Brazil, a laboratory for the global fight against disinformation

President Lula receives the fifth dose against covid, injected by his vice president, who is a doctor, this Monday in Brasilia. Gustavo Moreno (AP)

This week the Presidency of Brazil issued an official denial in forceful terms: "The information in the video produced by Ana Gonçalves on the Tik Tok social network is a lie."

The clip, which the author had deleted by then, was about vaccines, an extremely sensitive issue for the new government after 700,000 deaths in the pandemic and four years of a president subscribed to scientific denialism.

The video responded to the official launch of the immunization campaign that culminated in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 77, receiving the fifth dose for covid injected by his vice president, Geraldo Alckmin, a doctor.

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Gonçalves distorted a typical gesture when giving any injection to falsely affirm that that scene was a setup and that Lula was not immunized.

That the Head of State went to the trouble of going out to deny an unknown TikTok user shows the degree of concern that misinformation and false news cause Lula and his team.

The clip, deleted, continued to circulate.

And at stake are vaccination rates that are no longer exemplary in Brazil.

Brazil is fertile ground for one of the most worrisome phenomena of our time and, simultaneously, it is emerging as one of the laboratories where various ways to combat it are being tested.

Three quarters of its 210 million inhabitants use Facebook, Instagram, Telegram TikTok... or all of them daily and for hours.

For a large part of the population, WhatsApp is the main channel through which they receive information.

It is also a very juicy business: the fifth market in the world for social networks.

An environment that the previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, took enormous advantage of and that, in part, explains his political success, even though he is now in the US and seems to be at a low point.

The issue is extremely complex, has a thousand facets, and entails risks to freedom of expression.

The debate is served.

And not only in Brazil.

The US Supreme Court is analyzing these days two crucial cases for the future of the Internet.

And the Government of India is considering banning news that it itself considers to be false.

The violent assault on the heart of democracy in Brasilia, which took place on the networks almost without disguise as a peaceful march, has given a new urgency to the Brazilian authorities to combat the plague of falsehoods that infest the networks and messaging applications.

The Lula government has presented a battery of initiatives that includes regulating social networks.

It has also created a prosecutor's office to defend the Administration in cases in which disinformation is used against public policies.

Specialists warn that it has coined a definition of disinformation so broad that it can curtail freedom of expression.

Working groups with specialists have been created in various ministries to prepare proposals against false news and hate speech... These are some of the government initiatives.

But this is a war that is also being waged in the courts in Brazil.

There the main protagonist is the Supreme Court, specifically, Judge Alexandre de Moraes, endowed with superpowers in the name of democracy.

Moraes has adopted the practice of suspending the social networks of those suspected of knowingly spreading falsehoods.

He silenced for weeks the most voted deputy in the last elections, Niklas Ferreira, a 26-year-old conservative Christian, TikTok star, and other influential Bolsonaro allies.

This same week he has released a hundred Bolsonaristas accused of invading the headquarters of Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court after almost two months in prison.

They return home but without a weapons permit or a voice in the digital world.

His accounts on Telegram, Instagram... remain suspended by order of the magistrate, who has had an investigation open for years against Bolsonaro's second son, Carlos, the clan's digital strategist, for spreading fake news and inciting

.

Distrust in institutions, the discredit of traditional media have increased with Bolsonaro's sustained campaign these years.

And the big lie, as in the US, has gone deep.

The thousands of Bolsonaristas who attacked the three powers wanted the military to remove "Lula's communist" convinced that he did not really win the elections.

It is a widespread falsehood.

40% of those surveyed after the attack are convinced that Bolsonaro was robbed of the elections.

Nina Santos, a researcher and coordinator of

, a disinformation platform, recently highlighted in an academic article that the movements of the Brazilian government will intensify a necessary debate in which it is convenient to be very alert: "It is not easy to establish the fine line that separates, for On the one hand, the fight against

, hate speech and misinformation in the broadest sense and, on the other, the protection of rights such as freedom of expression and privacy, but (differentiating these areas) has become essential for any truly democratic society.

Regulating social networks is an idea that Brazil also brought to a recent Unesco conference because it considers it vital to preserve democracy.

In a speech by President Lula read at the meeting, he stressed that what happened in Brasilia on Sunday, January 8 "was the culmination of a campaign, started long before, that used lies and disinformation as ammunition" to attack "democracy and the credibility of Brazilian institutions”.

He added the president that "this campaign was conceived, organized and disseminated through different digital platforms and messaging applications (...).

This has to stop ”, he sentenced.

The Supreme Court investigates Bolsonaro for encouraging the invasion.

Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's technology company and owner of Facebook, responded angrily denying any complicity or omission.

And saying that the fault of the invasion was the one who broke the law, not the networks.

The company revealed that since the beginning of the Brazilian electoral campaign and until the assault - almost five months - they removed a million contents from FB and almost the same from Instagram because they incited violence, including calls for military intervention.

During the electoral contest, the technology companies collaborated closely with the judges in the war against misinformation.

President Lula's indignation with big technology is enormous.

“We want to open a debate to find out how we prohibit application companies from spreading news that is lying, violent or that encourages people to do things that are not right, those who preach evil and lie on the Internet.

They cannot continue as calm as they have been until now, ”he proclaimed a few weeks ago in a meeting with bloggers similar to those he received at the presidential palace.

The enormous impact of fake news is a matter that irritates him deeply.

It is a deeply distorting element that did not exist when Lula governed Brazil between 2003 and 2010. In fact, during the campaign he confessed that he does not have a mobile phone, that he uses others'.

When he began considering a return to power, Lula viewed the impact of fake news with a certain amount of disbelief, as if he couldn't believe people were buying really crazy stories, but over time he has assumed that it is a key front in the task. to govern.

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