{"id":29575,"date":"2018-01-10T10:38:27","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T15:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29575"},"modified":"2018-01-10T10:38:27","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T15:38:27","slug":"first-france-now-brazil-unveils-plans-to-empower-the-government-to-censor-the-internet-in-the-name-of-stopping-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29575","title":{"rendered":"First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plans to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping \u201cFake News\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Mark Schiefelbein\/AP<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plans to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping \u201cFake News\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n
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YESTERDAY AFTERNOON,<\/u> the official Twitter account of Brazil\u2019s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent)\u00a0posted an extraordinary announcement<\/a>.\u00a0The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to vest in the federal police and the federal government that oversees it the power to regulate, control and outright censor political content on the internet that is assessed to be \u201cfalse,\u201d and to \u201cpunish\u201d those who disseminate it. The new power would cover both\u00a0social media posts and entire websites devoted to politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the next few days, the Federal Police will begin activities in Bras\u00edlia [the nation\u2019s capital]\u00a0by a specially formed group to combat false news during the [upcoming 2018 presidential] election process,\u201d the official police tweet stated. It added: \u201cthe measures\u00a0are intended to identify and punish the authors of \u2018fake news\u2019 for or against candidates.\u201d Top police officials told media outlets that their working group would include representatives of the judiciary\u2019s election branch and leading prosecutors, though one of the key judicial figures<\/a>\u00a0involved is the highly controversial right-wing Supreme Court judge, Gilmar Mendes, who has long\u00a0blurred judicial authority with his political activism.<\/p>\n

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Among the most confounding aspects of the Twitter announcement is that\u00a0it is very difficult to identify any\u00a0existing law that actually authorizes the federal police to exercise the powers they just announced they intend to wield, particularly over the internet. At least as of now,\u00a0they are claiming for themselves\u00a0one of the most extremist powers imaginable \u2013 the right of the government to control and suppress political content on the internet during an election \u2013 with no legal framework to define its parameters or furnish safeguards against abuse.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: Mark Schiefelbein\/AP First France, Now Brazil Unveils Plans to Empower the Government to Censor the Internet in the Name of Stopping \u201cFake News\u201d YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, the official Twitter account of Brazil\u2019s Federal Police (its FBI equivalent)\u00a0posted an extraordinary announcement.\u00a0The bureaucratically nonchalant tone it used belied its significance. The tweet, at its core, purports to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[90,120,2779,301,333,5437,379,1339,5567,819],"class_list":["post-29575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-brazil","tag-censorship","tag-fake-news","tag-fbi","tag-france","tag-glenn-greenwald","tag-government","tag-internet","tag-the-intercept","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29576,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29575\/revisions\/29576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}