Dear Biden, stop backing down from the fake news wars

Just like the United States, Brazil faces existential threats from disinformation and a would-be strongman — in Brazil’s case, that’s the elder Bolsonaro. The Brazilian government is going after the people and companies peddling fake news, prompting howls of outrage from Bolsonaro supporters, the far right, and of course, US-based tech moguls. “The severity of the censorship,” Elon Musk posted on X in April, “and the degree to which Brazil’s own laws are being broken, to the detriment of their own people, is the worst of any country in the world.”

Despite the backlash, Lula has refused to give up — a determination US officials might want to emulate. The main takeaway: You don’t back down against demagogues who want to subvert democracy.

Brazil has punished politicians for spreading lies and making anti-democratic statements much more aggressively than the United States has. Now Lula’s government is campaigning to impose hefty fines on the tech companies responsible for allowing rampant disinformation to spread on their platforms.

In comparison, the Biden administration’s efforts to curb fake news have been anemic. Two years ago, it set up the Disinformation Governance Board to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security.” But the administration dismantled the board after a right-wing smear campaign cast it as the equivalent of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s “1984.” The board’s executive director, Nina Jankowicz, was denounced as a dictator-in-waiting.

“The irony is that Nina’s role was to come up with strategies for the department to counter this type of campaign, and now they’ve just succumbed to it themselves,” an insider told the Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz. “They didn’t even fight, they just rolled over.”

Not so in Brazil. Some context: Bolsonaro, a conservative populist, has been sowing distrust in his country’s electoral process for years. In 2022, he ran for reelection and lost to Brazil’s former leftist president Lula. But Bolsonaro refused to publicly concede. Conspiracy theories — alleging that Lula had stolen the election — spread online. And on Jan. 8, 2023, in an echo of the United States’ own Jan. 6, Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through Brasilia, the country’s capital. They stormed the presidential palace, the National Congress, and the Supreme Court. Their goal: to topple Lula and overturn democracy.

Lula confronted the culprits immediately. “Lies, misinformation and hate speech were the fuel of January 8,” Lula said this year. “Our democracy will be under constant threat until we firmly regulate social media.”

However, that has so far been difficult to do. The main weapon in Lula’s arsenal is his “Fake News” Bill, which Bolsonaro supporters are holding up in Brazil’s Congress. The proposed bill would penalize tech companies with hefty fines if they don’t find false or misleading information on their platforms and remove it. In the meantime, the Brazilian judiciary has stepped in. Moraes, the Supreme Court justice and the former president of the Superior Electoral Court, had the power until recently to issue rulings against electoral disinformation. During the 2022 campaign, he even penalized Lula several times for making inaccurate statements, and he took on Bolsonaro for spreading conspiracies about Brazil’s electoral system.

Moraes has since issued arrest warrants against Bolsonaro allies for spreading disinformation. He has also ordered social media platforms to block the accounts of politicians and influencers engaging in “anti-democratic acts.” His justification: “Freedom of expression doesn’t mean freedom of aggression. It doesn’t mean the freedom to defend tyranny.”

This might sound a little dystopian to Americans, but it’s in fact an approach entirely in keeping with the Brazilian Constitution.

“In Brazil, as in Europe, freedom of expression is an essential right that is equal to other essential rights,” says Estela Aranha, Brazil’s former secretary of digital rights. “If you try to use one right to infringe upon another right, you will face limitations.” Moreover, Brazil has strict laws around political disinformation. “You cannot, for example, use knowingly false information in election campaigns. This is a crime,” Aranha adds.

In the United States, it’s much harder to crack down on false or misleading statements that politicians make. The First Amendment means that free speech is construed much more broadly. Only “fighting words” that directly incite violence are illegal. Last year, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that the Biden administration couldn’t require social media companies to address disinformation on their platforms. The government couldn’t do anything, he said, that led to the “removal, deletion, suppression or reduction” of posts. The Supreme Court has since rescinded the order, but the case is ongoing.

All of this makes it difficult for the government to fight disinformation effectively, but it doesn’t make it impossible. Yet the administration has too often pulled its punches — if it has punched back at all. For years now, Trump has said that America’s electoral system is rigged against him. This has had serious consequences: Election officials are routinely threatened by Trump supporters. So much so that the ballot-counting process next November could be a risky endeavor for poll workers. Trump has called on his supporters “to guard the vote” and “to watch those votes as they come in.”

Local election officials say the US federal government has failed to adequately protect the voting process. A 2023 poll conducted by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice found that 85 percent of election officials want the Department of Homeland Security to “do more to dispel disinformation around elections.”

Election security experts agree. Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center, told NBC News that, paradoxically, the Biden administration is doing less to offset election disinformation than the Trump administration did. “There’s no question that there has been a pullback particularly in the last year or so from federal agencies . . . and, more generally over the past couple of years, unfortunately, even pushing back against election rumors and misinformation.”

The US government may not be able to criminalize disinformation the way Brazil does, but the Biden administration’s timidity in facing down the far right is making things worse. Lula and Moraes, on the other hand, have refused to bend under pressure from Brazil’s far right.

In April, Moraes ordered X to block accounts accused of sowing lies in Brazil. But Musk refused to comply. “How did Alexandre de Moraes become Brazil’s dictator?” Musk tweeted soon after. “He has Lula on a leash.” (X has since said it would comply with the court order.)

But the Brazilian government stood its ground. “We cannot live in a society in which billionaires domiciled abroad have control of social networks and put themselves in a position to violate the rule of law, failing to comply with court orders and threatening our authorities,” said Jorge Messias, the Brazilian attorney general.

The Biden administration shouldn’t be shy either about making the case for combating fake news.

Demagogues like to argue that prosecuting anti-democratic speech is itself anti-democratic. But it isn’t. To thrive, democracies cannot tolerate lies. The opposite is true with demagogues: To thrive, they need lies. It’s the truth they cannot tolerate. And, from Rio to Washington, they hate it when they’re held accountable for their mendacity.

As Lula says, “There is no democracy without freedom — but let no one mistake freedom for permission to attack democracy.”

Theo Zenou is a historian and journalist who recently completed a doctorate at Cambridge University.