The Bahia Court ordered the Poder360 portal to remove the name and photo of a Bahia delegate mentioned in one of the vehicles published in December 2025. The decision is preliminary and subject to appeal.
This determination was criticized by the (National Newspaper Association), which classified the episode as judicial censorship and defended the immediate review of the order as it considered that it compromised the free exercise of .
According to the entity, the decision violates the and occurs in a context of initiatives that threaten the. Among them, he cites an initiative to obtain data that, he claims, could lead to a breach of the source’s confidentiality.
The Court of Justice of Bahia confirmed the court order and stated that it is a compensation action that is being processed under judicial secrecy. The court added that it does not comment on the merits of judicial decisions, in compliance with the Organic Law of the National Judiciary.
In the decision, judge Renata Mirtes Benzano de Cerqueira ordered the deletion of the delegate’s name and her deindexation from the site’s internal search engines, under penalty of a daily fine of R$100.
The website Poder360 reported that it complied with the court order, but classified the measure as a restriction on press freedom and a form of censorship of journalistic work. The website reported that it will take appropriate legal action to reverse the decision.
The report targeted by the measure reports that the delegate was working in an investigation in which one of the parties was represented by a lawyer who had already defended the police officer in another case. The newspaper pointed out that this situation could constitute a conflict of interest, since the delegate did not declare herself a suspect to conduct the case.
In the legal action, the delegate claimed that “the narrative is offensive to her functional reputation and the regular exercise of her position”.
Before the court decision, the website had already received an extrajudicial notification from the Bahia Police Delegates Union, which asked for the report to be deleted.
The union alleged that the report suggested irregularities in the exercise of police functions without indicating the existence of legal impediment, formal suspicion or administrative procedure that would support such a conclusion.
Poder360 said it disagreed with the interpretation, claiming that journalistic reports can report facts of public interest without there yet being an administrative or judicial decision regarding what happened.
“It would be impractical for professional journalism to report facts only after they have been validated by some official body. The union’s request reveals a mistaken interpretation of how press freedom works in democratic societies,” he stated.
In December 2025, the Federal Police requested Poder360 the date and time at which it had received the data used in the report “OAB of Bahia analyzes accusations against lawyers for procedural fraud”. In the site’s assessment, the disclosure of data could lead to the identification of a source protected by journalistic secrecy, a provision guaranteed by the Constitution.
