New Hasty Attempt to Tackle Fake News in Brazil Heavily Strikes Privacy and Free Expression

Ina Goel

June 16, 2020

Brazil’s Senate is rushing through a new law called the “Fake News Law,” which is supposed to protect the country from fake news. Still, it will instead impose requirements on messaging and social media platforms that would do away with privacy and freedom of expression. The laws would mandate platforms and apps to verify user’s identities with identification documents and even to store information on how a chain message is shared. Social networks and private messaging applications would be obliged to keep the chain of all communications that have been forwarded tracking all its nodes, regardless of the distribution of the content was done maliciously at the source or along the chain. This is a massive data retention obligation, which affects millions of users instead of only those investigated for an illegal act. Of course, to be able to track the development of a potentially fake news chain message, apps would have to do away with end-to-end encryption and continuously monitor their users. Apps that don’t comply will be suspended. The EFF is speaking up against this poorly thought law.

Abridged fromEFF