic contradiction, alongside the interpretation of some regarding possible restrictions on freedom of expression, did not allow us to gather the necessary political conditions to take this project to the vote”, justified the president da Câmara, this Monday (26), during an event in Lisbon, Portugal. The urgency of the bill that regulates digital platforms was approved by the plenary of the House at the end of April. Urgent approval allows voting on the text at any time, without the need to go through the Chamber’s thematic committees. However, the project ended up being withdrawn from the agenda in early May. Lira said she hopes “in the not too distant future” to put the issue to the vote again. For the president of the Chamber, “without proper legislative regulation of the new informational environment in Brazil, the political arena will resemble more and more a Hobbesian state of nature. A war of all against all based on the arbitrary or sectarian apprehension of reality. A polarization that will not allow for the necessary construction of consensus and democratic solutions”. Big techs During the discussions of the report that creates the Brazilian Law of Freedom, Responsibility and Transparency on the Internet, the Bill of Fake News, Google published on the main search page of its platform a text critical of the project reported by federal deputy Orlando Silva ( PCdoB-SP). And in the study The war of platforms against PL 2630, researchers pointed out indications that Google and Meta (owner of Facebook) would be presenting biased search results with the aim of favoring content critical of the bill. The platforms denied interfering with search results. Faced with the accusations, an inquiry was opened at the Federal Supreme Court (STF) to investigate the performance of the leaders of Google and Telegram in the processing of the project in the Chamber. Misinformation Bia Barbosa, member of the Right to Communication and Democracy (DiraCom) and Coalition Rights on the Network, who acted in the Chamber in favor of the Fake News PL, assesses that companies promoted misinformation regarding the project. She said that there was an ostensive presence of platforms in Parliament to prevent its approval. “This is natural from a democratic game point of view,” she said. However, the expert alleges that the companies “distorted the project’s impacts on parliamentarians to the point of convincing a portion not to vote for the text. This was done both in this interlocution with the parliamentarians, but also in the public performance of the platforms”. Bia Barbosa remembers that the companies disclosed that the PL would “worse the internet”. “It was an extremely generic argument that they used and that was not supported by any aspect of the points that were made in the text”. In another action, the platforms claimed that the bill would end small businesses on the internet. “There was no impediment for small businesses to continue advertising on the networks. What was in the bill was a provision that platforms had transparency in the data they used to direct this content. The problem is that with the obligation of transparency it would be very clear that they would be violating the general law of protection of personal data”, explained Bia Barbosa.
Agência Brasil
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