Fake News Inquiry Committee Starts Targeting Carlos Bolsonaro and Social Media

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Rio de Janeiro city councilman Carlos Bolsonaro, a ghostwriter for his president father on social media, is in the sights of the parliamentary committee of inquiry on Fake News (CPI), the parliamentary investigation of the network of lies spread through the internet. His summons to testify is being prepared discreetly by the CPI’s rapporteur,  Bahian deputy Lídice da Mata, together with legislators from opposition parties.

Summoning, rather than inviting, should be a rule within the committee, as agreed at its first meeting, on September 10th. It was a suggestion by Sergipe Senator Alessandro Vieira. A police chief inspector, he said that his professional experience suggests that inviting deponents is ineffective.

He made the observation when the committee discussed whether to summon Brazilian representatives of the companies WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, and Twitter. The summons was proposed by deputy Luizianne Lins, a PT member from Ceará. And it was approved. The leftist wants to know how massive disparities of content are made, and who pays for them.

In a demonstration of the troublesthe government is expecting with the CPI, Flávio Bolsonaro, Carlos’ senator brother, wanted to protect WhatsApp from the summons. Of course: his father’s campaign rolled over other candidates on this social media network in the 2018 election, in the opinion of Lídice da Mata, who says: “I have no doubt that the Brazilian election was greatly influenced by fake news. How was the gay kit born?”

Flávio is on the CPI, as well as other members of PSL, Bolsonaro’s party. The party tried to block the vote on the calls for representatives of social media companies but was defeated by the committee’s president, Senator Ângelo Coronel.

There are currently four recall claims in the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) against Jair Bolsonaro and Hamilton Mourão, the presidential slate elected in 2018, lodged by Fernando Haddad’s lawyers. Two of them deal with some form of misleading news and may be fuelled by CPI findings. One day after the first CPI meeting, some members of the committee went to seek out information about the claims from the leftists’ lawyers.

A member of the CPI and one of the vice-leaders of the government in the Senate, Eduardo Gomes, counseled the PSL bench on the day of the committee’s first meeting.

Felipe Barros had already attempted, in vain, an injunction in the Federal Supreme Court (STF) against the CPI´s establishment. Justice Ricardo Lewandowski denied the injunction in early August. Eduardo Gomes himself had attempted something similar before the president of Congress, Senator Davi Alcolumbre, also unsuccessfully.

Source: CartaCapital

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