 Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Hope you're enjoying your food. My name is Guzzo. I'm Associate Director of Program Design here with the Rudwini Social Media Institute at the Berkman Klein Center. I welcome you all to the center. Today we have a very exciting panel, an issue that for me is very close to my heart, which is this information and misinformation. And before we start the panel, I'd love to introduce our moderator, who is Paulo Carvão. Paulo is a Global Technology Executive with a record of leading large businesses at IBM, where he was a senior leadership team member until 2022. Since then, he has acted as a strategic advisor for technology and go-to market issues and is a venture capital-limited partner and investment committee member. During his social impact fellowship at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, Paulo is focusing on the intersection of technology and democracy. Paulo, hope we have many other events as you as a moderator, but for now, I pass it on to you. Thank you so much for organizing this. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for joining us live here today. And for those of you who are the web guests, welcome to our disinformation panel. I hope you'll have exciting next 45 minutes of prepared remarks. And then we'll have ample time at the Q&A both here as well as on the web. As Guido mentioned, we're my fellowship here at Harvard and focusing on this intersection between technology and democracy, especially the role that social media and traditional technologies have in generating radicalization, polarization, and in doing so, eroding some of the democratic institutions. So, I wanted to set the context for the panel. We first, I wanted to acknowledge that social media is a vehicle for political action from providing a voice for the oppressed or for minorities all the way on the more kind of a negative side of things, potentially generating misinformation and misinformation. Also, Brazil is a very large market for social media. I hope that we can learn some of what happened there. And this would be a guide also as we embark in our own election cycle here in the U.S. To give you some perspective and some view of how large this market is, today it is considered the fourth or fifth, depending on whether in China or not, market in the world. It's only behind China, India, U.S. and Indonesia in disorder. We have about 160 million users. This represents about three quarters of the population in the country. The statistics of usage are basically that about 82% of these users report daily usage. And when you focus only on adults and people on a voting age, this goes up to 92%. So, everybody is constantly on this. The largest applications are in disorder. WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. So, you see there's a cluster around the meta properties. It is a pretty recent statistic as of July of this year. 92%, sorry, actually 79% of those surveyed news, internet and social media as their main source of news. The second source of news for the overall population is television with 51%. So, 79% use social media and the internet as the main source of news and second television with 51%. And we have had a presidential election last year. The current president was elected with 50.9% of the votes. The one who lost the election lost with 49.1%. So, as you can see, it was a very contested election, very close election. And if we fast forward to today, this 50-50 split is still a very good picture of the situation in the country and how polarized things are. So, this is basically the context of what's going on. I wanted to introduce our great panelists today to give you a little bit of their background and I'll go through the sequence of what we're going to cover. And so, first, Maria Duarda, she's a lawyer and a policy advisor with expertise in public and digital security. She works at Instituto de Picarapé in Brazil. She has graduated from the University of the State of Rio, considered one of the premier law schools in the country. As a criminal lawyer, has also master's degree in human rights public policies at the Federal University of Rio and is currently a LLM candidate at NYU University here in New York. But most importantly, she is one of the co-authors of this information post, which is the report that will kind of dissect in a few minutes. We have Natalia Vianna. She is the co-founder and executive director of Agência Pública, which is Brazil's largest nonprofit investigative journalist outlet. She leads long-term investigations and multimedia projects about human rights violations. And her team has won more than 70 awards for excellence in journalism. She, in 2022, was a Nieman fellow here at Harvard and dedicated her time to investigate misinformation, bringing together her knowledge from both journalism as well as some academic background to this. Natalia has led the coverage of the Brazil elections and their aftermath, including and primarily from an angle of disinformation She is a board member at the Gabo Foundation. It's an organization founded by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and dedicated for Betterment of the Journalists. And she is also in the board of the Center for Media Integrity of the Organization of American States. And finally, we have David Niemer. He is a tenured associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and Anthropology at the University of Virginia. He is also the director of the Latin American Studies there. He is the author of two books, Favela Digital, The Other Side of Technology from 2013, and then recently in 2022, Technology of the Oppressed. He was a visiting scholar here at the Berkman Klein Center in 22-23 academic year. He holds a Master of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Virginia, a Master of Science in Computer Science from Sarland University, and a PhD in Computing, Culture, and Society from Indiana University. So what we're going to do is first do that is going to provide us a factual baseline of what happened in Brazil. Then Natalia will discuss a little bit of the aftermath of what happened and go deeper into the role of some international organizations in generating this misinformation and disinformation. And David will bring us home with a discussion of the legacy behind this, including a bill that is currently in Brazilian Congress to potentially regulate some of this activity and draw some parallels between the constitutional structure, the judicial system, and the reality between Brazil and the United States. And as I mentioned, this should leave us ample time for a live Q&A here or with you on the webcast. Good afternoon to all. Is it working? It's a