25 Nov FINAL REPORT OF THE FAKE NEWS BILL
Bill No. 2630/2020 (“PL das Fake News“) and its more than 70 appendix aim to improve the Brazilian legislation regarding internet freedom, responsibility, and transparency.
The project has already been approved by the Federal Senate and is now being analyzed by the working group created by the President of the Chamber of the State Representatives, Arthur Lira.
On October 28, 2021, the reporter of the working group, Orlando Silva, presented the final report about the PL of Fake News and the main points addressed were:
(i) In addition to providers of social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, and instant messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, the rules of the law will also apply to search engines, such as Google and Yahoo; the rules will apply to providers that offer, professionally and for economic purposes, services to the Brazilian public and that have more than 2 million registered users, including companies based abroad;
(ii) The obligation for foreign companies to have headquarters in the country was excluded from the text; the appointment of a legal representative in Brazil remains mandatory;
(iii) The rules of the law do not apply to journalism companies, non-profit online encyclopedias, scientific and educational repositories, or open-source software development and sharing platforms;
(iv) Journalistic content used by the providers should be remunerated;
(v) Articles that made it possible to track users by providing those records of mass forwarded messages be kept for three months and thus made it possible for companies to require the identity document of those responsible for the accounts were deleted from the text;
(vi) Promoting or financing the mass sending of untruthful messages with the use of robots is now considered a crime by law;
(vii) The Reporter required notification for moderations by the providers, a guarantee of adversarial proceedings, and redress in the event of inadequate moderation;
(viii) It was determined the creation, by the providers, of a self-regulation institution with the purpose of creating and managing a digital platform for receiving complaints about content or accounts.
(ix) Platform self-regulation will be supervised by the Internet Steering Committee (“CGI”).
(x) In cases of disobedience to the rules foreseen in the law, the reporter inserted the penalties of temporary suspension of activities and prohibition of the exercise of activities, in addition to the fines already foreseen in the text that came from the Federal Senate.
According to Arthur Lira, the text should be voted in the plenary still in November.
The report is fully available, here.
This article is intended exclusively to provide information and does not contain any opinion, recommendation or legal advice from Kestener & Vieira Advogados concerning the matters herein addressed. Copyrights are reserved to Kestener & Vieira Advogados.
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