TOP Brazilian judicial and legal officials have insisted that regulating misinformation on digital platforms should not be seen as an attack on freedom of expression, but as a necessary step to protect democracy and public safety.
They emphasized this on June 25, 2025 at the 12th edition of the Global Fact-checking Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The summit, organised by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute, brought together over 400 fact-checkers from across the world.
Addressing the summit virtually, Alexandre de Moraes, a federal Justice at Brazil’s Supreme Court, posed critical questions on the unchecked influence of big technology companies.
“As a good faith society, are we happy with social media? What is the social media that we want to leave to our children? As a society, did we delegate to the Big Techs the power over life and death?” he asked.
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De Moraes, who has led Brazil’s legal efforts against online disinformation, including the controversial Fake News Inquiry targeting allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro criticised tech platforms for failing to regulate themselves.
He cited the January 8, 2023, attacks on government buildings in Brasília as evidence of the real-world consequences of online misinformation.
De Moraes stated that self-regulation has proven a failure, pointing to political, economic, and criminal interests that drive digital disinformation. He also dismissed claims that regulation amounts to censorship.
“Television is not a land with no laws, and that does not affect their freedom of expression. They have freedom with responsibility,” he added.
Also speaking at the event, Cármen Lúcia, president of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, echoed De Moraes’ views. She likened regulating disinformation online to introducing traffic laws after the invention of automobiles, arguing that rules are essential for public order.
“Your freedom does not mean you are free to go the wrong way, crash into another car, and kill another driver,” she said.
Similarly, Jorge Messias, Brazil’s Attorney General and representative of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government at the summit, agreed that the issue lies not with the technology itself, but with those controlling it.
“A hammer in the hand of a bricklayer can build good things, but in the hand of a killer, it can kill a person,” he said.
Messias also revealed that his office had established a Defense of Democracy task force to tackle misinformation as part of broader institutional efforts to safeguard democratic values in the Latin American nation.
The three Brazilian officials, De Moraes, Lúcia, and Messias were described as “the top three people engaged in the anti-disinformation battle in Brazil,” according to Cristina Tardáguila, founder of Brazilian fact-checking outlet Lupa, a co-host of the summit.
Their calls for regulation come nearly six months after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the company’s fact-checking programme in the United States in January 2025. In a video, Zuckerberg accused fact-checkers of bias and described their work as censorship.
However, the IFCN director, Angie Drobnic Holan, reaffirmed the global fact-checking community’s commitment to freedom of expression. “Freedom of expression is sacred to fact-checkers,” she said in her opening remarks at the summit.
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Despite the strong calls for regulation, the Brazilian leaders did not outline specific mechanisms or clearly define the role fact-checkers should play within a regulated digital environment.
Meanwhile, the director of ColombiaCheck and a GlobalFact12 attendee, José Sarmiento, said the debate now needs to shift from whether regulation is needed to how it should be implemented.
Sarmiento urged governments to involve journalists and fact-checkers in the process, stressing that their work should be protected, not restricted.
“It’s important for governments to truly understand what we do that it’s not censorship, and maybe within the regulation, governments could guarantee some type of protection for our work.”
Seasoned fact-checker and researcher Fatimah Quadri has written numerous fact-checks, explainers, and media literacy pieces for The FactCheckHub in an effort to combat information disorder. She can be reached at sunmibola_q on X or fquadri@icirnigeria.org.