real pleasure to be here with you. I'd like to thank the Berkman Klein Center for hosting this event today, and in particular the facilitation of Paulo and the participation of my colleagues, Natalia and David. Let me also extend my gratitude for Ireland and the Stability Fund for supporting this report that I will present in just a bit. And as by way of introduction, the Garapai Institute is I think a new tank focused on the areas of public, digital, and climate security. And its objective is to propose solutions and partnerships for global challenges. But let's get to the topic that we are here to discuss, which is a 21st century challenge that we are living not only in Brazil, but indeed in every country in the world. This is a threat of digital harms. And by that I mean misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation mobilized by an economy fueled by cliques. And how these harms can threaten our democracies nowadays. So in the next slide as Paulo already introduced, Brazil is a profoundly digitalized society. So whether we like it or not, the social and political debates that are preoccupying the majority of Brazilians nowadays are filtered through social media. And I don't know if we are remotely ready for this challenge and to manage the ways in which a small group can hijack our conversation and how this radical decentralization in our communication is happening. So at the Institute we've been studying the ways in which social media are being mobilized by all actors in 2014, 2018, and 2022. To better understand all ways these informations are corroding our democratic values. We've been studying to how institutions and civil society groups are responding to these harms. And you can find our report here. So Brazil is an extraordinary laboratory for understanding both the threats as well as the responses to digital harms. But these digital harms are not occurring in a vacuum. They're coincides with a 15 year low faith in democracy in Latin America. And there are many explanations for this downward trend in support for democracy. Frustration with political elites to deliver, persistent inequality, low wages, low economic growth, as well as high levels of corruption and crimes. All these issues come to mind. But what our research shows is that digital harms are amplifying this content, sharpening biases, shifting behavior, both online and offline. And what we saw in the last couple of years in Brazil and elsewhere is that many of political leaders are leveraging their position to target the legitimacy and integrity of electoral processes and democratic institutions. They don't just reduce support for democracy, but they also can intensify this anti-democratic sentiment. And this can partly help to explain why we are seeing the rise of many authoritarian and populist leaders all over the road. And as part of our research, we focus our analysis on four dominant disinformation narratives seeking to reduce trust in elections, target democratic institutions, discredit and diminish the influence of opponents, and influence supporters to mobilize and take actions on false pretenses. Our research focus on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Twitter. And between August and October of 2022, we found that there was a fairly even distribution of disinformation narratives. And what I will show you now is a representative sample of narratives to give you a sense of their content and form. Overall, we found that narratives seeking to reduce trust in electoral system tended to be most common, as we can see in green. But here, we further subdivided these four narrative categories into over 20 sub narratives. In the interest of time, I will just briefly point a few top line findings. Let's start with the sub narrative following other elections, the electoral system. And the most common targets here we detected were the TSC and election machines. And this tended to grow over the election period, often in response to decisions made by the TSC and the SCF. Well, the next one is our superior electoral court and the SCF that I'll present today is our Supreme Court. And as for narratives targeting democratic institutions, the key targets were the judiciary as a whole, often accusing of favoring the left as well as our Supreme Court. And the next sub narrative regarding attacks against political opponents, we see not just the far right, but also the left using these tactics. Many narratives on the left sought to discredit Bolsonaro and his allies, accusing them of everything from fascism to corruption and genocide, for example. But the far right were far more active than the left in spreading this information all over social media, targeting the traditional media, accusing of everything from authoritarianism, drug trafficking, satanism, pedophilia and more. And finally, the last sub narrative we focus on this information used to sway supporters. Some of the most most popular sub narratives cast the election as an existential struggle of good versus evil. They threatened that Lula would impose communism, dictatorship, suppressed religious freedom, and spread gender and identity based ideologies in primary schools, for example. And the next slide. The analysis of posts and interactions on social media showed superior performance and engagement among far right groups in almost all social media frameworks and networks. Here I'll use a Facebook example, but the same trend will be repeated on Twitter and Instagram. When we look at the vol metric metrics of political content, we found that the far right was not necessarily producing more content, as we can see in the graphic on the top, but getting far more content engagement, as we can see in the graphic below. They outpace it the left, the center, the traditional media during the months leading up and during the election period. And next slide. The high volume and this rapid expansion of this information often outpace it institutions and platforms working to remove offending content. And this can partly be explained by these fluidity between platforms. And that's because the nature of narratives that emerge on each platform is kind of different. While more objective messages are shared on Twitter with limited and more shallow content, the same narratives may take on more detail and density on YouTube, where more elaborate posts are shared. Following the flow cuts of videos on Facebook and YouTube, reach a TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and WhatsApp to highlight more appealing speeches. And digital harms, next slide. And digital harms, including aggressive discourse and hate speech can contribute to intimidation, harassment and even the outbreak of physical violence. One