Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) orders Brasil Paralelo to remove false video linking Lula to corruption.
Known for spreading far-right narratives, the production company classified the removal request as "censorship" and, in a mocking tone, posted a cake recipe on its Twitter account.
Agência Brasil/EBC - The plenary of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) decided today (13), by 4 votes to 3, to order the removal of a publication on Twitter in which the production company Brasil Paralelo links several cases of corruption to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, candidate in the second round of the presidential race.
With this decision, the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) granted a request from Lula's "Brazil of Hope" coalition. In the initial petition, the former president's campaign lawyers alleged a serious distortion of news reports about corruption cases, "leading the population to believe that he was involved in all of them."
The video shows news reports about schemes investigated during Lula's presidency, such as the mensalão scandal, the bingo scandal, and the sanguessugas mafia. In its defense, the production company claims that the publication is based on true news and is therefore not false information.
In the end, the understanding of the Court's vice-president, Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, prevailed, who argued that the material produced by the production company promotes "informational disorder."
The minister stated that the cases cited in the video “were never judicially attributed to him [Lula] and he [Lula] never had the opportunity to defend himself.” Lewandowski criticized the attempt to link the former president to corruption cases in which he was not involved, simply because they allegedly occurred while Lula was President of the Republic.
Lewandowski was accompanied by ministers Benedito Gonçalves, Cármen Lúcia, and the president of the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Minister Alexandre de Moraes, who stated that the video promotes a "manipulation of true premises," but results in "second-generation disinformation."
The ministers gave Twitter 24 hours to remove the aforementioned post and banned new ones. posts of the type. With the decision, the plenary reversed the understanding of the case's rapporteur, Minister Paulo de Tarso Sanseverino, who had denied an injunction (provisional decision) to remove the video, because he did not see any false information in the material.
In statements on Twitter and in an article published on its website, Brasil Paralelo classified the request to remove the video as "censorship," and said there was political persecution of the material it produces.
Electoral propaganda
Another decision favorable to Lula was that of TSE minister Paulo de Tarso Sanseverino who determined, yesterday (12), the suspension of the broadcasting of electoral propaganda in which the campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking re-election, calls his opponent in the second round a “thief” and “corrupt”.
In the advertisement, broadcast last Sunday (9), Bolsonaro's campaign aired an interview with retired minister Marco Aurélio Mello, from the Supreme Federal Court (STF), who says that "the Supreme Court did not acquit Lula". Then the announcer states that "the biggest lie of this election is saying that Lula is not a thief. Voting for Lula is voting for a corrupt person."
Lula's lawyers argued that the statements are factually and conceptually incorrect, and that Marco Aurélio was referring to the trial of a habeas corpus from the former president in which "the Supreme Court reaffirmed the presumption of innocence of former President Lula".
The defense further argued that the Constitution establishes that a citizen is innocent until proven guilty by a final and unappealable criminal conviction, which is not the case for Lula.
Minister Sanseverino agreed with the arguments. In his decision, he wrote that "the illegality of the challenged advertisement lies in the use of the expressions 'corrupt' and 'thief,' abusively attributed to the candidate of the representative coalition, in violation of the presumption of innocence."
The judge ordered the suspension of the airing of the electoral advertisement in question by Bolsonaro's campaign, under penalty of a fine of R$ 50 in case of non-compliance.
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