Summary
Brazil criticized Meta’s decision to end factchecking in the U.S., with Communication Minister Sidonio Palmeira calling it harmful to democracy due to unchecked misinformation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to replace factchecking with “community notes,” sparking global concerns about misinformation.
Brazil’s public prosecutor has demanded clarification within 30 days on whether these changes will extend to Brazil.
President Lula emphasized the dangers of disinformation and vowed to combat hate speech, recalling Brazil’s strong stance on regulating social media, including past actions against Twitter/X for noncompliance.
Meta is a threat to democracy. It has too much power over communications and is almost entirely unregulated in that regard. The same applies to Xitter and Tiktok and could apply to any other social media that gets too big.
“Oh, it’s user generated content, we just host it, we can’t be held liable!” - True, but you also profit off it. You also don’t properly act to contain bad actors and criminals (instagram is full of drug sellers and scammers) because they’re profitable, they pay for ad space. They should, at the very least, be liable for any ads they host and require full info (KYC, know your client) on the person paying for that ad.