of the most extreme effects of some digital harms is to intensify support for non-democratic transitions of power. We've seen in Brazil as well as in the US how they can supercharge protest movements and empower extreme voices, including those opposed to democratic forms of government. The spread of this information, proliferations of conspiracy and the rising acceptance of non-democratic solutions, culminated with the failed January 8 insurrection not that long ago in Brazil. And the point is that this information channeled by a tiny handful of influencers and bots can effectively mobilize affection of partisans with devastating effects. Next slide. But if there is any good news, I think we can learn much about how Brazil responded to this information in recent years. We have seen Brazilian institutions, particularly the judiciary, pushing back against digital harms and helping to detect, deter and remove ill-intention content from social media. And there are many examples which I'll not have the time to reveal in detail, but they're all listed in our report. One is the program to combat this information set up by the TSE with more than 150 partners. Another is the Observatory of Election Prosperity, set up by the TSE too, made up of civil society institutions, including the Garapa Institute. And as I mentioned, the judiciary has been particularly active, especially the SCF, our Supreme Court and the TSE, our electoral court. One reason for this is likely because this court themselves has been the target of many attacks, but it also underlines the resilience of our institutions. And, but I think this more assertive judicial approach, also in the range in social media, also raised a lot of concerns and exacerbated this political polarization in Brazil. And that could also be considered as a cautionary tale of how the lack of regulation about this thing can be an invitation to arbitrariness. And what we can say is that all of these initiatives, they are still a working progress and there are significant tensions balancing, preventing and detecting this information, while also maintaining freedom of expression. And there is a risk, as many will say, that the disease could be in some cases worse than the, the cure, the cure. No, the cure could be in some cases worse than the disease. So how do we deal with these challenges? Well, I think the point here is that digital harms are not going away anytime soon. In an era of intense computational potency and increasing AI potency too, we're going to see an increase in the frequency, intensity and complexity of digital harms. These are the negative externalities of digital commons. And of course, digital harms cannot be prevented and reduced through digital means alone. We will need to see much more engagement from the executive, the judiciary and the legislature. And at minimum, we need to see more accountability from the platforms, which of course will require regulation. And, but more fundamentally and beyond legal approaches, I think reducing digital harms such as this information requires addressing underlying polarizations and all these structural structural factors that drive it, such as social equity issues and economic inequality. And what is more tackling it will require a step change level in of engagement in addressing awareness, education and inoculation strategies. And of course, I look forward to explore all of these, not just in the interest of safeguarding democracy in Brazil, but also sharing lessons for the world. Thank you. And kind of the strange thing is this probably was not a coincidence, right? And I think you have a point of view of what was happening behind the scenes here. Yes. Thank you very much, Paolo. Thank you again, David. And thank you so much for being here to listen to our, our rendition of what happened in Brazil. Hello. To our rendition of what happened to Brazil, I think that it was very important that the US reasons should not happen in Brazil because the responses were different, but not only the strategies were similar, they were organized together. This is what I'm going to talk about. So on January 8th, about 4,000 Bolsonaro supporters invaded the buildings of the three powers of Brazil, the government, Congress and the Supreme Court. The raiders were highly organized. They had life weapons and in their heads, they were protesting fraudulent election and requesting that the military took over to establish law and order. They were doing the right thing. The actions were the result of a multi-year disinformation campaign led by Jair Bolsonaro, his sons, his vice president, who is an army general, vice president candidate, who is an army general and other close allies. This disinformation campaign aimed at creating an alternative narrative about the election fraud, which convinced many people, including important places. Recently, we learned that the Navy commander, the commander of the Navy of Brazil, for example, said he would accept a coup attempt. This was a disinformation field attempt to grab power, to keep power, the second one in our continent in just two years. It is a new phenomenon that journalists, academics and lawmakers have to analyze deeper, and it is a consequence of the digital transformation of politics and society. Now, our role, the role of investigative journalists, is to find the factual links, the connections between individuals, and follow the money to find where the, how these campaigns are being financed. We looked at the human infrastructure, which is a term that I use from my friend, David Naimer. So to do this, we combine traditional investigation methods such as door stepping and tracking campaign expenses and online investigations. So, the checking includes mapping, mapping influence, hashtag analysis, investigative profiles, to see if they are fake or not, if there is a bot network, and etc. Us, at Agência Pública, we have investigated and covered several networks that were operating to spread this information throughout Bolsonaro government. Many of them were fueled by public funds and were directly related to not only the Bolsonaro family, but also congressmen and congresswomen. We also worked on understanding the connection between Bolsonaro's, the Bolsonaro's, and the American far right. Now, by studying, comparing the strategies taken by Donald Trump, from their mind trust in the US election, and by Bolsonaro, we found at least 15 tactics that were directly imported from the US, basically copied from Trump, such as, for instance, using government institutions to promote the narrative of fraud. And we all know, in Brazil, we all know, Bolsonaro famously held a meeting last July with foreign ambassadors to tell them that