Haddad: Fact-checking agencies should also be regulated.
Former mayor Fernando Haddad said that fact-checking agencies that work to identify fake news also need regulation and that their role is to check facts, not opinions.
247 - Former mayor Fernando Haddad, a likely presidential candidate in 2022, said that fact-checking agencies that work to identify fake news also need regulation. "We have to guarantee some kind of social control where opposing viewpoints are established. This can work very well," Haddad said during a [event/event - context needed]. debate about fake news promoted by the Prerogativas group broadcast live on the internet this Saturday (6).
"I think I'm fully in favor of the issue of platforms being self-regulated, even being legally obligated to create their own internal controls to prevent misuse of these platforms. I think there needs to be filtering in relation to this. The problem is who does the filtering," said Haddad.
The statement was made after the portal's editor Brazil 247Leonardo Attuch questions the role of digital platforms and fact-checking agencies in the spread of fake news. Recently, Revista Fórum was erroneously included in a report by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) on fake news due to a failure by the fact-checking agencies. Shortly after the issue came to light, however, the CPI... admitted the mistake and removed Fórum from the report that lists websites spreading fake news.
“We have to guarantee some kind of social control where the right to reply is established. This can work very well. There are newspapers, broadcasters, that cultivate precisely this issue of opposing viewpoints. There are newspapers that have 'contact us,' in short, there are various ways, and you can do so without any risk to freedom of expression, which is the greatest good that must be protected,” said Haddad.
"We have to find ways to socially prevent digital terrorists, virtual terrorists, from using these tools to mislead public opinion with slander, insults, false data (...) everything that is contrary to democracy," he added.
“We have to be very careful about this: who oversees the platforms, what is transmitted there, and the fact-checking agencies that consider themselves above good and evil in relation to their work, which should also be subject to debate,” he stressed.
"Interpretations of facts are not facts. If it's a fact-checking agency, it has to check facts, whether they are true or false, and not try to be an interpreter. That's not its role, but society's," he concluded.