Dictatorship seeks control of the large media. Trump decided to imitate them, establishing an alliance between the White House and the global platforms of Musk and Zuckerberg. The reactive event, in Brazil, the debate on the regulation of (anti) social networks. In the new legislature, the government will try to advance some regulatory project.
From the purely intellectual point of view, it is easy to outline the principles of a democratic regulation of networks:
1. Crime and opinion. It is only a crime in networks what is a crime outside the networks.
Freedom of expression is not an absolute right. Its limit is the crimes of word defined by law: direct incitement to violence against institutions, social groups or individuals, dissemination of pedophilia, slander practices, injury and defamation.
Opinion – Goodle, bad or deplorable – is not a crime. “Progressive” voices (PT, PSOL, identity priests, even judges and journalists!) They aim to ban the “hatred discourse”, “undemocratic discourse” and “misinformation”, subjective expressions whose translations oscillate according to ideological positions. It is a desire to censor the rival.
2. User responsibility. In democracy, there is no anonymity.
It is there, in Article 5 of the Constitution: “The expression of thought is free, anonymity forbidden.” Networks must provide name and ID of users accused of crimes. They are – the users – the first responsible for crimes committed in their posts.
3. Platform responsibility. It is worth the general rule of press vehicles in cases of driven or monetized posts.
Newspapers, printed or electronics, are co -responsible for crimes of the spread that disseminates. Platforms, however, unlike newspapers, do not choose the authors of their texts. They should only be judicially responsible for what their algorithms decide to boost or monetized posts. Such “exceptions” cover most of traffic on networks – and crimes of extensive social impact.
4. Factual check. The lie needs to be identified.
“Trump beat Biden in 2020” (Trump) – this is false, factually. “Venezuela is a democracy” (Lula) – this is false, politically. None of the two statements must be censored, but it is only necessary to mark the first as untrue, because the second is a (revealing) opinion. The platforms have no means to check tens of millions of posts. Just check those that reach wide circulation, in magnitude defined by experts. “Earth is flat and Elvis Presley didn’t die” – who cares about the lie that packs only idiot sects?
The dilemma is not intellectual, but exclusively political. The government, with its procession of “progressives”, cherishes the authoritarian dream of disciplining the speech – or to shape the minds. At the opposite end, right -wing extremism sees nets as tools to break the institutional mediations of democracy – and operates in alliance with fanatized “libertarians” and politicians whose horizon does not exceed the next election campaign.
The network regulation project was frozen in Arthur Lira’s Criogenic Chamber because the government does not give up censorship and a decisive portion of Congress does not give up the western. Now comes a new opportunity, which will be wasted.
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