The retired minister of the STF (Supreme Federal Court) Luís Roberto Barroso defended this Monday (1st) the decrees issued by the president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) that updated the Internet Civil Rights Framework regulations and came into force on the 21st.
“[É] a very important decision regulating digital platforms in an extremely moderate way that does not even remotely approach censorship”, he said during the XIV Lisbon Forum, in Portugal.
One of the decrees establishes guidelines for the protection of women on the internet and for combating violence against women in the digital environment.
Another imposes stricter rules for application providers, requiring a reporting channel, legal representative in Brazil and allowing the removal of criminal content without a court order.
For Barroso, three “very basic” rules of the judicial process were respected.
“The general rule continues to be: the platform is only responsible if it is a crime; it is only removed from the air after a court decision, this remains the general rule, unless it is a crime that must be removed by simple private notification; and a third rule of duty of care for a certain type of post that cannot reach the public space: child pornography, terrorism, instigation of suicide.”
The retired minister explained that it doesn’t matter if someone is liberal, conservative or progressive when it comes to internet regulation. “You can’t have child pornography on the internet, you can’t have terrorism on the internet, so the polarization in the world has led to a certain loss of common sense that we need to rescue.”
Moraes and Gilmar also defended regulation
Also present at the event, the minister Alexandre de Moraes evaluated supposed contradictions between what was expected from social networks and what is practiced by the platforms.
“How many articles were written saying that social networks would be the new Greek agora, everyone would have, under equal conditions, the same possibility of opinion. So what went wrong? Because there was the possibility of manipulation of social networks, the possibility of targeting against certain people, against certain groups. Instead of democratizing opinion, it was possible to manipulate opinions”, stated the minister.
Then, the judge accused Big Techs of collecting data without authorization to “brainwash” them. “In this naivety, we don’t realize that Big Techs took everyone’s data without authorization. Using non-random algorithms, data is manipulated to carry out real brainwashing in the so-called bubbles,” he said.
The minister Gilmar Mendesorganizer of the event, criticized what he called technofeudalism in his opening speech of the edition, with the theme “New International Order, Technology and Sovereignty: Democratic, Economic and Social Challenges”.
“Conventional capitalism has given way in contemporary times to a new order, techno-feudalism. In this configuration, power is no longer established through free competition between capitals, but through the absolute dominance exercised by digital platforms, which monopolize collective attention, dictate behavior and extract income from both users and entrepreneurs”, he added.