the elections for theory is backfire, thankfully. Other strategies imported included efforts to block voting in opposition majority areas, calling for supporters to act as election inspectors, refusing to accept an unfavorable outcome even before the elections, urging the electoral court to stop the vote count, legal battles to revert the results after the result was done, and the vast use of misinfographics, which are misleading technical information about how votes are counted and probabilities of winning, as this was copied from the US and used in Brazil. This shows that there was an international coalition around this exchange. Also in Brazil, there was another family, no, another thing before. Also in Brazil, it was very important, the influencers from the US were very important to spread the story about electoral fraud, because right after the elections, the electoral court and the Supreme Court were already repressing the Brazilian influencers. So the misinformation spread abroad, mainly. The Bolsonaro family has spent immense time and effort to build alliances in the United States. Eduardo Bolsonaro met Steve Benham on August 2018. Months afterwards, he was named the South American representative of the movement, which is Benham's platform for the populist right. He visited and met three key Trump allies more than 80 times in four years. He founded his own conservative institute in Brazil that helped to create a Brazilian version of the CPAC, pro-Trump conservative political action conference. So he's making how the far right organizes here in the US in Brazil. And he was in Washington around the eve of the capital attack, and met key Trump supporters during those days, including Ivan R. Jared Kushner and my P.O.C.O. Mike Lindell. Now, Bolsonaro's allies celebrated and defended the capital riot in Brazilian social media. So they spread in Portuguese Trump's big lie. And in turn, Trump's allies, such as Tucker Carlson, Mike Matthew Thierman, Jason Miller, Ali Alexander, and Steve Benham all spread the lies about frozen Brazilian elections to a wider international audience. Right after Bolsonaro's defeat in October 2022, Eduardo flew to the US, met Donald Trump, met Trump Jr., met Jason Miller, and met Steve Benham, and also Jason Miller from a social media platform, Getter. According to Benham, they were talking about how should the reaction be. It is important to note that this articulation happened at the margins of any official channels. The main conduits for this articulation of the far left were the likes of the CPAC, this conservative conference, social media companies like Getter and Steve Benham in his network of relationships. It is also worth noting that Jair Bolsonaro was in the US during the January 8 riots. But also, we should also note that other political operatives from Latin America also engaged in the same campaign to discredit the Brazilian elections. So only four days after the defeat, an Argentinian political marketeer called Fernando Serimedo did a live broadcast on his right-wing newspaper called La Deja Diario, in which he said he had obtained a dossier by private individuals that reviewed voter fraud. He said that a number of other models of electronic voting machines were used in the Brazilian elections. This was broadcast from Argentina. It was a lie. His claims were debunked by the fact-checking agencies, news outlets and the Brazilian electoral court. But it was live streamed and watched by over 400,000 people. And it became one of the main pieces of propaganda in the aftermath of the elections. Together with his live stream, an apocryphical apocryphal dossier went viral and started being shared in Bolsonaro's social media. Now this person, Serimedo, is now a marketeer for a far-right candidate Javier Millay. So he's also behind the Millay campaign. And it is there not by chance that Thurston Carlson, the former Fox News presenter, went to Argentina to interview Millay. So here's a warning. If Millay loses the elections in Argentina, buckle up because you probably may see a wave of claims of rigged elections and maybe a new capital attack. We've heard that in the first round of the Argentinian elections, there was already a threat of a bomb in the white house, the pink house. So these kind of strategies are not that right now. They're playing out in Argentina. Now a couple of notes about the aftermath and how the Supreme Court acted. The Supreme Court overstretched a little bit its powers to refrain the coup, but it was super important for Brazil. In every step of the multi-step plan that I mentioned here, some of the steps the Supreme Court managed to counteract by many measures. So for instance, they advanced in a couple of days the certification of Lula's win, which was not foreseen, but because they were already like some talks about protesting in Brasilia. They find Bolsonaro's partying for attempting malicious lawsuit. They suspended social media for many influencers, including ministers and congressmen, which wasn't heard of before. Over 2,000 people were arrested, over 500 are charged with federal crimes, and the act of court now bared Bolsonaro from running to office until 2030 due to that meeting that I mentioned with the foreign ambassadors. Of course, the capital invasion here in the US had happened two years before, so the Supreme Court had some time to organize and to look ahead, knowing that something very similar could happen. So this also NGOs and the electoral court organized a very strong international response ahead of what we all knew could happen. But even though just this was suggested in Brazil, this does not mean that the misinformation campaign to subvert democracy is over. Bolsonaro's allies as much as Trump's are fomenting versions of him being a political persecuted person, and that there is widespread censorship in our social media. So the battle is very far from over. Thank you, and it's important to note how the institutions in civil society will react to that, right? So this is a good transition, David, to you, and what's been like the legacy of everything that has happened and how this compares to what could happen here also. Thank you. Can you guys hear me? I don't think the microphone is... Yeah, yeah. No. All right. This one's I know. Tucker Carlson invited Millay to be on his show, and then Millay said that he hates communism, so he's going to break ties with China and Putin in Russia. So he let us know that Tucker Carlson is one of the biggest Russian propagandists in the West. He was interested to see Tucker Carlson's face as he had to appear with the leg that Putin was becoming. Anyways, so I was given the task here by Paulo to compare the US and Brazil from a legal