Brazil has given Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) 72 hours to explain what the consequences will be in this country of its change of heart on verifying the facts, under penalty of “legal measures”, a senior government official announced on Friday.
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“Due to the lack of transparency of the company, the government will present an extrajudicial notification” and Meta will have “72 hours to inform what exactly its policy for Brazil consists of,” Jorge Messias, general counsel, told reporters. of the Union, responsible for defending the legal interests of the Brazilian State.
His services confirmed to AFP that Meta had indeed been seized.
If the American group does not respond within the deadline, “legal and legal measures will be taken,” he added.
“We are not going to allow the networks to give rise to digital carnage,” insisted Jorge Messias.
On Tuesday, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was ending his fact-checking in the United States, a spectacular turnaround that shook the media world in the run-up to Donald Trump’s return to the White House on January 20.
Mark Zuckerberg justified his decision by a desire to “restore free expression on [ses] platforms”.
Jorge Messias expressed the “huge concern of the Brazilian government,” saying that Meta “resembles a weather vane, which changes direction all the time with the wind.”
On Thursday, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva deemed this turnaround “extremely serious”, insisting on the importance of the “sovereignty” of each country in the face of digital giants.
Earlier in the week, the federal prosecutor’s office in Sao Paulo gave Meta 30 days to explain whether the decision to end the program fact-checking in the United States “will or will not apply to Brazil”, in order to “evaluate”, if applicable, “to what extent it may have an impact on the rights of users of these platforms”.
This subject is particularly sensitive in Brazil, where the social network
The magistrate who ordered this blocking, Alexandre de Moraes, warned on Wednesday that digital platforms “will only continue to operate if they respect the legislation, regardless of the bravado of irresponsible leaders of the big tech».
The AFP participates in more than 26 languages in a program of fact-checking developed by Facebook, which pays more than 80 media outlets around the world, including in Brazil, to use their “fact-checks” on its platform, on WhatsApp and on Instagram.
