Brazil, orwellian dystopia on the way

Brazil has just taken one of the fundamental steps that the manual for setting up dictatorships already presents on its first page — it forwarded, in yet another of those tricks that place the tables of Congress among the most demoralized things in Brazilian society, a project of censorship. Don't waste your time thinking that's not quite it, because it is exactly that. They say, of course, that this is a law to “combat disinformation”, end “fake news”, banish “lies from the internet” or “news”, and other nonsense. It's pure fraud — then yes, fake news in its entirety.

The project, in the world of concrete facts, creates and delivers to the government a censorship mechanism in Brazil; through it, the “State” starts to give orders about what the citizen can or cannot say on the internet, gains the right to punish those who manifest themselves on social networks and transform them into a set of useless words, for any and all practical purposes , the article of the Federal Constitution that establishes freedom of expression in this country.

The law that is proposed for approval does not want to “put order in this internet turmoil”, prohibit people from “lying” or repress the press – it is intended to silence citizens who want to express what they think through social networks. It does not punish, as in every civilized society, the acts that a person practices — as in every dictatorship, it represses what he thinks.

It is not intended to make Brazilian society cleaner, or fairer, or more organized, nor to combat the crimes that can be committed through the free word. Its only purpose is to give the government a tool of repression, to censor the circulation of points of view or information that it, the government, does not want to circulate. It has nothing to do with the idea of ​​order.

This order is already fully guaranteed by the Penal Code and other laws in force, which punish all crimes that can be committed with the use of freedom of expression - slander, defamation, insult, coup d'état, incitement to crime, racism, Nazism, threat. It's all there; there is nothing outside.

Brazilian citizens are indeed responsible for everything they say in public, and not just from a criminal point of view. He is subject, at all times, to paying indemnities and to compensate damages, if the justice so decides. It is simply false to state that “freedom of expression cannot be exercised without limits” or “injure the rights of others” — it has clearly marked limits in the law, and punishes anyone who violates any rights of other citizens.

The law calls itself the “Internet Freedom Act,” which says it all. Every time a law is made about freedom, without exception, freedom ends up getting smaller than it was, or disappears altogether; all dictatorships, from Cuba to China, are full of laws about “freedom”. In the Brazilian case, there is not a single word in the project that objectively supports freedom of expression; it's the exact opposite, all the time. The essential fact is that the new law creates a “Council”, to be formed by 21 members of “civil society”, with the explicit power to carry out censorship — an aberration that never existed in Brazil, not even at the time of AI-5.

Does anyone think that this Council, to be set up by the Lula government , will seek the truth, be impartial and guarantee “freedom on the internet”?