and constitutional perspective, which I'm happy to do here, but just a disclaimer, I'm not a legal scholar. So my goal here is not to present an illegal analysis, but rather to show how the current state of Brazil's legal system facilitated the following actions regarding this information and the attacks on January 8th and lead us to the so-called fake news bill that is currently in Congress to be voted. Just for context, Brazil's Supreme Court is composed of 11 justices, while in the US we have nine. In Brazil, there's a mandatory retirement age of 75 years and it's not a lifetime appointment as we have to see here in the United States, but the most impressive difference is the number of cases that each court considers. In 2020, Brazil's Supreme Court heard about 90,000 cases, while the US Supreme Court hears around 100 cases a year. So this high number is due to the Constitution of 1988, with it's more than 200 articles and 80 amendments allowing almost any matter to be brought up before the Supreme Court. Another peculiarity of Brazil's legal system is the Supreme Court's branch called the Superior Electoral Court, which is responsible for coordinating electoral work in the country in carrying out the certification of the President and Vice President of the Republic. So on March 14th of 2019, Brazil's Supreme Court opened an investigation aimed at investigating the existence of fake news, slanderous reports, threats, and copyright violations. Those were infractions that may constitute slander, defamation, and assault against the members of the Supreme Court and their families. So Supreme Justice Alexandre Morais was appointed to preside over it. This was called the Fake News Inquiry, but the question that comes up is how was the Supreme Court allowed to investigate and judge the case in which it was the victim? So according to Article 41 of the Internal Regulations of the Supreme Court, if a crime, if a criminal event of course within the court's own premises, the court is given the power of investigating, investigating it because in theory it is the most interest in unraveling the criminal action and has the closest knowledge of the acts. This raises doubts since criminal investigation is as a responsibility of the judiciary police and exceptionally the public prosecutor's office. So in the absence of proper regulation to deal with disinformation and online orchestration to delegitimize democracy, the country relied on the Supreme Court's Fake News Inquiry to take down malicious content, ban social media accounts, and arrest people whose intentions were to harm the electoral system in the country. So several acts led by Justice Alexandre Morais were questioned due to their borderline authoritarian tone and some even called them unconstitutional. However, the Supreme Court has been able to demonstrate how its approach not only kept democracy intact during the elections and transition of power, but also stayed within the constitutional boundaries. Even though Brazil's Supreme Court has had this active role during and after the elections with which was something that we didn't see in the Supreme Court here in the United States, it felt like the Supreme Court here was not seeing what was going on with the so-called big lie claims. Brazil was still bombarded with misinformation as presented by Duda leading to the attacks of January 8th as presented by Natalia. So these attacks were classified as domestic terrorist acts along with several school shootings that happened in the country all coordinated on online platforms. There was a major call for proper regulations of big tech companies in Brazil. So the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Congress, is currently considering the so-called fake news bill, which goes way beyond the issue of misinformation and attempts to regulate social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or now X, and messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The bill compels telecom providers to take action against disinformation, strengthens the transparency of sponsored online content, and outlines the procedures by which state authorities can penalize non-compliant companies. It primarily targets major tech companies operating in three categories, social network insights, search engines, and public instant messaging apps with over 10 million registered active users in the country. So basically the major big tech companies that are present in Brazil. So although the main objective of the bill is to enhance transparency on social media platforms and private messaging apps, and it has the goal to contain and combat the spread of misinformation, it also has the potential to modernize some of the internet laws established in Brazil, which was called the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which in Portuguese is translated, the name is Maco Civilão Cane. So Brazil does have an internet constitution or an internet law, however that was voted and approved in 2014, so the internet has changed a lot since then, so there's a call to renew some of its main points. So I'm just going to lay out four main points that are somewhat polemic, but it's worth noting. So one deals with content moderation. Article 15 of the bill outlines that social media platforms are required to establish content moderation guidelines that provide users with the right of reply and disclosure of the moderation's motives and profiles. Public agent and parliamentary privilege, this one is very polemic as well as it says that the bill recognizes that social media accounts of political figures, such as the president, governors, mayors and legislators, to be of public interest. As per the proposal, these accounts cannot restrict other accounts from accessing their post. I think we had this issue of Donald Trump banning people on his Twitter account and people fighting to have access to it because he was a public person of interest, but this proposal claims that these accounts cannot restrict other accounts from accessing their post. For example, the bill prohibits public officials from blocking other accounts and users thus restricting access to publications. And also it gives a parliamentary privilege because in the Constitution, governors and folks in the public office, they do have some privilege in terms of investigation. So it would allow them to share misinformation or disinformation without facing any sort of repercussion or content moderation from the platform. So they would have some sort of privilege with Mrs. The Point because as we know, most people in office, especially those in the far right, are the key hubs of distributing this information. The third point is election ads. So social media