On March 25, Brazil’s government launched a multifaceted campaign to fight “disinformation,” including a website dedicated to identifying and debunking “fake news.”
The initiative, seen by many as a tool for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s administration to delegitimize the criticism it faces under the guise of “fact-checking,” raised serious concerns about the excess of government, freedom of expression and the future of Brazil’s fragile democracy.
“There is no such thing as government fact-checking,” Christina Tardáliga, senior program director at the International Center for Journalists, he tweeted in response to the news of the initiative. “This appropriation of the term is wrong and offensive. What the government is doing is propaganda”.
While the attempts of a government to assign itself the arbiter of what is real and what is fake would certainly be worrisome in any country, the risks are particularly serious in Brazil.
That’s because, despite their regular outbursts against the prevalence of “disinformation,” Brazilian governments, both right-wing and left-wing, have a long history of relying on what can only be described as “news false” to promote their political agendas.
Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, for example, spent his entire term accusing his critics of spreading “fake news” as they spread misinformation on a wide range of issues, from COVID-19 and vaccine science to corruption and feminism.
And Lula is hardly better. Like Bolsonaro, the leftist president also has a habit of delivering impassioned speeches against “fake news” and spreading disinformation to further his government’s interests almost at the same time.
Just three days before launching his campaign against “fake news,” for example, the president unleashed a wave of disinformation against senator and former judge Sergio Moro, who had once sent him to prison.
This year, Brazil’s federal police launched an operation against members of São Paulo’s powerful drug cartel, the First Command of the Capital (PCC), for plotting to assassinate Moro. Investigators said they received a tip about the plot to kill a former CCP member who is currently in witness protection and gathered evidence to support their claims by secretly monitoring the phones and emails of active members of the cartel
However, dismissing the work of his own police force, Lula suggested the assassination plot was likely a politically motivated “setup” by Moro. Although Lula later admitted that he has no evidence to support this claim and called for caution, a wave of abuse and condemnation was already unleashed against the former judge. The episode clearly showed that Lula is only concerned with disinformation when it is directed at him and his government.
Lula’s relationship with “fake news” and disinformation is also not limited to a one-off comment aimed at hurting an old adversary. The president has an established record of using public money to support media outlets that publish disinformation that is beneficial to him and his Workers’ Party (PT).
Today there are still countless websites and TV channels in Brazil that exist only to spread pro-government “fake news”. Of course, the output of these Lula-friendly outlets is not expected to be scrutinized by the government’s new “fact-checking” website anytime soon.
It seems that with its new initiative against disinformation, the Lula government has not only given itself the opportunity to denounce any criticism of its work as “fake news”, but has also laid the groundwork for the creation of “official” facts and truths that could lead. to the silencing of dissenting voices, to widespread censorship and, perhaps most importantly, to the erosion of public trust in Brazil’s main independent institutions.
For example, Lula’s PT is convinced or sees it as an indisputable “fact” that former President Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor chosen after her first term in office, was removed from power not through a process of legal impeachment, but of a coup d’état. This, of course, is not a “fact” accepted by the Brazilian judicial system, but an interpretation of events by a political party.
What if the government’s new “fake news” initiative decides to “fact-check” a claim or story related to Rousseff’s ouster from power? Will the “official” facts he presents overturn the Supreme Court’s position on the matter? What will Brazilians do about the discrepancies between the facts approved by the government and the decisions of the Supreme Court? The issue is not limited to party politics either. What will happen when the facts sanctioned by the State about a pandemic or a natural disaster end up conflicting with the unauthorized facts exposed by a scientific body?
All governments engage in propaganda and many use “friendly” media to promote their agendas. However, the Lula government’s attempt to dictate, through an official agency, what is real and what is fake takes the manipulation to another level.
And all this comes as Brazil’s lower house of Congress finally looks poised to pass a bill against “fake news” that experts say can be used to stifle dissent, censor viewpoints not approved by the state and give politicians the right to spread the word. disinformation with impunity.
First proposed in 2020, the so-called Fake News Bill makes it a crime to create or share content that allegedly poses a serious risk to “social peace or economic order” without defining those terms. It also makes it an offense to be a member of an online group knowing that its main activity is to share defamatory messages, even if the member did not create or share those messages. It bans the use of “manipulated” content for the purpose of “ridiculing” political candidates, potentially ending legal political satire in Brazil. It also legally pressures social media sites to monitor content shared by their users, introducing disincentives that can result in political speech being censored or silenced. It also orders social networks to store personal data and conversation histories of Brazilians who use their services.
If the proposed bill becomes law, Brazilians could face hefty fines or even jail time for sharing harmless political commentary or satire online. At the same time, however, the bill gives politicians complete freedom to say what they want online without consequence: it proposes to remove the power of social networks to ban or suspend politicians’ accounts for sharing content in violation of their terms on duty.
This bill, along with the government’s new “fact-checking” service, could be seen as the building blocks of a Brazilian Ministry of Truth – the start of a new nightmarish reality in which the government decides alone what is the truth and punish. those who refuse to repeat it.
The fight against “fake news” is important. The rise of social media has made disinformation more effective and easier to spread. But the Lula government’s response to this looming threat is wrong, and the solutions it proposes are probably more damaging to Brazilian democracy than the problem itself.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
