The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) formalized today (15) the partnership with eight social networks with the aim of combating misinformation about this year’s electoral process. The initiative, which had already been announced and took place in previous years, was signed in a virtual ceremony.
This year, the novelty was the inclusion of Kwai, a platform for sharing short videos. “We will have a direct channel with the TSE to [denunciar] content that violates electoral legislation and poses a risk to the integrity of the elections”, said Wanderley Mariz, director of government relations and public policies for the social network.
This Tuesday (15), memoranda of understanding were signed that list actions, measures and projects to be developed jointly by the TSE and the platforms, according to the specifics of each one. Such actions will be put into practice even after the election period, until December 31.
One of the main lines of action is the removal of content considered harmful to the electoral process. Along these lines, platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have announced that they will continue to exclude harmful posts. Twitter, in turn, showed a more cautious stance.
“We don’t just rely on binary content removal and/or deletion decisions, as we know that providing people with the proper context is also an effective and important tool to fight disinformation,” said Daniele Kleiner Fontes, Twitter’s head of public policy.
WhatsApp said it will continue to suspend accounts that show “inauthentic activity”. According to the representative of the instant messaging platform, Dario Durigan, worldwide more than 8 million accounts are suspended from the application per month. “The Brazilian election is the most important for WhatsApp in the world in 2022,” said the executive.
Without citing competitors, Durigan stated that the application is “one of the only instant messaging services that respect Brazilian law”. Since the beginning of the year, the president of the TSE, Luís Roberto Barroso, has criticized Telegram, one of WhatsApp’s main competitors, for not having representation in Brazil or submitting to Brazilian laws.
Google’s director of government relations in Brazil, Marcelo Lacerda, also announced that the company will release a political ad transparency report, “which will give visibility to who hired these ads, how much they paid, to whom these ads were served and what the parameters were. used to target these ads”.
Other platform initiatives are focused on the dissemination of official information about the election, which should receive greater prominence from the tools, through links, stickers, TSE’s own warnings and bots.
“We managed to advance with tools and instruments that help electoral justice and platforms to best serve the country and Brazilian democracy,” Barroso said at this Tuesday’s event. He reaffirmed that the partnership between the TSE and the platforms does not involve any exchange of money.
