(Brasilia) Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) announced on Friday that the encrypted online chat platform Telegram has joined the agreement signed with other messaging apps to fight disinformation ahead of the October presidential election.
Posted at 7:57 p.m.
“The objective of the alliance (with Telegram) is to combat false content related to electoral justice, the electronic voting system, the electoral process in its various stages and the actors involved,” said the highest electoral court. of Brazil in a press release.
Telegram, the popular online messaging service widely used by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his networks seven months before the presidential election, in a country plagued by disinformation, has been under judicial pressure in Brazil for months.
The TSE wanted Telegram to join the “Permanent Program to Combat Disinformation in the Electoral Sphere”, as Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, Instagram, YouTube and Kwai did in February.
The announcement of this agreement, which aims to prevent the elections from being disrupted by disinformation as in 2018, comes after a Supreme Court judge decided last week to block Telegram for not having responded to its injunctions judicial.
This decision was ultimately not put into practice, as the fastest growing application in Brazil, which is installed on 53% of mobile phones in the country, ended up giving in to the demands of the court. In particular, it withdrew a publication from August 2021 in which Mr. Bolsonaro questioned the reliability of the electronic voting system in Brazil in place since 1996, and by appointing a legal representative in Brazil.
Telegram is a keystone of Mr. Bolsonaro’s campaign strategy, which aims for re-election in October and defends freedom of expression without limits.
For months, he has been trying to rally his followers on Telegram, where he has more than a million followers and numerous support groups.
Unlike other apps, the app allows for groups of up to 200,000 people, unlimited user channels, and minimal content moderation, which greatly increases the viral potential of fake news.