The controversial “PL das Fake News” has recently garnered massive media attention. Worthy and necessary attention as this is a project that provides usage and maintenance guidelines applicable to all social networks, direct messaging applications and search engines.

TO big technologies the owners of these services will have to adapt to major changes in the administration of their products, which raises some doubts among the general public. How will this affect users? What would change our use of these tools in everyday life? And what is PL 2630/20 anyway?

Project

Introduced in June 2020 by Senator Alessandro Vieira, bill (PL) 2630/20 seeks to approve the Brazilian Internet Freedom, Responsibility and Transparency Law, which aims to “…set standards and transparency mechanisms for social media providers, search tools, exchange instant messages, as well as recommendations for their use.

The PL was seen as complementary to four other Brazilian laws, but is closer to two of them: the Internet Civil Rights Fundamentals and the General Data Protection Law. The project is more focused on companies that have a service with more than two million users, as they are at the highest risk of social harm.

The fight against new formats that crimes take through digital services is legislatively integrated with them. Especially the spread of false information, which during the year of the development of the PL has become a constant problem for the Brazilian society.

Over time, the project has changed, new legislation, standards, tools and mechanisms have been applied to it, making it more complex, but also more complex. The project was headed by MP Orlando Silva.

The PL has seven themes that, if approved, will have a strong impact on companies and their platforms:

1 – Fake or automated profiles

They must prohibit false reporting that mimics the identity of another person or entity, unless it is satire or has a humorous purpose, which is a mandatory definition of those intentions.

User use has also been restricted. botswhich will only be allowed to remain active if they have previously been identified as robots, in addition to requiring platforms to create limits on the number of automated profiles a user can manage.

In case of non-compliance by users of the established rules, companies will be allowed to require the owners of these profiles to verify their identity by presenting an identity document.

2 – Restrictions on messages and groups

Companies should limit the sending of “chain messages” and the number of members in groups and mailing lists. You want them to deactivate the automatic option to include in lists and groups, giving the user the option to add or not.

They will be required to keep records of messages sent in bulk forwarding for three months; which are considered as sending the same message to chat groups and mailing lists made by more than five users within a 15-day interval and received by more than a thousand users.

Access to the recordings will be allowed only by court order in order to bring to justice those who have carried out the mass distribution of illegal content.

In addition, messaging applications that provide services related solely to mobile numbers must suspend the accounts of users whose contracts have been terminated by telephone operators or by the consumer themselves.

3 – Output content

In case of condemnation or application of legislative measures, the target users of these actions must be notified.

However, in cases where there has been immediate damage that is difficult to repair, risks to the protection of information and the integrity of the users involved, or even a violation of the stability of any operation of the law, the user will not be notified.

Users will be able to resort to deletion, as well as have the right to respond to the same scope and scope as the topic found inappropriate.

4 – Advertising

Any paid content on social platforms should be easily identifiable and also contain information about who is responsible for the advertising.

If the ad is political or campaign in nature, all other ads in the set must be available and publishing costs must also be reported to ensure transparency and ease of federal court review.

The identity of the advertising contractor will be kept confidential unless there is a court order.

5 – Public Agents

The LP proposes that the official profiles of high-ranking public figures with an active mandate, such as the president, ministers, deputies, senators, governors, mayors and others, cannot block the accounts of other active users of their profiles. The personal accounts of these agents are exempt from this rule.

Public administration entities will be responsible for collecting data from advertising contracts, increasing the number of publications of these profiles and making them available on transparency portals.

6 – Transparency Council

The most controversial of the topics raised by the LP was the creation of a council that would create a code of conduct for social networks, evaluate and study methods for combating disinformation and guaranteeing information security.

Responsibility for the formation of the council lies with the National Congress, which elects 21 members from public authorities, the civil sector, the academic sector and the private sector for up to two years.

The project’s critics have called this council the “Ministry of Truth,” referring to George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984.

In the book, the ministry rewrites history and propagates the truth, artificially created by the interests of a totalitarian state, in addition to controlling and manipulating the information that is transmitted to the population, in order to maintain order and the full confidence of the citizens.

This proposal was received so negatively by the population that the speaker decided to remove it from the most recent version of the LP and intends to revise it with more attention and popularization.

7 – Penalties and Sanctions

If companies do not comply, they may have to pay a simple fine of up to 10% of the invoice amount, but not more than 50 million reais.

There are also daily penalties that can be applied if providers do not remove illegal content from their platforms within 24 hours of being notified, ranging from 50,000 to one million reais per hour at the end of the response time.

If the problem is in a community or group within the platform and there is a delay in removing or blocking activities on these pages, an amount of ten to one thousand reais per user registered on the pages will be applied, along with a daily fine.

Reflections

On the last day 2, there was a vote in the House for the approval of the LP, which was delayed at the request of the speaker Orlando Silva, since there was little chance of approval of the process in the version that was found. The deputy explained that he removed the LP from the vote also because he received many requests for changes in various parts of the project and wanted to make it as complete as possible.

This seems to be correct, as several experts have indicated that there are several parts of the project with general explanations, without more detailed explanations of how certain topics will be approached, planned and carried out.

The complexity of the topic is so great that even a communiqué sent out big technologies, contradict each other. Google believes that the moderation required by PL could make companies more restrictive, making virtual environments less user-friendly.

Meta, on the other hand, believes that because of so many demands, companies have made less effort to maintain constant moderation, opening up opportunities for attackers to take advantage of the situation.

In politics, the polarization on this issue is quite pronounced. One side believes that the bill will gently restrict freedom of speech, making the Internet a less democratic place. Another sees LP as a form of regulation aimed at placing greater liability on companies whose space is being used to plan and/or commit crimes and the misuse of these media.

And this drastically affects the popular LP melody, which, in addition to the complexity that the subject already introduces to uninformed people, still needs to constantly filter out biased information. Which, unfortunately, ends up deterring many people from trying to get more accurate information about the country’s laws and policies.

Being attentive to polarized narratives that do not seek critical and impartial analysis of bills is an extremely important task to maintain citizenship that does not reproduce the division of society.

Via: Letter from Google, Letter from Meta Source: PL 2630/2020 – Portal of the Chamber of Deputies, PL 2630/2020 1st version, PL 2630/2020 Current version