platforms must disclose all paid content along with the account responsible for it, allowing users to communicate with advertisers. Electro ads or content that mentions candidates, parties, or coalitions must be publicly available for review by the electoral justice. And the fourth point deals with news and media. This is also very controversial because for example, in Australia, there has been efforts to create this payment from big tech companies to journalist outlets. However, I don't know if you follow this, but then Facebook didn't agree with it. Basically, every news outlet from its platform so it was not possible to access these online news agencies from within the platforms. So basically, the fake news bill states that providers must compensate media outlets for the use of their journalistic content. This has been taken off of the bill that is going through Congress right now, but it's certainly something that people want to look at in the future to see how we can regulate this relationship between news agencies and big tech platforms. In any ways, to conclude here, the so-called fake news bill has raised concerns about its potential impact on freedom of speech and its effectiveness in combating this federal misinformation. A congressman, Orlando Silva, who drafted the bill faces significant challenges considering the recommendations from the federal government and civil society organizations while still attempting to garner enough support from the Chamber of Deputies to best develop. So Brazil can seize the opportunity to study an example for the world in regulated big techs. However, the country must avoid adopting the reckless approach of move fast and break things instead embrace the challenge of moving accordingly and preserving society. Thank you. Thanks, David. So let's open up for questions. Anybody here in the room? Or if you're on the webcast, you can ask your questions in the chat and then we'll get to you. Please state your name and then the question. Hi, it's Anupam Chander. I'm a professor at Georgetown and a business scholar here at the Rebidin Social Media Institute. So the question I have for all of you, but especially David, is with respect to the comparison between the Brazilian approach and the European approach. As you know, the Digital Services Act, which has gone into effect, again, targeting largely V-LOPS or V-LOSES, the very large big tech companies that are operating there. There, the threshold is 10% of the European population, the EU population. And your threshold is actually smaller than 10 million people. So it's interesting. It might cover more companies in that way. But what we've seen is some concern about how the DSA is being used already. We saw groups like Article 19 and EFF joining forces to raise concerns about the letters that have been sent out to the platforms in the wake of the Israel Gaza violence. And so I wanted to see what you've taught about those powers that are being used in Europe, in this context. So the concern that the civil liberties groups have raised is that the targeting of certain kinds of speech might be what is intended by, what exactly the authorities consider disinformation might be open to the question. So I just wanted to see how you guys are dealing with that. Thank you. Thank you for your question. So I'm not an expert on the European regulations, but from what I read and I saw, they're trying to materialize for, let's say, update the current laws that they have regarding speech into the digital world. How can they identify these sort of speech in those online strategies or online posts? Like, for example, in Germany, you can't deny the existence of the Holocaust, it's not protected under free speech. And there are many ways that you can engage with that idea of denying such a thing on online platforms. Of course, it broadens the ways that people can be more creative and engaging with their hate speech. And that's where the tricky part is, how can you identify these things even though you're trying to not hurt freedom of speech. Again, I'm not an expert on the European regulations, but that's what I understood that they are trying to do. They're not trying to come up with a taxonomy or classification of what counts as misinformation, disinformation, or rather they're trying to see how can they bring their own regulations on speech to the online platforms. And I think this is where Brazil is also going. So hate speech is not protected under freedom of speech in Brazil. So the challenge now is actually identifying where and how these hate speech get spreaded through these platforms so they can combat that. And unfortunately, we've been using the term fake news misinformation as an umbrella term to bring all these things together. But from what I know of the European context, it's mostly focused on speech that is already regulated distinctly in Brazil. I'm sorry, I just wanted to add something because I think David is he didn't he didn't he didn't explain why the view was stopped. And this was a very violent rebuff from the big tech in Brazil. And I think this is very important for everybody to understand big tech was regulated in Australia, as I mentioned, there is an attempt to regulate to make them pay for journalism also in Canada. And in Brazil as well. And I was the president of the Brazilian Digital News Association. And I was part of these conversations, I was part of the negotiations that they were they were happening before the bill passed. Before the bill was about to vote. When the bill was about to be voted two days before. And there was an agreement in Congress and in government already. Google used its homepage, which is used by 92% of the Brazilians for search to spread lies. Google posted two links. The first one said the fake news view is going to make it harder to understand what is true and why it is not on the internet. And the second one said fake news is going to worsen your internet. And this is like what 100% of the Brazilians use. So they created a scare. It was a huge uproar. The people were far right, a light to Bolsonaro. He started intervening and saying that the fake news law was actually censorship and he just clustered the entire debate. This is a set of companies that are meddling in politics in different countries because they are against regulating. So the European approach, because the Europeans are things with more time and more consideration and etc. is very positive. Nobody had no other country has been able to regulate them. And they have said very clearly that they're going to combat, they're going to muscle their way against regulation. Right now, Canada has been without news on Facebook and on Google for four months. So if you