on April 28 Felipe Neto, a Brazilian YouTuber with more than 45 million followers, was angry. He had just received a message from YouTube warning him about PL2630, a bill in Brazil’s National Congress called the “Fake News Law”, which would regulate online platforms. Influencers like Neto, the company said, could be forced to remove content to avoid lawsuits, and the government could potentially monitor parts of the YouTube platform.
To Neto, that warning itself was fake news. He believed the post, and a similar post on YouTube’s blog, misrepresented the proposed legislation. “The attempt to manipulate makers against the bill was clear,” says Neto. He tweeted in response the message from YouTube along with his own replies to his statements, warning other content producers to “read carefully, because I have never seen such a strenuous effort to use creators to defend Google’s interests.”
Neto was responding to just part of a multifaceted effort in Brazil by Google and several other major US tech companies to push back a bill that imposed a new regulatory structure on them. It requires platforms and search engines to find and remove hate speech, misinformation and other illegal content or face fines.
In the weeks leading up to a congressional vote scheduled for early this month, Brazilians noticed a bombardment of advertisements and corporate statements pushing back the proposed law. Ads on Instagram, Facebook and in national newspapers linked to a Google blog post calling for an extended debate on the bill. The post said some parts of the bill had not been discussed in Congress and that the timing of the vote had limited “room for discussion and opportunities to improve the text in Congress.”
Last week, just 24 hours before Brazil’s National Congress was due to vote on the bill, users in the country who opened Google’s homepage were greeted with a link below the search box that read, “The fake news bill could add to confusion over what is true or false in Brazil.” Google removed the link after the country’s Justice Department said it would fine the company up to $200,000 per hour for what the agency called a “propaganda campaign” in violation of consumer protection laws.
“You have to make it transparent that someone has paid [a message], that it’s a company’s position, and that’s why it’s there,” said Estela Aranha, digital rights secretary of the Brazilian Ministry of Justice. Rafael Corrêa, director of communications and public affairs at Google Brazil, describes the company’s action against the bill as a “marketing campaign to make our concerns more widely visible” and compared it to previous campaigns on matters of public interest, such as promoting voting or Covid -19 vaccinations. He says the notice to Neto and others was an attempt to explain the bill’s “legitimate” risks.
The vote on the bill stalled last week due to an influx of last-minute amendments, but the way US technology platforms, notably Google, have sought to shape public debate on the law has raised concerns among experts and government officials in Brazil . The industry’s attempts to fend off new regulations may now lead to even more scrutiny.
wake-up service
The need for social media regulation feels greater to some in Brazil since January 8, when thousands of people stormed the National Congress in support of defeated right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro. Like the 2021 attack on the US Congress, the Brazilian uprising was fomented on platforms like Telegram, and activist groups found ads questioning the integrity of the election repeatedly slipping through Meta’s systems. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as “Lula”, has been open about the need to regulate platforms more aggressively.
“The platforms were unprepared, but especially unwilling to take tough action against hate speech and disinformation surrounding elections,” said Flora Arduini, campaign manager at the advocacy group Ekō. “For the Lula government, January 8 was really when they felt, ‘We need to continue this debate to effectively regulate the platforms.'”
