President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said this Thursday (9) that he will hold a meeting to discuss the new rules announced by the multinational Meta, a technology company that controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, for the operation of these social networks.
“What we want, in fact, is for each country to have its sovereignty protected. One citizen cannot, two citizens cannot, three citizens cannot think they can harm the sovereignty of a nation”, stated Lula at the Planalto Palace, while visiting the gallery of former presidents, which is located on the ground floor of the building, and was reopened a few months ago.
Last Tuesday (7), the owner of Meta, the American billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, announced the new guidelines of content moderation on social networks and highlighted that it will join forces with the government of the elected president of the United States (USA), Donald Trump, to pressure countries that seek to regulate the digital environment. Among the changes are the end of the fact-checking program that verifies the veracity of information circulating on the networks, the end of restrictions on issues such as migration and gender, and the promotion of “civic content”, understood as information with a political content. -ideological.
“I think it’s extremely serious that people want digital communication to not have the same responsibility as a guy who commits a crime in the written press. It’s as if a citizen can be punished because he does something in real life and can’t be punished because he does the same thing digitally”, commented Lula about the impact of the changes.
So far, Meta’s new moderation policy applies to the USA, but should be extended to other countries.
Before the president’s comment, the new minister of the Presidency’s Social Communication Secretariat (Secom), Sidônio Palmeira, had already criticized the new ruleswhich in his assessment will cause harm to democracy.
In the same vein, Secom’s Secretary of Digital Policies, João Brant, stated that Meta’s decision explicitly signals that the company does not accept the sovereignty of countries over the functioning of the digital environment, in anticipation of actions that will be taken by the Donald Trump’s government, which takes office on January 20th.
Also on Wednesday (8), Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), declared that the Court “will not allow that the big techssocial networks, continue to be instrumentalized, intentionally or negligently, or even just for profit, instrumentalized to amplify hate speeches, Nazism, fascism, misogyny, homophobia and anti-democratic speeches”.