go to Google and you search what's going on in my neighborhood, there's not going to be any new source. This is what's happening. It's very, very serious. Sorry, I'm very busy. And I think that more than combat is information that is always saying like fake news bill and why it's fake news bill. Because a lot of people think that it's a bill trying to define which contents are not permitted to go online. But it's not about saying that's true, that's false, that's true, that's false. It's not about it's like it goes beyond like we need to it's not about only combating this information is about like how can we prevent it. So we need to look for like digital literacy awareness, education, but also increased transparency about their algorithms. So it's more than making a taxonomy. We need to look this entire environment. So that's why it's fake news view. It's not about fake news only. It's much more broader than this. Thanks for that. I know we have a couple questions more from the audience. Hello, my name is Veronica Mosso from Brazil. I'm a recovering journalist who's now a student at the government school at the Kennedy School. And I have a question actually about it's safe to say that Bolsonaro election in 2018 was came a lot from the fake news environment such as in the US also. But to what extent can we really can we really say that his non-election last year could come from the efforts we were already doing in Brazil was already doing as a nation because we still don't have to be we still don't have nothing in place to prevent that. We have like very strong and organizations of profits. And as I said they're trying to tackling that. But is it already can we say that we have we had some reflection of our efforts as a society to to kind of trying to fight that or not at all can I don't know what's your view on what happened on that reflection. Thank you. Congratulations on being a recovering journalist. I don't think we can measure this right. They're the political sides we can measure this but because we've been following all the attempts by Bolsonaro and actually policing them and seeing all the ways that the Supreme Court counteracted. What I what I can say is if the Supreme Court had not acted we would be in a very much worse situation. So for instance with the buses you remember on the day of in the day of the elections when I say they sent buses to stop voters from the northeast from areas where Lula was going to win. If nothing had been done this would have been proceeded. There was other actions of like distributing money that were stopped. There were a lot of Bolsonaro's worst-present lies whose content was taken off and the Supreme Court acted very swiftly like in a very impressive way. Of course if we had like a proper government that was taking care of the elections it would be better. But the vote was so close that I do think that it had an effect. I don't know what's there been. And if definitely anything here would be a judgment and I think what it's from a political and a societal perspective what is interesting is I mentioned to you this is a country that is 50-50 split at this point right. So a lot of these facts as presented here could be interpreted in different ways or people could have opinions about what the Supreme Court had done or you know what would have happened. So what makes you know legislating about this topic so complicated is this right that's how do you legislate in a way that would be factual and legally correct while at the same time adhering to some of the normative principles in the country. So who do we have time for one or two more questions? I know that we have one from the audience and maybe one online so maybe we can come let's have one from the audience and then I'll try and combine with one or two of the ones that we have online here. Hello yeah and thank you very much. Well thank you for the for the talk. It was super interesting. My name is Beatriz and I'm an LLM student here at the High Road Law School currently writing a paper in a topic very related to this one. So for me this is super interesting and I actually have two questions. The first one for Maria Eduardo. I was very curious on how did you define misinformation or fake news in the paper because for some categories it's obvious right like disqualifying a particular candidate making statements which are obviously invented but on others that you had on the screen for instance like criticizing the electronic means of voting the line is more gray there right. So did you choose a definition if and if you chose it which is it and the second question would be which are the legal remedies that the TSE is using in Brazil for people that are spreading fake news. We heard like that the ultimate punishment is being prevented to run on the elections for a certain amount of time but I'm wondering what are the other options that the board has. Thank you very much. Thank you. Let me just add one of the questions online to this. Ruda when you addressed the first question online it's been asked that you mentioned that the right had less volume on social media but much more interaction and the question is whether this phenomenon was also influenced by overridden recommendations or if there is any way to explain this. So I'll begin with the last question and then go first. I think regarding the far right engagement we could say that those groups on social media they are really focused on political content and we when we look at the last at the center they were not of course they talked about politics but they were also concerned about science I don't know celebrities so it was much more decentralized than with the far right and the engagement was absolutely crazy like people just talked about this so it was like they were kind of digital warriors so they were really I don't know and I think the thing is when we talk about algorithms a lot this digital platforms they are mobilized by an economy fueled by cliques so if more people engage with this content it's better for them so what engages more a moderate content or something that I don't know you feel angry about it or you feel kind of I don't know you feel feared so if you feel angry you have more chance to engage with this content but if it's moderate it's like I don't mind like there's a lot of this so I think that's one of the reasons why the the far right had much more engagement like these two reasons and when we talk about the legal remedies I could say like a lot of those but they were there were many penalties against the economic sponsors of the those channels that were propagating this information the demonetization of youtube channels for example a lot of collective agreements so this program