In August, weeks before the first round, the Superior Electoral Court will have in charge a judge specializing in crimes of political disinformation — the practice of spreading fake news to interfere in elections.
Alexandre de Moraes, 53, of the Federal Supreme Court, has just completed three years conducting a controversial inquiry, that of Fake News, which began with a measure of censorship of the press — to Crusoé magazine —, which was revoked days later.
The investigation continues, focusing on far-right activist groups, some recognized for their ties to the Jair Bolsonaro government.
One of the chapters is composed of a map of political relations, drawn up by the Federal Police. There, Bolsonaro’s three parliamentary sons and a dozen more federal deputies stand out.
One of them is Daniel Silveira, sentenced last week to eight years and nine months in prison for crimes against the democratic regime and threats to judges and their families. He was pardoned by Bolsonaro, but he is and will remain ineligible, understand Moraes and other members of the STF and TSE.
On Friday, Moraes spoke to audiences in São Paulo and Rio about how the results of these investigations, which have not yet ended, influenced the preparation of the Electoral Justice for this year’s general elections.
“In the Superior Electoral Court there are two important positions, which will define here all the interpretation for the 2022 elections”, he said.
He added: “The first is that, for electoral purposes, platforms, social networks, are considered means of communication for the purpose of abuse of political and economic power. So, if they are not for other purposes, for electoral purposes they have the same responsibility, consequently they will have the same charge.”
“The second point,” he continued, “is that candidates who are proven to use disinformation, negative speech against their opponent, hate speech, fraudulent news, that interfere in the elections will have their registration revoked and will not be graduated.”
Six months ago, when the electoral court exempted Jair Bolsonaro-Hamilton Mourão from punishment for spreading fake news in the 2018 campaign, Moraes announced this understanding with peculiar force: “If there is a repetition of what was done in 2018 [difusão em massa de notícias falsas] the register [da chapa eleitoral] will be impeached and the people who do so will go to jail for attacking institutions and democracy in Brazil.”
Yesterday, in São Paulo, he recalled the case of a state deputy from Paraná, Fernando Francischini, whose mandate was revoked at the same time, October of last year. “And that was exactly why, because on election days he recorded videos and posted ‘Fraud in the polls’. He had over 300,000 followers and that boosted his candidacy. His mandate was revoked, because it is not possible to live with these practices. We cannot tolerate hate speech, attacks on democracy, the erosion of democracy.”
According to Moraes, there is consensus in the STF and TSE on the constitutional guarantee of freedom with responsibility: “If you have the courage to exercise your freedom of expression not as a fundamental right, but as a protective shield for the practice of illegal activities; if you have the courage to do that, you must also have the courage to accept criminal and civil liability. Do what you want, but bear the consequences.”
He exemplified: “It is not possible to defend the return of institutional act number five, the AI-5, which guaranteed torture of people, death of people, the closing of Congress, of the Judiciary. Well, we’re not in a jungle. Freedom of expression is not freedom of aggression. It is not possible to live together, we cannot tolerate hate speech, attacks on democracy, the erosion of democracy.”
In three years of investigations, he said, an organized political-financial operation was found. He described four interconnected “structures”. “There is the production of disinformation and dissemination. If you produce news, video, with false information and then you give it a robot. For what? To get to that Top 10 [das redes sociais]. From the moment it reaches the Top 10, it “legitimizes” the third structural core of disinformation, which is the political core. The political nucleus cannot immediately start spreading disinformation, because it loses credibility. So, there is the production nucleus, the dissemination nucleus — that of the robots that run wild — and when it reaches the Top 10, it is already a news shared by society, then the political group enters, disseminating, legitimized, because it is already at the top of the news from Twitter, from Instagram, from Facebook.”
“Financing all this,” he continued, “the economic core, the financing core. Anyway, there are four structured cores for disinformation. And for two purposes. One is the seizure of power, undemocratic, authoritarian, uncontrolled and limitless seizure of power. But, always, the seizure of power comes together with the second purpose, which is the economic one, to make money. People are getting richer from it, really getting richer.”
“This has been repeated, and it was possible from these investigations to verify the modus operandi. At a certain point, they let go of the robots – which have now returned – and hired, like a call center, people to proliferate news, because political agents need to spread the word. And then, they also pass to the traditional media in the form of statements by parliamentarians about that fake news. This happened in the 2018 elections — the truth is that nobody expected it, nobody was prepared. In the 2020 elections it was already a little smaller, but because they were not national elections. And that is the great challenge for the 2022 elections.”
Moraes is convinced that, except for the receiving public, there are no innocents in the fake news machine. “Disinformation is not naive. It’s criminal, and it has a purpose. For some, it’s just enrichment. For others it is the uncontrolled seizure of power. There is so much misinformation that, sometimes, even the traditional press repeats fake news, because they don’t have time to check. Today (Friday) a news came out saying that the Supreme wants to file the Fake News Inquiry. This is fake news. It will not file any fake news inquiry.”
At the origin, he suspects, would be the police advance in mapping the economic web: “We are really reaching out to all the financiers. People don’t understand that the investigation has its public moment and its secret moment, which most of the time is when you go on sewing illicit activities, and the Federal Police is investigating in relation to that.”
The inquiry, the successful conflicts opened by Bolsonaro and the repeated public messages from judges, such as Moraes, the future president of the TSE, indicate an electoral season of strong emotions.