Netizen Report: Bill Would Require Brazilians to Use Full Names on Blogs, Social Media
Editor’s Note: The CRE Brazil website may be found here.
From: Slate.com
The Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world. It originally appears each week on Global Voices Advocacy. Ellery Roberts Biddle, Marianne Diaz, Sahar Habib Ghazi, Weiping Li, Hae-in Lim, Taisa Sganzerla, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.
Brazilian legislator Silvio Costa is pushing a bill that would obligate every Brazilian Internet user to provide their full name and identification number in order to post comments on blogs, Web forums, and social media. The bill would function as an amendment to the Marco Civil, which establishes rights, principles, and obligations related to Internet use in Brazil. Costa, who originally proposed the bill in June, says it is “crucial” to preventing people from “misusing freedom of expression to incite hate, defame people or condoning a crime.” If it’s approved, Brazil will join the ranks of countries like China and Vietnam, which have introduced similar policies requiring users to provide identification documentation to publish comments online.
Meanwhile, policymakers and civil society leaders gathered in Salvador in July for Brazil’s Internet Governance Forum, where major topics of discussion included cybersecurity, human rights, and the pending regulation of “gray areas” of the law, such as technical exceptions to net neutrality principles. Brazil’s Ministry of Justice has been conducting an online poll and debate on the matter since December 2014. Notably, many of the forum’s participants expressed concerns with Facebook’s plans of bringing Internet.org to Brazil, on the grounds that it breaches net neutrality and creates a digital divide on the country’s Internet.
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