MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Brazilian Senate Speaker says regulating social media inevitable

According to Pacheco, there needs to be legal discipline on the subject

Amid the controversy between X owner Elon Musk and Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre De Moraes, Brazilian Senate Speaker Rodrigo Pacheco said Monday that regulating social media in South America's largest country was inevitable, Agencia Brasil reported.

“What we can contribute to effectively resolving this debate that has taken place over the last few days is to deliver legislative frameworks that are intelligent and efficient in order to be able to discipline the use of these social networks in the country,” Pacheco said during a press conference.

According to Pacheco, there needs to be legal discipline on the subject, not least to prevent the Judiciary from having to decide on issues relating to the use of social networks without there being a law governing the matter.

“This ends up generating controversies like the one we've seen where the Judiciary needs to act in relation to anti-democratic acts, violations of rights, attacks on democracy, and this is interpreted as some kind of censorship or inhibition of freedom of expression,” Pacheco went on while citing a bill on the regulation of digital platforms, which was approved in 2020 by the Senate and is now before the Lower House.

“I think this is fundamental, it's not censorship, it's not limiting freedom of expression, it's rules for the use of these digital platforms so that minds aren't captured indiscriminately and that they can manipulate misinformation, spread hatred, violence, attacks on institutions. There is a civic role to be played by digital platforms in not allowing this environment to be an 'anything goes' environment,” Pacheco insisted.

Meanwhile, the chief minister of the Secretariat of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha, considered Musk's attacks on the STF “inadmissible.”

“The best response Brazil can give to what I consider to be an unacceptable attack on the Supreme Court and Brazilian sovereignty itself is a political-institutional response. On the one hand, all support for the work of the Judiciary through the instruments for investigating those who use social networks for criminal acts. And at the same time, the political debate that the National Congress has been having,” Padilha argued.

In recent days, Elon Musk has published a series of posts criticizing De Moraes and the STF. On Saturday, he used the comments section of the minister's own profile on X to attack him. On Sunday night, De Moraes ordered Musk to be included among those investigated in the so-called Digital Militias Inquiry (Inq. 4.874), which investigates the criminal activities of groups suspected of spreading fake news on social networks to influence political processes. In the same decision, the judge ordered the opening of an “inquiry by prevention” to investigate Musk's conduct.

(Source: Agencia Brasil)