that I mentioned to combat this information more than 150 partners so from social civil civil society from platforms government so I think these collective agreements it's a terrific legal I don't know solution maybe and formal commitments of course uh signed it by those platforms and lastly how we defined this misinformation and fake news I think we we got to the obvious like we didn't try to to go to this great area otherwise it would be really difficult to say what is true what is not true but mainly the narratives that were already recognized as this information by the tsc or the tsf the dstf so we went to this direction yeah removed by similarity which was right but tsc removed by similarity content right yeah back just the last question that you read online uh yes and then maybe we can take one last question here from the audience I think brex you had one right uh well it relates to the relationship just get the mic between various so you know in in my i'm rex by millsworth i'm with harvard advanced leadership initiative studying american policy issues um and you may know our experience with having a uh misinformation governance board uh went down in flames here with orwellian comparisons and we don't seem to have the political will so we look to brazil and europe and because it's expensive for platforms to have different rules for europe and brazil and so have you seen any impact of the european regulations on what the platforms are doing in brazil and you hope for maybe that we might benefit from what brazil does here do you see them saying if we do this for you we have to do this everywhere so david why don't you start because you want it to yes so this as i thought it said before this is the big tag company's biggest fear that that regulation in brazil gets turning to a law that sets the precedent that countries all around the world will follow that same example when uh enact the same kind of laws that hold these back these big tag companies liable to the content that is shared on their platform not only shared but they also participate in distributed and also monetize big tag companies have been way too comfortable hiding behind the section 230 here in united states there are conversations around taking it down but never goes anywhere it was quite embarrassing when the supreme court had that hearing about section 230 and then i can't remember which justice said that but she said well we have nine people here that know the least about this our own elena kagan yes exactly so that is very concerning because these are the the most powerful and influential companies in the world and they act without any sort of regulation i think right there is a conversation around naturality that also is not going anywhere right now we have team will uh who uh he was a professor at uba and now he's a professor of law at columbia and he's working with biden in this uh reformulation of the net neutrality to see if we can pass a certain regulation but it seems like it's not going anywhere either um there's a lot on domestic interest as well because these are american companies there's a lot that they bring back to the united states so regulating them according to how countries in europe and brazil would regulate them may not be in the best interest of united states unfortunately um so i'll be very curious to see how it goes forward and to address real quickly the last question we tend to focus too much on the tax as these actors of spreading misinformation but as i show in my research i defined i coined a term called the human infrastructure of misinformation uh in brazil 99 of every smartphone is has whatsapp and that's basically where misinformation gets spread in the country and for you to get a message on whatsapp you need deliberate human action to send you a message so you can receive it there's no algorithm behind whatsapp to curate that sort of misinformation so in the absence of an algorithm a human infrastructure was put into place to not only produce but to curate specific disinformation that would promote this sort of a negative commotion like anger and fear to get into people's whatsapp groups like church groups soccer band groups family groups and they would infiltrate those groups to make sure that these misinformation would get spread wide and further and you know according to a research by the university of washington was published in science misinformation tends to travel six times faster and wider than the truth or the fact check of that misinformation so obviously it's uh it's sort of a battle that it's hard to be but there's no super bullet that requires a multifaceted approach to solve this problem so we need regulation we need uh big tax to be liable to the content that they're monetizing make money we need researchers we need the press um think tanks so we need the whole society working together we cannot just expect one social actor to solve the problem because he's just not going to happen thank you david and uh i wanted to wrap up going back to uh one of the things that i mentioned in the beginning which is uh this technology is a tool for political action and can be used for good for providing a voice for the oppressed providing a voice for minorities enabling civil participation but it's also can be you know used for for evil right then that's what makes this topic so fascinating we could be here for several more hours unfortunately we're limited for time so we'd like to thank david natalia and duda for a fantastic panel thank you the audience uh here and also in the web and especially thank bergman client center for forcing us uh today musou i think you wanted to just say a few words as we wrap up just really quick scene thank you for our panelists if we could get a round of applause say that in the world of in the game of policy and politics and internet there is four difficulties easy medium hard and brazil right so i appreciate a lot i think that raised many topics i think regulating hate speech the particularities and comparisons between the brazilian legal system the desire of users for objectivity which is a whole different metaphorical level and also critics of the mainstream media how the mainstream media work that so many threads of discourse that we can continue having throughout the academic year want to thank you very much for your presence this was the rsm uh we're meeting every wednesday with um speakers rsm speaker series every wednesday until the end of this year not the academic year the 2023 year and uh our next event that i wanted to invite you to is uh also moderated by paulo uh on ai uh ethics an interesting perspective so same time same place one week from now i'll see you all here see you next time