In emphatic speeches, representatives of the Brazilian judicial and executive branches told an audience of journalists from around the world that disinformation creates urgent problems for democracies and defended the need to regulate digital platforms.
Brazilian Supreme Court justices Cármen Lúcia and Alexandre de Moraes and Attorney General Jorge Messias argued that the business model of social networks encourages conflict and lies in the name of profit, and that self-regulation in the sector has failed.
The three spoke during the opening panel on the impacts of disinformation on democracies during the 12th edition of GlobalFact in Rio de Janeiro on June 25. It was the first time that the largest international gathering of fact-checkers, hosted by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter, was held in Brazil.
Even without specifically addressing their speeches to fact checkers or journalists, the speakers offered the international audience a glimpse into the legal and moral logic that has guided the Supreme Federal Court’s (STF, for its acronym in Portuguese) decisions on the subject. Among the three branches of government in Brazil, the court has been the most active in combating disinformation, a position that has earned it both support and criticism at home and abroad, especially regarding the actions of Minister Moraes.
The day after the panel, the STF approved by majority (8-3) a decision with a strong impact on the sector: social networks are now required to remove illegal content, including the defense of anti-democratic acts, without the need for a prior court order. The decision contradicts a central article of the 2014 Brazilian Internet Bill of Rights, which determined that digital platforms only had to act after a court order. The STF considered the article unconstitutional.
Justice Cármen Lúcia, who is also president of the Superior Electoral Court, opened the panel with a comprehensive and philosophical reflection on the risks of disinformation. The three speakers were expected to appear in person, but she and Moraes participated via video call, frustrating those who went to the Getúlio Vargas Foundation auditorium to see them.
Lúcia said that the massive dissemination of false information corresponds to a profound rupture with the world model on which democratic regimes have been structured in recent decades. “The world model is over. We are living in a different time,” Lúcia said.
According to the minister, contemporary disinformation cannot be compared to the “malicious gossip” of the past. The difference lies in the scale, speed and power of manipulation, she said.
"[Today] there are spaces, environments and applications capable of killing people without needing to use physical, visible, tangible weapons, through actions that leave criminals of all kinds, including those who try to kill democracies, anonymous," she said.
The minister added that lies are fueled by digital platforms and algorithms that operate without transparency and are guided by economic interests. This, she said, leads to individuals being led to decisions and behaviors based on false data, without realizing that their freedom has been eroded.
Lúcia referred to a “digital servility” to describe this new state of subjection. She described a subjective captivity, in which individual autonomy is undermined by manipulated flows of information.
“They imprison us through lies,” Lúcia said. “The person themselves does not see themselves as enslaved, but they are not capable of thinking critically.”
To illustrate the systemic nature of the problem, the minister structured her analysis around the “five V’s” of disinformation: volume, speed, variety, virality and verisimilitude.
Lúcia said the massive volume of content makes constant critical judgment impossible; speed prevents verification before decision-making; variety fragments the sense of reality; virality refers to the contagion of a disease; and verisimilitude makes lies more effective than facts.
The speech concluded with a firm defense of the actions of the Judiciary and, in particular, of the Superior Electoral Court in the face of disinformation during the Brazilian elections of 2022 and 2024. According to the minister, the Judiciary not only has legitimacy, but the constitutional duty to protect the democratic process from illicit influences.
She compared social media to a public space that also needs clear rules.
“Companies also have a duty of care. What is not allowed in the real world cannot be allowed in the virtual world,” Lúcia said.
She argued that combating the spread of false or misleading information is not about censorship, referring to the period of military rule in Brazil, from 1964 to 1985:
“My generation knows what a gag is. We are against any form of censorship. But freedom is not the absence of responsibility,” she said.
The most anticipated name on the panel, the controversial Minister Alexandre de Moraes was the next speaker, and presented a harsh diagnosis of the role of social media in the erosion of democracy and the dissemination of hate speech.
While speaking, he showed a sequence of slides with racist tweets — illegal in Brazil — and images of the destruction caused in the attacks on the three branches of government on Jan. 8, 2023, to illustrate what he called the complete failure of self-regulation by the platforms.
Moraes began with a provocative question: “What social networks do we want for our society?” He added that if we were satisfied with the current situation, events like GlobalFact would not be necessary.
The networks, the minister said, have been used for illicit purposes, subordinating themselves to a logic of profit and political power that favors the viralization of violent, misogynistic, racist and anti-democratic content. “What gets likes is what gets money. And what gets money gets economic and political power,” Moraes said.
The judge, who is also a professor of constitutional law at the University of São Paulo, devoted much of his presentation to addressing the limits of freedom of expression under Brazilian law. This is, internationally, one of the most controversial points of Moraes' actions. Freedom of expression in Brazil is much more restricted than in the United States, and a series of behaviors, such as racist and anti-Semitic speech, are crimes in Brazil.
“Freedom of expression, and I always repeat this, is not freedom of aggression, including against democracy,” Moraes said.
Like Lúcia, Moraes said that the same laws that govern speech in the real world should apply to the online space.
“If you cannot attack the pillars of democracy in the real world, because that is a crime, you cannot cowardly hide behind fake profiles and attack democracy in the virtual world,” he added.
The minister stressed that the business model of big tech companies benefits from conflict and polarization, not from fact-checking, which differentiates them from traditional journalism. Social networks, he said, are not neutral, but have economic and ideological interests, leading to risks of algorithmic manipulation in the formation of public opinion, especially in electoral contexts.
The minister cited the case of 2022, when, he said, big tech acted to sabotage Congress' attempt to vote on the urgency of a project to regulate platforms.
He said that companies released “fraudulent news” against deputies and that this digital pressure caused parliamentarians to back down for fear of retaliation on social media during the election year.
Moraes concluded his speech by reaffirming the urgent need for state regulation. He said that other mass media, such as radio and TV, are governed by laws, and the same should apply to digital platforms.
“There is no economic activity in the history of humanity that has had an impact on thousands, or in our case, billions of people, that has not been regulated. All activities, absolutely all of them, have been regulated,” Moraes said. “There are rules on television, television is not a lawless land, and this does not violate freedom of expression. This applies to radio, it applies to television, and it should also apply to social media and big tech.”
The Attorney General – responsible for leading the institution that represents the Union, judicially and extrajudicially, in defense of its interests and in guaranteeing the legality of its acts –, Jorge Messias, closed the panel arguing that, although it is not something new, disinformation has become more serious given the current economic logic of the platforms.
“The problem is not the technology itself, but the business behind it,” Messias said. “These companies follow an economic and technological playbook and doctrine that is guided solely by the profit motive.”
Without specifying which alternative technologies should be developed, Messias said that, until Brazil develops its own communications technologies, it will be vulnerable. “We are using imported technologies every day, which are serving interests other than our national interests,” he said.
For Messias, public debate in Brazil suffers from a flawed communication model that favors conflict, radicalization and disinformation. He cited data from the Internet Steering Committee and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to illustrate the vulnerability of the Brazilian population: “85% of Brazilians say they get their information from social media, but we are also the country with the least ability to distinguish fake news,” he said.
Concluding his speech – which was the longest of the trio, lasting more than 40 minutes, which caused the question and answer session to be cancelled –, the attorney general argued that Brazilian society needs to take ownership of technology, which implies regulating it for the benefit of democracy.
“If we don’t know what algorithm is behind that action, we don’t know what the level of interest and the degree of manipulation it can generate is,” he said. “That’s why we need to discuss the need for these companies to offer transparency in their processes.”
