The 2016 election season in Brazil put Ctrl+X, a platform created to monitor lawsuits that demand the removal of content from the internet, to the test. The site found that “electoral lawsuits,” one of the subsets of legal proceedings tracked by the site, increased 33 percent in recent municipal elections in 2016 when compared to the elections of 2012. In many of these cases, politicians and parties go through designated electoral courts to sue journalists and get information removed from the internet.
For journalist Iván Flores Poveda, the presidential elections that will take place in Ecuador in February 2017 represent “a democratic transition.” After 10 years in power, President Rafael Correa decided not to put his hat in the ring for the position. However, according to Flores, the president has become a kind of campaign manager for the ticket of Lenín Moreno and Jorge Glass, the former and current vice presidents under Correa.
Following the lead of other fact-checking collaborations in the region, four Brazilian fact-checking projects will harness their collective experiences and talents to analyze an upcoming debate between the two remaining candidates for mayor of Rio de Janeiro.
“Stolen Memory” is the investigation that led to the creation of the first journalistic platform that collects massive data on illicit trafficking of cultural artifacts from Latin American countries. It is a project of Peruvian digital investigative journalism site Ojo Público, which invited four important media in the region to participate in a transnational and collaborative investigation.
For Borja Echevarria, vice president and digital editor-in-chief at Univision, the way forward at the legacy media company involves collaboration and diversity.
Since Peruvian investigative journalism site Ojo Público was born two years ago, its four founders knew that in addition to their investigations, they wanted to offer a space to share knowledge and experiences that could be useful to colleagues not only in Peru but throughout the region.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was acquitted of crimes against the public administration in the case of the “diarios chichas,” or yellow press, by a Supreme Court panel presided over by controversial Judge Javier Villa Stein, reported El Comercio.
The main objective of the creation of the Law on Personal Data Protection– enacted on July 11, 2013 and effective in all of its rules since May 8, 2015 – was to protect the personal data of those who feel vulnerable by its publication, like its comercial use by private companies, up to achieving the removal of news related to information in question from the internet.
Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist known for reports on the National Security Agency (NSA), launched The Intercept Brasil, a country-specific version of the site he co-founded in 2014.
Rodolfo Romero is 27 years-old. He received money from the government to finance a news site. It was going to be called Cuba accuses (Cuba acusa) but he did not like the belligerent tone of the name, so he decided to call it Cuba denounces (Cuba denuncia) only to discover that was the name of a site created by exiled Cuban dissidents. Therefore, Romero edits the site Pensar en Cuba (Thinking of Cuba) along with a team that depends on the Ministry of Culture. Through it, the various policies of the United States concerning Cuba in the last 50 years are denounced.